Expect to see more online data scraping, thanks to a misinterpreted court ruling

A US appellate court, in a case involving LinkedIn, recently ruled that data scraping publicly-visible information does not violate The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. This decision — ZDNet's take is here — has a reality component and a perception component. In reality, the ruling is delightfully narrow and unlikely to have much of a legal impact. As for the perception part, that's where enterprise Web chiefs and their IT colleagues are likely to suffer a big chunk