This past month, professional networking site LinkedIn Corp., was given more time to file a petition for certiorari challenging a Ninth Circuit finding that hiQ Labs Inc. (“hiQ”), a workforce data analytics startup, did not violate federal hacking laws by “scraping” LinkedIn member profiles without LinkedIn’s permission.

Data scraping, or web scraping, is a method where a computer program extracts data from websites. The data that is extracted is often considered to be human-readable information. The question of who owns data that is scraped from public websites is now at the doorstep of one of the largest technology social media companies in the United States.