Law / United States / 
California
Unfair Competition Law (unlawful, unfair or fraudulent business practices)
Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code § 17200
In force.
An unfair competition rule binding private bodies.
- Audit expectation
- none
What it requires
- Do not engage in an unlawful, unfair or fraudulent business act or practice in connection with scraping or the use of scraped data.
- Causing measurable harm to, or impairing the operation of, a target's computer system through your crawling can expose you to trespass to chattels; merely unwanted access without such harm does not, under Intel Corp. v. Hamidi (Cal. 2003).
These lines are LexLint's reading of the law's text.
Who enforces it
Settledness
- As of
- Open questions
- Can a scraper's breach of a website's terms of use serve as the "unlawful" business act or practice that Business and Professions Code section 17200 reaches, when the scraping itself violates no other statute?
- Is an operator's refusal to let a competitor collect publicly available data an "unfair" business act or practice under Business and Professions Code section 17200?
What it makes you log
Logging duty
Section 17200 defines unfair competition for the chapter as an unlawful, unfair or fraudulent business act or practice, unfair, deceptive, untrue or misleading advertising, and any act prohibited by chapter 1 of part 3 of division 7. It states no duty to create, keep, produce or review a log or record and no territorial clause. The remedies and enforcement powers sit in other sections of chapter 5 that the row does not cite.
- Kind
- None
- As of
What this law does
Section 17200 defines unfair competition to include any unlawful, unfair or fraudulent business act or practice and unfair, deceptive, untrue or misleading advertising, together with any act prohibited by Chapter 1 (commencing with Section 17500) of Part 3 of Division 7 of the Business and Professions Code.
In hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn, a data-analytics company dependent on LinkedIn's publicly available member data argued that LinkedIn's decision to block its access was an unfair business practice under the Unfair Competition Law. The district court's 2017 order granting a preliminary injunction found serious questions that LinkedIn's behavior may be anticompetitive conduct in violation of that Law.
Separately, trespass to chattels is narrower in California than the earlier federal-district trend: Intel Corp. v. Hamidi (30 Cal. 4th 1342, 2003) requires actual damage to, or impairment of the functioning of, the computer system, so an unwanted crawl causing no measurable server harm is not trespass to chattels under California law.
Chapter 299 of the Statutes of 1977 added section 17200, which moved the former Civil Code § 3369 unfair-competition provisions into the Business and Professions Code. The section's history note records only its 1992 amendment, and no day on which chapter 299 came into force has been located.
When LexLint raises it
When your app profile says your app crawls the web.
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