Law / United States / 
California
Unfair Competition Law (predicate vehicle for scraping claims)
Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code § 17200
A citation is an address, not a summary. The first part names the law; what follows narrows it to the exact section, article or paragraph.
What follows is LexLint's own research summary of this law, not legal advice.
In force.
An unfair competition rule binding private bodies.
As of 29 August 2026.
What it requires
- A scraping practice that violates any other California or federal law can separately expose you to a private Section 17200 claim, which federal law alone would not.
- 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).
What this law does
Drafted with AI from the cited sources under the direction of UnGovr staff. UnGovr holds editorial responsibility for this page.
Section 17200 reaches any unlawful, unfair, or fraudulent business act or practice, is broader than the federal FTC Act because it carries a private right of action, borrows violations of any other law under its unlawful prong, and has no interstate-commerce gate. It is the standard vehicle for scraping-adjacent claims in California, including hiQ Labs' eventual state-law liability alongside trespass to chattels once its Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) win did not resolve the dispute.
Trespass to chattels itself 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. Section 17200 was added by Stats.
1977, ch. 299, which moved the former Civil Code § 3369 unfair-competition provisions into the Business and Professions Code; a contemporaneous law review article and a legislative-history research service both confirm the citation, but neither leginfo.legislature.ca.gov nor any other located source carries the chapter's specific operative date, so the commencement date is left unset rather than assumed from California's general January-1-following-enactment default.
When LexLint raises it
crawls_web
Read the law
official text, California Legislative Information (leginfo.legislature.ca.gov)
Every line above is drawn from the primary source linked here, read on the date shown. This is a research summary, not legal advice.