Last week, a judge in US fed­er­al court ruled in favor of a start­up whose busi­ness cen­ters on scrap­ing pro­fes­sion­al net­work LinkedIn for pub­lic data to inform its own clients about their employ­ees’ poten­tial career moves.

LinkedIn object­ed to the prac­tice, which is how the par­ties found them­selves in a Cal­i­for­nia court­room.

And, at least ini­tial­ly, the start­up seems to have pre­vailed. How­ev­er, it’s not over yet and, as it plays out, this is a case that could have huge impli­ca­tions for data and pri­va­cy in the mod­ern era – and per­haps even the search indus­try itself.

That’s because the case will ulti­mate­ly deter­mine how much con­trol LinkedIn has over the pub­lic data it stores.

Chris Hart, head of US client devel­op­ment at Scrib­ble­Live, said there are a num­ber of addi­tion­al ques­tions, such as whether the start­up has a right to build its busi­ness off of an unau­tho­rized data source and how much con­trol LinkedIn has over choos­ing which bots are allowed access to its data and which are not, as well as who is respon­si­ble for the addi­tion­al cost LinkedIn incurs as a result of increased bot traf­fic.

“It is a very inter­est­ing case as bot use has done noth­ing but accel­er­ate over time and there is lit­tle to no end in sight for that accel­er­a­tion,” Hart added.

Mar­cus Mil­er, SEO and PPC strate­gist at dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing firm Bowler Hat, agreed it’s an inter­est­ing case in part because LinkedIn doesn’t want users scared of using its plat­form, but, at the same time, the infor­ma­tion being scraped is pub­lic, which makes it seem unlike­ly LinkedIn could legal­ly put any mea­sures in place to pre­vent scrap­ing.

David Erick­son, vice pres­i­dent of online mar­ket­ing at Kar­wos­ki & Courage Pub­lic Rela­tions, how­ev­er, said assum­ing the case fails upon appeal, both the gen­er­al pub­lic and the search indus­try in par­tic­u­lar will ben­e­fit.

That’s because crim­i­nal­iz­ing the prac­tice of site scrap­ing would have more neg­a­tive con­se­quences than the prob­lem the law­suit is try­ing to resolve.

“A lot of new con­tent and many ser­vices are cre­at­ed through the mash-up of dis­parate con­tent and/or data,” Erick­son said. “That new con­tent then becomes addi­tion­al con­tent for search engines to index, pro­vid­ing the world with addi­tion­al valu­able infor­ma­tion and knowl­edge and, [for] search engines them­selves, more ad inven­to­ry.”

Miller agreed if there was ever a court deci­sion about scrap­ing con­tent, search engines would have a big prob­lem.

“The data that search engines like Google use is almost entire­ly scraped data,” he said. “If Google was no longer able to scrape and store data, then they could not per­form their basic func­tion of cat­a­logu­ing the ocean of infor­ma­tion out there.”

That being said, Miller not­ed it’s unlike­ly such a judg­ment would ever be made as “it could be murky water if cer­tain groups of peo­ple were not allowed access to pub­lic infor­ma­tion.”

He added, “LinkedIn, for exam­ple, wants to be scraped by Google to appear in search results. They do not want to be scraped by this com­pa­ny as they don’t want a third par­ty using infor­ma­tion from their plat­form. One rule for one. One rule for anoth­er.”