LinkedIn’s Scraping Case Ends in a Consent Judgment

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✓ checked 8 October 2026 · sources: court filings in LinkedIn Corp. v. ProAPIs Inc., No. 5:25-cv-08393 (N.D. Cal.), via CourtListener/RECAP; our Scraping Law Hub; Federal Register API · method · caveats · download the data

On 16 September 2026 a federal judge in San Jose signed a final judgment on consent that ends LinkedIn’s lawsuit against ProAPIs Inc., Netswift (SMC-Private) Limited and Rehmat Alam. The defendants agreed to a permanent ban on scraping LinkedIn and on selling LinkedIn data, without admitting the allegations. There was no ruling on the merits. That fits a pattern in the federal scraping cases we track: the orders against scrapers that we could confirm as permanent were agreed to, not won at trial.

Read this first. Everything below about what the defendants did comes from LinkedIn’s complaint. Those are allegations. The judgment records that the defendants “deny liability for the actions alleged in the Complaint”, and no court tested the claims.

days from complaint to judgment 349kinds of conduct the judgment bars 7Federal Register documents mentioning “web scraping” 21

Headline numbers

1. The case ended 349 days after it was filed, with no answer and no ruling on the merits. LinkedIn sued on 2 October 2025. The parties stayed the case in February 2026, and Judge P. Casey Pitts signed the judgment on 16 September 2026. The judgment says the defendants “have not filed an answer in this matter, but deny liability”.
2. The judgment bars 7 kinds of conduct, including accessing LinkedIn “through impersonation, fake accounts, scraping, crawling, and/or the use of bots”, selling LinkedIn data, and circumventing LinkedIn’s technical measures. The defendants also certified, under penalty of perjury, 6 steps they had taken, including that they had permanently deleted “all LinkedIn Data that they have obtained, directly or indirectly, via any means”.
3. LinkedIn alleged that customers paid “up to $15,000 per month to scrape LinkedIn”. The complaint says that price bought “5,000,000 API calls at 150 requests per second”, and, in a passage beginning “Upon information and belief”, alleges that the defendants “used over a million of these fake accounts”.
4. The three permanent orders against scrapers that we could confirm in 18 federal cases were all entered by agreement: Meta v. BrandTotal (a stipulated permanent injunction, after a split summary-judgment ruling), Cox Automotive v. Super Dispatch (a consent permanent injunction) and now LinkedIn v. ProAPIs. In 5 cases, the defendant beat the site owner’s main claim.
5. When the federal government writes about web scraping, it’s usually describing its own work. In 15 of the 21 Federal Register documents that mention “web scraping”, an agency describes using, testing or studying it to collect data, led by the Agriculture Department (6) and the Energy Department (5). In 5, the scraping is of a government website.

What the judgment says

The judgment, entered on the docket as entry 36, lists the claims in LinkedIn’s complaint: breach of contract, fraud and deceit, misappropriation, trespass to chattels, the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, California’s computer-access law (Penal Code §502), the Unfair Competition Law and the Lanham Act. It records LinkedIn’s allegation that the defendants “extracted and copied data from millions of LinkedIn member profile pages using an automated process known as ‘scraping,’ and operated a vast network of fake accounts”.

The permanent injunction covers the defendants and those acting with them. In short, they may not:

• access LinkedIn’s servers or data through fake accounts, scraping, crawling or bots, or otherwise in breach of LinkedIn’s User Agreement;
• advertise the availability of LinkedIn data;
• circumvent LinkedIn’s technical access controls;
• offer or use third-party services that provide LinkedIn data, run LinkedIn accounts for others or access LinkedIn in an automated way;
• help others use such services;
• sell or transfer LinkedIn data or tools for automated access; or
• use LinkedIn’s marks or suggest an association with LinkedIn.

The judgment says it “is final and may not be appealed by any party”, and the court keeps jurisdiction to enforce it and the parties’ settlement agreement. The settlement agreement itself isn’t on the public docket.

How the case moved

The full docket (37 entries) is on CourtListener. The case is filed under the trademark nature-of-suit code (840), and it wasn’t among the cases in our law hub.

How 18 federal scraping cases stand

Our Scraping Law Hub tracks 17 federal cases filed from 2020 to 2025 that are clearly about web scraping (9 include a Computer Fraud and Abuse Act claim and 8 a terms-of-service claim). Adding LinkedIn v. ProAPIs gives 18. The groups follow the court records cited on the hub.

4 closed cases have no public ruling or filing we could find that says how they ended; settlements often aren’t filed. Southwest v. Kiwi.com closed in November 2021 after a preliminary injunction, and we couldn’t confirm whether a permanent order followed. For one scraping company’s litigation history at the patent office, see Bright Data’s patents.

Web scraping in the Federal Register

The Federal Register API returns 21 documents that contain the phrase “web scraping”, the first from 2016 and 2 from 2026. We read the matching passage in each and grouped them. A further 5 documents use the phrase “data scraping” instead; they’re not in the table.

Examples of agencies’ own use: the Energy Department says it “leveraged web scraping to gather data on clothes dryer models”, and the Energy Information Administration plans a “‘web-scraping first’ protocol” for public air-permit portals. On the other side, the Labor Department’s H-2A and H-2B rules expect job-search sites to run “web-scraping protocols” on SeasonalJobs.dol.gov, and the SEC noted that many EDGAR filing agents use web scraping.

Method

Court records. Docket metadata and entries for No. 5:25-cv-08393 (N.D. Cal.) from the CourtListener API, and the complaint, proposed judgment and signed judgment from the RECAP archive, downloaded 8 October 2026. Quotes are from those PDFs.

Case groups. The 17 cases and their outcomes come from our law hub (last refreshed 2 October 2026 from CourtListener and GovInfo). “Defendant beat the main claim” is the hub’s own grouping. “By agreement” means a stipulated or consent order.

Federal Register. Federal Register API full-text search for the exact phrase, on 8 October 2026. We grouped each document by reading the passage the API returns around the match; the CSV includes the phrase that decided each group.

Verification. A separate script re-reads the saved PDFs and API responses, recounts every figure and checks each quote against the saved source.

Caveats

• LinkedIn’s allegations weren’t tested in court, and the defendants deny liability. A consent judgment isn’t a finding that the law was broken.
• The settlement agreement isn’t public, so we don’t know whether money changed hands.
• Our case list covers federal cases that are clearly about scraping; it isn’t every case with a scraping element, and state courts aren’t included.
• “Not confirmed” means we couldn’t find the reason in public records, not that nothing happened.
• Federal Register search finds the exact phrase only; documents that say “scraping” or “web crawling” without it aren’t counted. The grouping is our reading of each passage.
• This is not legal advice.

Download the data

• Federal Register “web scraping” mentions (CSV): all 21 documents with citation, agency, our group and the deciding phrase.
• How the cases stand (CSV): all 18 cases with docket, status, group and outcome notes.

Cite as: ProxyPicker, “LinkedIn’s Scraping Case Ends in a Consent Judgment”, 8 October 2026, https://proxypicker.com/scraping-cases-consent-judgments/. Court documents via CourtListener (Free Law Project). Federal Register data: Office of the Federal Register.

Related: Scraping Law Hub · Bright Data’s Patents · AI-Crawler & llms.txt Census · The AI Opt-Out Standard vs Real robots.txt Files · AI Copyright Lawsuits in Federal Court.

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