Law note · California
Unfair Competition Law (predicate vehicle for scraping claims)
What it asks of an app
- 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).
When LexLint raises it
crawls_web
What we found
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 the sources checked this pass carried 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.