Apparently, the LinkedIn legal team has had a busy spring. Earlier this week, we reported on SourceCon that the professional social networking site had sent a cease and desist order to SellHack. GigaOM reported earlier today that the LinkedIn has now filed an injunction against HiringSolved, a “people aggregator” who received seed funding late last year.
The original HiringSolved suit was filed in January. An amended complaint, filed last week, names HiringSolved and it’s founder, Shon Burton. See the details of the complaint below.
LinkedIn HiringSolved Complaint
Will this affect the other people aggregators? Who do you think is next on the LinkedIn legal team’s list?
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UPDATE:
In response to our inquiry, Shon Burton of HiringSolved provided the following statement:
Based on the claim, I don’t believe LinkedIn or their attorneys understand the role of People Aggregator tools. In the first page of the claim, Item #3 states:
“HiringSolved website includes individuals’ profiles that Defendants have indiscriminately copied directly from LinkedIn’s own website. These profiles frequently contain explicit references to LinkedIn member pages, which HiringSolved has not even attempted to hide or otherwise remove.”
We do not attempt to hide or remove references to source data. This is by design, not accident. Like most search engines, we reference the information source and include the exact source URL. We call this attribution. We attribute the source of data within HiringSolved so the user can refer to the source directly. This a feature, not a bug.
The role of aggregator tools like HiringSolved is to combine and correlate data from many sources. This provides a more complete picture than a resume, or any social profile alone.
Perhaps the phone book.
I’m not sure what LinkedIn is freaking out about. This website is not one I’d even consider paying for, even with the 7 day money back guarantee. I did a search just to compare and I didn’t get a single possibility on the first page of results that were remotely close to what I was looking for.
@Carol: which site are you referring in terms of guarantee?
@Shanil: HiringSolved. Sorry I wasn’t clear.
I’ve demo’ed HiringSolved twice. Once independently w/ a trial run many months ago and once with a rep taking me through it. First, while it may be a people aggregator, almost all of the profiles being pulled were from LinkedIn… which I already have. Secondly, when I ran it with the rep, as Carol pointed out, it was no where close to what I was looking for. After I explained our niche to the rep, he basically agreed that the site needed to expand a bit before including candidates who I might actually want to see.
On the other hand, I can understand why LI is going after some of these companies. They’re aggregating, but if all of their usefulness is pulling LI info, then what’s the point? And it has the same restrictions of viewing LI profiles as LI has. The only LI add-on tool that I’ve found useful recently is Connectifier and even that is hit or miss.