I'm seeing some confusion about how this affects people outside of the West Coasts 9th circuit. It certainly affects you if you are in other circuits. There's no question that this precedent will be brought up in other courts, even if they aren't bound to uphold the decision.

IANAL, but a bit of a supreme court hobbyist. For those unfamiliar, a short lesson on how the federal court system works that I think would be useful for HN readers:

Generally speaking, a case first goes to District Court. There are 94 districts in the country and they tend to consist of small regions. For example, Northern California (note these are for federal courts... each state has it's own state system, which operates differently in each state). So you first go to one of these courts when you bring a lawsuit.

Now, the lawsuit is decided and one side is unhappy with the verdict. In a lot of cases, they might say, "ok, I'm unhappy, but I'm also spending a lot of money on lawyers, so i'll accept the decision and move on". Or they have the right to appeal the decision. If they choose to do the latter, then the next layer of the court system, the Circuit Courts come into play.

The Circuit Courts consist of 11 "circuits" plus the DC [0] and Federal Circuits [1]. When you appeal a case to one of the circuit courts, they have to hear your case. It's your right to appeal. However, if they think the case doesn't have merit, they can issue what's called a "summary judgement" where they issue an opinion without a full trial. In other words, if they think the lower court issued the correct decision and they think it would be a waste of time to go through a trial to appeal it, they can look over the facts of the case and make a decision without a trial.

At the next level up, you have the Supreme Court [2]. Unlike at the circuit court level, you have no right to appeal to the supreme court. Generally speaking, they get to decide which cases they want to take, so if you think that the appeals court screwed up and the supreme court decides to not take your case, there's nothing you can do. Unlike appeals courts, they aren't even obligated to look over the facts of the case at all if they don't want to.

Instead, what happens is that you petition the Supreme Court to hear your case. So you lose your case at appeals court and you basically file paperwork with the SC saying "please please hear my case, here's why i think you should".

The SC turns down a lot more cases than it hears. So what makes them take a case on? One is if the case is super super important. Something like a case against Obamacare or something else of very high national significance. But typically, the SC takes a lot of boring cases too, and for the most part, this has to do with circuit splits. A circuit split is when two of the regional circuit courts issue conflicting rulings. So for example, if every circuit more or less rules the same way on a given issue, there's nothing for the supreme court to decide on. The system is working as intended. But if two circuits disagree, then the SC's job is to resolve the issue so that federal law is applied uniformly.

So in this case, the ruling was issued in the Ninth Circuit (which covers California and much of the West). Technically speaking, I can sue someone over scraping my site in Wisconsin (in the 7th Circuit) and the judge can rule in my favor (that scraping is illegal) since she isn't bound to follow 9th Circuit appeals rulings, whereas a district judge in Colorado or Montana (both in 9th Circuit) are bound by the appeals court precedent. And then they appeal the case in Chicago and the appeals court also isn't bound by the Ninth Circuit ruling. But you can be damn sure that the lawyers for the defense are going to bring up that Ninth Circuit case as precedent. And generally speaking, the precedent does matter (circuits don't want to create circuit splits).

Coming back to this case, does this mean that you have carte blanche to scrape websites anywhere in the country? No, case law is going to need to evolve more to get to the point where you can safely think that way. But, this is definitely an important step in that direction.

[0] Washington DC has its own circuit, even though it's just a city, not a region. This seems odd at first glance, but in fact, a lot of lawsuits against the federal government come through this circuit, which is why DC gets it's own circuit, while for example, NYC does not.

[1] The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit is a special case. Most of these circuit courts have to do with regions. So if I commit a federal crime in Florida, it gets tried in a Florida District court and then it gets appealed in the seat of the 11th circuit, which is in Atlanta. However, certain cases, based on subject material, don't get appealed in Atlanta, but go instead to the Federal Circuit. These tend to be things with national ramifications. Patents are a prime example, where you really really don't want a patent being enforced in Iowa, but not in Alabama. So for these special cases, we set up a different appeals system.

[2] There are a few times when cases go straight to the supreme court. For example, in disputes between two states or cases involving ambassadors and other public ministers, a case might go straight to the SC and skip the lower courts. But this is the exception, not the rule.