The issue is not the scrapping, but the use of "Southwest" inside your own name!
Southwest Airlines is intimidating our startup
11–20 of 76 posts
Re: Southwest Airlines is intimidating our startup
#12"The problem I see with their argument is that they are making this information public."
I love this idea! However, I think that unfortunately this argument doesn't hold up, and wouldn't in court. The information is available via their site, but that does not make it public.
Re: Southwest Airlines is intimidating our startup
#13So, the Southwest TOS state that you can't scrape or programmatically access their data. Isn't that the end of the argument unless they find a way to manually access it for customers?
Re: Southwest Airlines is intimidating our startup
#14If you're not in the US, what could a company do to stop you from scraping?
Re: Southwest Airlines is intimidating our startup
#15Maybe you can crowdsource pricing info. That way, you're not scraping, and users are voluntarily sharing what they've searched.
That would be one way to comply with the letter of the TOS. There will be some issue of getting enough traction from users that obey the TOS to make the site useful, though.
I think crowdsourcing would open up SWmonkey to 'attack' from SW, where SW would flood the channel with conflicting info at a rate that would make the SWmonkey site useless to legitimate customers.
Also, most of the companies that offer fare comparisons do not show SW flights... Some of those companies have the tech chops to implement 'fixes' that would comply with the SW site TOS and the massive legal departments to defend their position/approach in any and all courts in the world.
Re: Southwest Airlines is intimidating our startup
#16My brother-in-law sunk a million dollars of his own money into a similar real-time airline pricing service, all of which was thrown away when his now defunct company got banned for scraping.
There are only a few blessed companies that are allowed to scrape airline data (not surprisingly, big players in the market). If you haven't been granted permission and don't comply with their cease and desist you'll be sued and/or have your scraper IPs blacklisted.
It's a tough business to get into.
Re: Southwest Airlines is intimidating our startup
#17Calling it Southwest monkey is clearly a mistake. You have little argument there, and you should change that because to a 3rd party it could look like a service offered by Southwest itself. The part about scraping, etc, is more complicated and you may want to fight that. See: http://blog.icreon.us/advise/web-scraping-legality and https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/08/court-rejects-li... as two quick examples I…
I've never understood why people do that. It's not as though you'd have much more work on your hands with a "safe name" from a promotions standpoint.
Re: Southwest Airlines is intimidating our startup
#18"The problem I see with their argument is that they are making this information public." I love this idea! However, I think that unfortunately this argument doesn't hold up, and wouldn't in court. The information is available via their site, but that does not make it public.
If the information is available to any member of the public that requests it with no conditions at all, why is the information not considered public?
Re: Southwest Airlines is intimidating our startup
#19The issue is not the scrapping, but the use of "Southwest" inside your own name!
For the first letter, yes, but the 2nd is clearly against the scraping.
Re: Southwest Airlines is intimidating our startup
#20If you're not in the US, what could a company do to stop you from scraping?
They could potentially file a suit in the country you ARE in.