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Southwest Airlines is intimidating our startup

swmonkey.com

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Re: Southwest Airlines is intimidating our startup

#21

Post by verall »

oh_sigh wrote: post #18
dstaten wrote: post #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.

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?

But it doesn't make it available with "no conditions at all", their robots.txt implies the condition that you aren't scraping it with a bot.

Re: Southwest Airlines is intimidating our startup

#23

Post by dstaten »

oh_sigh wrote: post #18
dstaten wrote: post #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.

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?

> with no conditions at all

There are conditions on their site, and most sites.

Separately, if this information was public, then Google would have already incorporated it into its flight price notifications feature.

But again, fun idea. It's a good example of something individuals could create for themselves, and Southwest would likely never notice.

Re: Southwest Airlines is intimidating our startup

#25

Post by oh_sigh »

verall wrote: post #21
oh_sigh wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

But it doesn't make it available with "no conditions at all", their robots.txt implies the condition that you aren't scraping it with a bot.

So there would be a material difference between me using the data when a bot scrapes it, versus a human doing it?

Re: Southwest Airlines is intimidating our startup

#26

Post by mapgrep »

"Everyone has a right to access public data. And we believe that whether you are accessing that data by typing in a URL in a web browser, through a CURL request, an RSS feed, a cached copy, or having someone read it to you aloud, does not change your right to access public data. "

I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, but I believe this is, sadly, dead wrong. The infamous Computer Fraud and Abuse Act contains a provision barring not just unauthorized access to computer systems but also accessing such systems in a manner that exceeds authorized access. In other words, if you break terms of service on a website, you may be in violation of the CFAA.

The ACLU last year filed suit to overturn this provision of CFAA, on the grounds that it chills research into civil rights violations, as well as academic research and journalism. https://www.aclu.org/cases/sandvig-v-sessions-challenge-cfaa...

Re: Southwest Airlines is intimidating our startup

#28

Post by dzdt »

Does putting a human in the loop make scraping okay? Can there be a button on the web page : "please click here to run a price check for one of your fellow travelers" that initiates a web page being fetched, attached to a round-robin queue of fares that are being monitored?

Re: Southwest Airlines is intimidating our startup

#30

Post by sp332 »

it was a public domain image, licensed under creative commons.

Unless it was CC0 (which is not what was linked), Creative Commons licenses are not public domain licenses. Someone still holds the copyright and you have to abide by the license terms. Secondly, CC and "public domain" are about copyright, not trademarks. It's totally possible to infringe someone's trademark even with a public domain image.

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