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Ryanair wins screen scraping case against Booking.com in US court ruling

rte.ie

151–160 of 303 posts

Re: Ryanair wins screen scraping case against Booking.com in US court ruling

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and that it had induced a third party to access parts of Ryanair's website without authorisation "with an intent to defraud," the verdict said Where was the "defraud" happening here? When Ryanair wants to make money on flights they shouldn't offer flight tickets that only make money when they can lure the consumer to purchase addons via a boatload of dark patterns. For me as someone looking to book a flight, bookin…

> Where was the "defraud" happening here? When Ryanair wants to make money on flights they shouldn't offer flight tickets that only make money when they can lure the consumer to purchase addons via a boatload of dark patterns. This lawsuit is not about ryanair's pricing model, so that the company engages in bad practices is irrelevant to the court decision. What matters is that booking.com wants to earn money on sell…

> They are not your useragent, they are acting as a reseller: You buy a product from them which they acquire elsewhere, taking a profit in the process.

Yeah so what? Why should anyone, be it a private person or a commercial entity, be restricted from buying something and then re-selling it to another person or entity?

The only thing I'm willing to accept as a restriction for any kind of legal transaction is a reasonable price cap (i.e. no sale above face value of tickets + 5% fees) to get scalpers under control and for security reasons (e.g. name-bound tickets for sports events to prevent hooligans from attending or flight tickets to prevent terrorists from boarding).

But neither applies in this case - flight tickets usually are not a scarce commodity that attracts scalpers and the airline has the full set of PNR data.

Re: Ryanair wins screen scraping case against Booking.com in US court ruling

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flying budget air carriers is already so incredibly cheap in the EU. It is cheaper to fly from Belfast to London, than it is to fly Houston to Austin (half the distance) or Houston to New Orleans (roughly the same distance). I wish the US could figure that out.

RyanAir used to fly to Morocco, and it was often cheaper to go Dublin -> Marrakesh than it was to get a plane or train from London to Manchester. Lot of it comes down to individual airports and fees. Part of the reason that RyanAir flies into Buvais rather than CDG or Orly when you fly with them to 'Paris', or that other joke airport they use instead of Berlin.

Ryanair flies to Berlin. Even before the new airport, they were flying to Schoenefeld which was just outside the city limits. In fact, the old airport was just across the runaways of the new one and you can still reach the old terminal building with the commuter train. Schoenefeld was the old East Berlin airport, which was indeed suboptimal for the load of travellers it got over time.

Re: Ryanair wins screen scraping case against Booking.com in US court ruling

#153
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand it, scraping data read-only is fine (Google Flights, Skyscanner etc) but using automated processes to book tickets on behalf of customers without sending them to the Ryanair site is not fine.

I'm not sure Google Flights actually scrapes RyanAir. I think they connect to API services such as Amadeus.

Google owns ITA which has all of the pricing data.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software

Re: Ryanair wins screen scraping case against Booking.com in US court ruling

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flying budget air carriers is already so incredibly cheap in the EU. It is cheaper to fly from Belfast to London, than it is to fly Houston to Austin (half the distance) or Houston to New Orleans (roughly the same distance). I wish the US could figure that out.

RyanAir used to fly to Morocco, and it was often cheaper to go Dublin -> Marrakesh than it was to get a plane or train from London to Manchester. Lot of it comes down to individual airports and fees. Part of the reason that RyanAir flies into Buvais rather than CDG or Orly when you fly with them to 'Paris', or that other joke airport they use instead of Berlin.

In general, European air travel is often pretty cheap relative to trains. Varies enormously though.

Re: Ryanair wins screen scraping case against Booking.com in US court ruling

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why Africa? Why not southern Wyoming?

It’s the openAI way.

For context, OpenAI recently caught flak from the less substantial organs of the American press for outsourcing RLHF/safety/content moderation tasks to a small SF firm called Sama (surely coincidental, eh @sama?). Sama hired workers in Kenya, Uganda, and India and paid them well above prevailing local wages, but the work involved the usual unpleasantness that content moderators have to deal with.

Much ballyhooing about “neo-colonialism” followed.

[0] https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/

Re: Ryanair wins screen scraping case against Booking.com in US court ruling

#156
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We used to regulate air travel. It was a lot more expensive then.

> We used to regulate air travel. It was a lot more expensive then. I'm not sure this is the gotcha you think it is. Air travel, even in coach, was downright luxury compared to where it is today, and I'm not even talking about in the distant past, I'm talking about 25 or so years ago. Seats are narrower, legroom is practically nonexistent, and the seats only recline like two inches these days. Also almost everything…

You already have the choice to pay more to upgrade to better seats/experience. If I value price over luxury, why would you want take that choice from me? There is no world where we regulate first class for everyone but at basic economy prices.

Re: Ryanair wins screen scraping case against Booking.com in US court ruling

#157
this looks like scalping to me.

[the airline, Europe's largest by passenger numbers, has in recent years launched a series of legal actions against third-party booking platforms that resell its tickets without permission.

It says the companies, which use screen-scraping software to find and resell tickets, add additional charges and make it difficult for the airline to contact passengers.]

Re: Ryanair wins screen scraping case against Booking.com in US court ruling

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they could hire some mechanical turks from Africa to type prices into an Excel sheet for $5000.

Oh lord you need to rephrase that....

Mechanical_turk == Automaton

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_turk

Re: Ryanair wins screen scraping case against Booking.com in US court ruling

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where was the "defraud" happening here? When Ryanair wants to make money on flights they shouldn't offer flight tickets that only make money when they can lure the consumer to purchase addons via a boatload of dark patterns. This lawsuit is not about ryanair's pricing model, so that the company engages in bad practices is irrelevant to the court decision. What matters is that booking.com wants to earn money on sell…

> They are not your useragent, they are acting as a reseller: You buy a product from them which they acquire elsewhere, taking a profit in the process. Yeah so what? Why should anyone, be it a private person or a commercial entity, be restricted from buying something and then re-selling it to another person or entity? The only thing I'm willing to accept as a restriction for any kind of legal transaction is a reasona…

flight tickets usually are not a scarce commodity that attracts scalpers

If airline ticket resale was as easy as concert tickets, you'd probably see a predatory scalping market develop. Airplane tickets are scarce in that there is limited ability to adjust supply, especially in the short term. If flights to a destination are booked, you can't just throw another plane on the route because the gates are limited and inflexible.

Re: Ryanair wins screen scraping case against Booking.com in US court ruling

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they could hire some mechanical turks from Africa to type prices into an Excel sheet for $5000.

Why Africa? Why not southern Wyoming?

the original chess playing Mechanical_turk was a fraudulent device, likely more at home proximal to the nigerian princes, than with wild west gypsy wagon snake oil peddlars

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_turk

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