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

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

#171

Post by gumby »

amelius wrote: post #89
gumby wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Booking.com's … grip on the market? Do they have a significant grip on the market? I’ve never used them, but for all I know they sell a majority of plane tickets. Then again I haven’t used Ryanair either. The reputations of Ryanair, Spirit etc are sufficient for me to avoid them. But in booking.com’s case I barely even know it exists.

> According to Booking Holdings (Booking.com)'s latest financial reports the company's current revenue (TTM ) is $22.00 B. In 2023 the company made a revenue of $21.36 B an increase over the years 2022 revenue that were of $17.09 B (from a google search)

Wow! Shows I’m living under a basket.

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

#172

Post by byteknight »

hipadev23 wrote: post #162

This will very likely be overturned as it flies in the face of the 9th circuit court decision on HiQ vs LinkedIn. This is in a different circuit, so it'll need to be elevated, but CFAA is absolutely the incorrect tool to be utilized here. [1] https://calawyers.org/privacy-law/ninth-circuit-holds-data-s...

CFAA was already reworded I thought to avoid these exact types of situations? Among other things, responsible disclosure.

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

#173

Post by TechDebtDevin »

SteveNuts wrote: post #167
ActionHank wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sets a precedent going forward that will impact Booking.com and many other services that do the same thing. I would imagine that it is also a nice foundation for cases against AI training data scraped from sites.

Pretty soon every single website will be hidden behind a login page

Yeah but then they'll have an unauthenticated API, I see this often.

Website owners will also never stop scraping and prosecuting the owner of every crawler (who can obfuscate their identity anyways) is impossible.

Captchas are going to increasingly become more obsolete.

It's a fools errand to spend resources fighting scrapers.

Edit (non cancerous URL) https://i.redd.it/o6xypg00uac91.png

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

#174

Post by pbhjpbhj »

eli wrote: post #128
lesuorac wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or what? They'll have to pay another 5k for 4 years of access (lawsuit was filed in 2020)?

At the least, they would find out real fast how big those punitive damages can get when it's a repeated and willful violation. CFAA isn't a joke - there are potential criminal penalties to executives and others within the company.

Could you give examples please. I looked at Wikipedia [0] and did a quick Google but didn't turn up any examples of punishment of C-suite in these circumstances.

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

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

#176

Post by JumpCrisscross »

nilamo wrote: post #164
theptip wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite obviously, minimum wage is many times higher in the US.

Minimum wage is not applicable for gig work. It would basically be the same business model as companies like https://rev.com , which can be <$1 per video transcribed.

> which can be

The average wage in Nigeria is about $25 per day [1]. The fundamental difference between Wyoming and West Africa is cost of living.

[1] https://www.timedoctor.com/blog/average-salary-in-nigeria/

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

#177

Post by lotsofpulp »

gumby wrote: post #171
amelius wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> According to Booking Holdings (Booking.com)'s latest financial reports the company's current revenue (TTM ) is $22.00 B. In 2023 the company made a revenue of $21.36 B an increase over the years 2022 revenue that were of $17.09 B (from a google search)

Wow! Shows I’m living under a basket.

Those numbers did not answer any of your questions.

They are doing significantly better than the main competing travel agent website:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/BKNG/booking-holdi...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/EXPE/expedia/marke...

What I always find interesting is middlemen businesses that don’t do any of the risky and laborious work, such as operating hotels and airlines and car rental businesses, earning higher profit margins and profits than the businesses that have to put much more on the line.

You would think the internet would especially be able to split the profit margin of these middlemen between the customer and the actual businesses that do the work by automating and commodifying the middleman’s function.

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

#178

Post by chx »

alwa wrote: post #155
mensetmanusman wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 abo…

I refuse the framing of tech bros exploiting African workers as "Much ballyhooing about neo-colonialism".

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

#179

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

Retric wrote: post #138
SoftTalker wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Airlines were a lot more expensive everywhere back then. The majority of the drop in airline prices is from improving aircraft. They use ~1/3 the fuel per passenger mile today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft#/medi...

How much of that "fuel per passenger" metric comes from simply packing passengers tighter?

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

#180

Post by qingcharles »

dhx wrote: post #42

It appears the latest opinion may not yet be published for this case 20-cv-01191-LPS, Ryanair DAC v. Booking Holdings Inc. et al, United States District Court of Delaware. This is the first opinion on the case from 2021 which denied Booking Holdings Inc request to dismiss: [1] https://www.ded.uscourts.gov/sites/ded/files/opinions/20-cv-... Ryanair (Irish company) makes one claim against Delaware corporation Booking H…

Didn't the HiQ case rule that under the federal CFAA at least, the ToS isn't a form of protection?

Here in Illinois, at least, they make it up to a felony to violate a web site ToS, and it's specifically worded as such in the statute.

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