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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

#191

Post by ericd »

lesuorac wrote: post #126
ericd wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is the CFAA mentioned, then? That’s historically been used as a bludgeon against scraping. “A US court ruled that Booking.com violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by accessing part of Ryanair's website without permission, court documents showed, a ruling the airline said would help end unauthorised screen scraping by booking sites.”

Ryanair had previously send Cease & Desist letters to Booking.com so they were very explicitly unauthorized Booking.com from accessing their website. The part that annoys me is the losses are redacted [1]. Judging by the length of the redaction its much more than the $5000 they were ultimately awarded. I'm also very unclear what harm will actually befall Ryanair if the losses weren't redacted. [1]: https://www.courtl…

I’m not a lawyer, and I haven’t kept up very closely with the movements in scraping legality, but my impression was that it was ruled in the past few years that if it’s on the public internet with no login-wall being circumvented, then CFAA isn’t applicable? I seem to recall a collective sigh of relief around some of those rulings.

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

#192

Post by doix »

chx wrote: post #184
doix wrote: post #3

Pretty light article, does anyone have any more context? Does this set a strong precedent for all these types of sites? Booking.com wouldn't be the only site reselling airline tickets, in fact I wasn't even aware they did flights. Does Booking.com do something particularly bad compared to something like SkyScanner or Google flights? > "We expect that this ruling will end the internet piracy and overcharging perpetrat…

> Why is it almost always cheaper to buy through some weird 3rd party than with the airline directly? > sometimes it's over $50 cheaper $ tells me you are in the US where these kind of legacy shenanigans happen. Never with Ryanair.

I'm actually from the UK, just wrote it in dollars since it's a currency I assume everyone knows the value of. I just check SkyScanner and buy from the cheapest reseller. Very recently I had to buy a ticket from Edinburgh to Oslo, it was £45 cheaper to buy it from Trip.com than directly from Norwegian Airlines.

Out of curiosity, I did go and check a bunch of routes that I know Ryanair flies on SkyScanner, and it was cheaper to buy directly from Ryanair. So fair play to them, I'm surprised anyone would buy from a 3rd party when buying direct is cheaper.

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

#193

Post by IG_Semmelweiss »

arghwhat wrote: post #119
SoftTalker wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And you still regulate it, just differently. The implied conclusion that regulation makes things expensive is wrong, and comparing the air travel market over half a century ago with the market today, and crediting a change made in 1978 for the difference doesn’t make sense. EU air travel is quite regulated with e.g. consumer rights for cash compensation, hotel and food service in case of delay, and yet air travel rea…

Can you cite examples of any industry or niche , anywhere in the world, that was newly regulated, and once regulation tool place, prices materially dropped?

Geniuinely curious.

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

#194

Post by TylerE »

IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #193
arghwhat wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you still regulate it, just differently. The implied conclusion that regulation makes things expensive is wrong, and comparing the air travel market over half a century ago with the market today, and crediting a change made in 1978 for the difference doesn’t make sense. EU air travel is quite regulated with e.g. consumer rights for cash compensation, hotel and food service in case of delay, and yet air travel rea…

Can you cite examples of any industry or niche , anywhere in the world, that was newly regulated, and once regulation tool place, prices materially dropped? Geniuinely curious.

Internet access after the telcos were forced to share their last mile fibre?

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

#195

Post by NohatCoder »

IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #193
arghwhat wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you still regulate it, just differently. The implied conclusion that regulation makes things expensive is wrong, and comparing the air travel market over half a century ago with the market today, and crediting a change made in 1978 for the difference doesn’t make sense. EU air travel is quite regulated with e.g. consumer rights for cash compensation, hotel and food service in case of delay, and yet air travel rea…

Can you cite examples of any industry or niche , anywhere in the world, that was newly regulated, and once regulation tool place, prices materially dropped? Geniuinely curious.

Telephone roaming charges in the EU.

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

#196

Post by pipes »

miroljub wrote: post #123
mensetmanusman wrote: post #121

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?

Because racism!!! Not really, there have been quite a few stories recently about companies claiming to be AI powered when in fact they are using African workers to perform tasks. The Turk bit is just what Amazon called their platform for outsourcing crappy repetitive work, which is named after the famous mechanical Turk.

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

#197

Post by chrisjj »

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

And pretty soon afterward, every one of those login page will be circumvented by a bot signup.

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

#198

Post by sureIy »

deanCommie wrote: post #163
mFixman wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big part is fees. OTAs like Booking sell the base part of flight from Ryanair and low cost airlines at the same price as the airlines but with much higher fees for luggage and extras. They hide this second part from flight search engines, so they appear cheaper when including luggage. I'm sure that a lot of dislike from low cost airlines comes from shitty OTAs rather than the airlines themselves.

Boosting this. I recently tried to use Expedia to book a flight from Vancouver to Toronto on Porter Airlines because then I could use my TD Reward points. The default prices that showed up in the results looked the same on Expedia or directly on Porter, so it didn't seem like I was losing anything. Except that base flight included no carry-on and no checked-baggage, which I needed to do. On Porter directly fixing tha…

It can go both ways.

Pros of Expedia:

    - they have my card
    - their website does not suck as much as the airline’s
    - they let me cancel within 24/48 hours for free and immediately
The second point can be a huge selling point and it applies to a lot of OTAs. Every time I try to book direct “because it’s best” I easily spend triple the time and sometimes I get fleeced anyway (oh, here’s a $5 convenience fee for using a credit card we don’t like)

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

#199

Post by ffpip »

TechDebtDevin wrote: post #173
SteveNuts wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

https://i.redd.it/o6xypg00uac91.png

non-cancerous url

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

#200

Post by stonogo »

rolph wrote: post #158
swarnie wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh lord you need to rephrase that....

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

No, it is specifically not an automaton. It has a human operator.
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