American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other • Hacker News Board

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#231

Post by beauzero » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 9:23 PM UTC

hlbjhblbljib wrote: post #208

KieranMac wrote: post #188

As an attorney who focuses in this area, I can say that the most interesting question is first where this case will be decided. Texas, and the Northern District of Texas in particular, has historically been the worst jurisdiction in the country for web scrapers to litigate. Southwest has a long history of litigating successfully there, including two cases from just last year. If TPG is going to win, first they'll nee…

I'm surprised more businesses don't ban all of Texas as customers to prevent any litigation happening there.

It's the second most populous (~29M) state behind California.

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#232

Post by whiddershins » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 9:26 PM UTC

nybble41 wrote: post #103

paxys wrote: post #62

Interesting that AA frames it as TPG's app stealing confidential customer data, while it is the customer who set up the app and willingly provided their credentials in the first place. Will AA be able to find a single customer who has a problem with what TPG does? What is their case then exactly? Would they similarly sue the app if customers were copy pasting data into it, rather than accessing it programmatically? F…

> What is their case then exactly? Speculating, but TOS generally say that you're not allowed to share your password with anyone. Assuming that's true for the AA site, AA might argue that TPG is encouraging users to break their TOS ("tortious interference"). Though if app doesn't actually share the password with TPG and just uses it locally there may well be a question of whether entering your password into a third-p…

So I wonder what if any legal difference there would be if TPG was only providing a web app that runs in the browser.

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#233

Post by KieranMac » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 9:26 PM UTC

divbzero wrote: post #228

tuckerconnelly wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kieran! Kieran (OP) is a friend of mine, highly competent, and I highly recommend his comprehensive legal guide to web scraping: https://mccarthygarberlaw.com/a-comprehensive-legal-guide-to...

Thank you sharing the link. I find it amusingly appropriate that viewing this legal guide requires agreeing to Terms & Conditions, but appreciate that it’s one of the shortest Terms & Conditions I’ve ever seen easy to read and understand within seconds.

Haha! Given that the article is about scraping, I figured some prudence with respect to people copying and pasting my work somewhere else was warranted!

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#234

Post by rhizome » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 9:27 PM UTC

paxys wrote: post #225

hlbjhblbljib wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised more businesses don't ban all of Texas as customers to prevent any litigation happening there.

Banning the second largest user base in the country isn't usually a good business strategy

It's funny how regionalism pops up on the internet. Thing is, it's less than 10% of the country (and surely not all of those 29MM are on the internet), and there are other businesses surviving just fine foregoing a TAM of the whole country.

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#235

Post by dragonwriter » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 9:28 PM UTC

hlbjhblbljib wrote: post #208

KieranMac wrote: post #188

As an attorney who focuses in this area, I can say that the most interesting question is first where this case will be decided. Texas, and the Northern District of Texas in particular, has historically been the worst jurisdiction in the country for web scrapers to litigate. Southwest has a long history of litigating successfully there, including two cases from just last year. If TPG is going to win, first they'll nee…

I'm surprised more businesses don't ban all of Texas as customers to prevent any litigation happening there.

> I'm surprised more businesses don't ban all of Texas as customers to prevent any litigation happening there.

Businesses are often the ones structuring agreements so that they can sue customers there and so that customers are forced to sue them there, so...that would seem counterproductive.

Even before considering the size of the market you’d be cutting off.

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#236

Post by randrews » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 9:29 PM UTC

hlbjhblbljib wrote: post #208

KieranMac wrote: post #188

As an attorney who focuses in this area, I can say that the most interesting question is first where this case will be decided. Texas, and the Northern District of Texas in particular, has historically been the worst jurisdiction in the country for web scrapers to litigate. Southwest has a long history of litigating successfully there, including two cases from just last year. If TPG is going to win, first they'll nee…

I'm surprised more businesses don't ban all of Texas as customers to prevent any litigation happening there.

American Airlines' headquarters is in Fort Worth, so banning Texas customers would be a peculiar move...

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#237

Post by BoysenberryPi » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 9:30 PM UTC

vineyardmike wrote: post #115

BoysenberryPi wrote: post #80

If screen scraping is illegal just know that pretty much every budget and banking app is also illegal because they all use screen scraping.

Plaid and the like now have API agreements with many of the major US banks, and are cutting down on their scraping usage (because its obviously unsustainable).

I would like to know who "the like" include because as far as I know it's just Plaid and maybe Intuit doing this. Until banks provide APIs directly to developers this just gives Plaid a monopoly. All devs who want to make finance apps securely have to go through Plaid.

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#238

Post by smsm42 » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 9:31 PM UTC

I wonder if other services like Mint, Yodelee etc. also do scraping? It seems to be the same model there as TPG/AA - a company has user data, but the user wants the data in some other place, so they authorize a third-party to extract the data and represent it in a different place. Most banks now are begrudgingly coming to terms with this being a thing, some going as far as providing OAuth-like read-only APIs to aggregators. Some are trying hard to not let that happen, and some just ignore the issue and let the aggregators scrape. But an actual case decision in this matter could change the picture - and make financial aggregator business so much harder if it's going a wrong way.

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#239

Post by dragonwriter » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 9:34 PM UTC

mbreese wrote: post #192

Glyptodon wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I authorize an agent to act on my behalf in a particular way wouldn't they be considered and authorized as me? If I make a contract with Bob to mow my lawn, it's not like Bob's workers or employees have to sign the contract too. TPG shouldn't need to be party to the contract to be an agent of one of the contracted parties.

But if TPG is an agent of the customer, then AA should be suing the customer. As said above, TPG isn’t subject to the TOS because they aren’t the ones who agreed to them. So, it’s the user that is misusing AAs data. But they don’t want to sue their customers (and in particular each customer individually, because I’m sure there is a no-class-action clause)… So here we are. It should be fascinating to see where this go…

> But if TPG is an agent of the customer, then AA should be suing the customer.

Respondeat superior lets you sue the principal for torts of an agent committed in the scope of their agency, but it doesn't eliminate the liability of the agent for their own torts.

You typically want to sue the principal when the agent is less able to pay, less willing to settle, or one of many easily replaceable agents employed by the principal for the same purpose.

When the first and third of those are reversed and the second is unclear (which seems to be the case here), you want to focus on the agent. You could sue the multitude of principals, too, but that's just a lot more cost for little additional benefit (and possibly sympathy backfire in a jury trial.)

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#240

Post by goda90 » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 9:34 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #117

enos_feedler wrote: post #59

I wrote a scraper for Air Canada's aeroplan program a few years ago. I wanted to track my points in my own custom native app. I probably had $10,000 worth of points in my account. One day I logged in to find out my account had been deactivated on suspicions of fraud. After several lengthy phone calls with their team (including sending them the node.js script I was using), I was able to get my account restored. For th…

I’ve been on the other side of this, defending against bots. Basically: Well-behaved and well-intentioned scraping bots are rare. You’d get a lot of users setting update rates to 60 seconds that did a new login every time and creating as much traffic as 1000 users. Then they’d release the script for integration with something people and suddenly you have 1000 people each creating 1000 times as many login requests as…

Reminds me of a little battle I got into years ago at work. The thermostat covered like 4 or 5 offices, and they had given us a control to change it on an internal website. It would record your name when you changed it, and then make you wait like 10 minutes to change it again. When I first moved into the office, I noticed that there was a battle between two people that had it doing several degree swings all day long. I sent them both and email and proposed a truce with a temperature in the middle, and they agreed. A few weeks later I noticed the guy who preferred it warmer broke the truce. I do not like it warm. So I wrote a script that would reload the page, check if the temperature was above a certain number, hit the down button, wait 10 minutes, then repeat. Some time after that, it became obvious that the other guy had a script too. But his script had no timeouts in the loop. Eventually the people in charge of the internal site emailed me and asked me to stop. They said they only noticed I was using a script because the other guy's script was breaking the website, and they looked at the logs and saw my responsible script reacting to it all night long. My manager laughed and told me to make the script more human-like. The other guy gave up his temperature tyranny and I let it sit at the truce point again.