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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

#231

Post by dudeinjapan »

mschuster91 wrote: post #43
arghwhat wrote: post #22

> A jury in the District Court of Delaware unanimously found that Booking.com violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse act 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 I imagine this is limited to a scenario where you: 1. Act as a middle-man for the transaction (as this lawsuit was about resale), 2. Interfere with pricing o…

> 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…

To answer side question: try skiplagged.com

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

#232

Post by darknavi »

SoftTalker wrote: post #96
arghwhat wrote: post #22

> A jury in the District Court of Delaware unanimously found that Booking.com violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse act 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 I imagine this is limited to a scenario where you: 1. Act as a middle-man for the transaction (as this lawsuit was about resale), 2. Interfere with pricing o…

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

A good video on the history of the subject:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzB5xtGGsTc

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

#233

Post by jcranmer »

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...

I haven't followed the facts of this case, and I haven't found any quickly online. The best I have is the order on the motion to dismiss [1], which covers why the judge thought HiQ v LinkedIn wasn't sufficient prior precedent to preclude this being a CFAA violation, along with Ryanair's motion for summary judgement [2] which suggests the results of discovery.

The short answer is... uh, not much. The order on the motion to dismiss suggests that to violate the CFAA, there is a requirement that you're specifically bypassing some form of access control, and it says the complaint sufficiently alleges such control (specifically password-protects internet accounts). Which... is a somewhat weak argument, but the judge here seems to think that HiQ is narrowly focused on "what's publicly available without requiring users to authenticate themselves." The motion for summary judgement states:

> Booking and Kayak admit that their access was intentional, and there are no factual disputes that Booking’s and Kayak’s access circumvents authentication mechanisms implemented by Ryanair specifically to keep Defendants out.

which, again, is vague on what those authentication mechanisms were, and it's not like this article provides any elucidation.

It's far from certain that this will be overturned on appeal, but "creating an account to use for screen scraping" doesn't sound like something that CFAA prohibits.

[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ded.731...

[2] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ded.731...

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

#234

Post by inopinatus »

mschuster91 wrote: post #151
arghwhat wrote: post #62

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…

> Why should anyone ... be restricted from buying something and then re-selling it to another person

because:

> flight tickets usually are not a scarce commodity

Airline tickets are not a commodity, full stop. They form a contract for a service between the airline and the customer. They're not a bag of fucking apples. Travel agents, when arranging air fares, are agents in the legal sense (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_agency) and not resellers. Booking.com were screwed on that front because they were deceptive in the particulars, a failure of good faith dealing that undermines the claim of agency.

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

#235

Post by maronato »

sega_sai wrote: post #61

If it was up to me, I would have required all airlines publish their fares in machine readable format.

Displaying the fares in a separate website isn’t the problem. The resale of tickets is, since other aggregators need to pay Ryanair a license fee to resell, and Booking is avoiding that by using RPA

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

#236

Post by lotsofpulp »

renewiltord wrote: post #230
lotsofpulp wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's normal. Information is a very valuable resource. It's often the case that advertising companies can be very profitable while people advertising using them have worse margins.

The information being referred to here is not scarce, though.

All airlines and hotels and car rental websites show everyone the information, at the cost of a few minutes low effort button clicking. A vast change from how difficult and time consuming it was to access information before the internet.

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

#237

Post by nilamo »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #223
nilamo wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More expensive than what? And how does that relate to minimum wages? And how does that relate to minimum wages with respect to gig work?

> More expensive than what? “The average wage in Nigeria is about $25 per day.” Wages in Southern Wyoming are more expensive than that. Gig or minimum is irrelevant. > how does that relate to minimum wages Wyoming is subject to the federal minimum wage. > how does that relate to minimum wages with respect to gig work? We’re comparing two numbers and observing one of them is bigger.

But we're comparing minimum wages in two places when the minimum wage is not a relevant number, since, as stated above, minimum wage does not apply to gig work.

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

#238

Post by chrisjj »

benj111 wrote: post #33
codetrotter wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This case is about more than that: > 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.

What it's 'about' (according to one side) and the law involved are 2 separate things. When I buy something from the supermarket, they add charges and make it difficult for the manufacturer to contact me directly, so that isn't illegal. Many things with bad outcomes are legal. Breaking the terms of service of the site may be illegal, and if you're mis representing yourself to log in, even more so. But then you're also…

> make it difficult for the manufacturer to contact me directly

Probably a good thing in the case of most manufacturers.

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

#239

Post by inopinatus »

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...

We may well find that this matter doesn't ultimately hinge on screen-scraping as much as it does deceptive behaviour by an agent.

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

#240

Post by Retric »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #179
Retric wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

On net close to 0. Roughly 50% the cargo holds of passenger aircraft are now taken up by air freight which adds quite a bit of drag and isn’t part of those comparisons and offsets the reduction in passenger legroom.

That freight also helps explain why nearly empty flights can make sense economically.

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