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American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

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

#241

Post by paxys »

KieranMac wrote: post #214
nybble41 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

American Airlines is alleging 12 legal claims: 1. Breach of Contract 2. Tortious Interference with a Contract 3. Unfair Competition by Misappropriation 4. Trespass 5. Trademark infringement 6. Dilution 7. Dilution under Texas State Law 8. False Designation of Origin 9. Copyright Infringement 10. CFAA 11. Violation of Texas Harmful Access by Computer Act 12. Unjust Enrichment

Curious how Breach of Contract can fly, considering TPG never agreed to a contract with AA to begin with. And AA is obviously not suing their own customers.

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

#242

Post by smsm42 »

TuringTest wrote: post #190
hypertele-Xii wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The customer is an advertizer. The humans browsing the web are the product being sold.

Yes, that's what caused it: turning it into a market instead of a library. When it was built by geeks, it was difficult to use but it was meant to serve people. Sellers turned "serving people" into that other meaning.

The market is not the problem. The misaligned setup of the market, where the interests of the most of the consumers are misaligned with interests of those who produces or pays for the content, is the problem. Imagine a grocery store which is actually a money laundering front for mafia, so it's much more interested in looking like a grocery store than actually selling any groceries. Do you think they'd sell high quality goods? Would they have the best prices? Would their customer service be excellent? Now imagine the mafia bought all (or almost all) grocery stores in town and turned them into money laundering outlets. How is your grocery shopping experience now? That's what we're having with ads.

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

#243

Post by rhizome »

tiahura wrote: post #210
mbreese wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. As the great Professor Hecker repeated so often in Business Associations - “The tortfeasor is always liable.” E.g. when you get hit by the Dominoes delivery driver, you can sue the delivery driver.

I was just looking at this in the context of the Rogel Aguilera-Mederos (110 year sentence) truck-crash case the other week. IANAL, but as I understand it there's a legal concept called "respondeat superior" and the "McHaffie Rule" that may complicate that assertion. A lawyer could and probably would stomp me on this description, naturally.

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

#244

Post by ksdale »

rhizome wrote: post #234
paxys wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How can you be so sure it's not regionalism that's causing you to dismiss nearly 10% of one of the largest, richest countries in the world as inconsequential?

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

#245

Post by ape4 »

tuckerconnelly wrote: post #224
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…

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...

Just for fun, here is the robots.txt from that site:

    # Default robots file version:2
    User-agent: \*
    Disallow: /calendar/action\* 
    Disallow: /events/action\*
    Allow: /*.css
    Allow: /*.js
    Disallow: /\*?
    Crawl-delay: 3
    Sitemap: https://mccarthygarberlaw.com/sitemap_index.xml

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

#246

Post by jdhawk »

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…

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/429

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

#247

Post by bastardoperator »

jrockway wrote: post #209
bastardoperator wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a favorite Airline? I view them all with contempt given their poor business practices. Who's your favorite serial killer?

I've flown over half a million miles on American. They've been pretty nice to me every time. I have nothing to dislike about them.

Pretty nice isn't how I would describe great service. That's my point, the bar is low when it comes to airlines. In your case they should be treating you like a legend.

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

#248

Post by sneak »

tuckerconnelly wrote: post #224
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…

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...

[flagged]

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

#249

Post by sneak »

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

Not all users are created equal. This is why many internet businesses cater exclusively to a wealthy country that contains only 6% (that is, excluding 94% of internet users) of the people on the internet.

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

#250

Post by balls187 »

jrockway wrote: post #207
balls187 wrote: post #186

I can't see how American Airlines will prevail in preventing screen scraping. At best, they can prevent their point data from being transmitted and stored to TPG's servers. Screen Scraping is essentially interacting with the DOM extract information. American Airlines can't conceivably attempt to limit programmatic interaction with the DOM because that is a core component of how the web works including accessibility t…

I wouldn't put it past the court system to make web browsers ("user agents" as we called them back in the day) illegal accidentally. I'd be more surprised if they didn't, honestly.

> I wouldn't put it past the court system to make web browsers

I agree.

My faith would be upon appeal or enforcement, such a ruling would get overturned, or dismissed.

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