Ryanair wins screen scraping case against Booking.com in US court ruling • Hacker News Board

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

#301

Post by Wytwwww » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 8:48 PM UTC

felixg3 wrote: post #289

Marsymars wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can still fly businesses and pay the same price as before You can't really though - e.g. 25 years ago you could fly economy from Vancouver Canada to Sydney Australia for $2600. (Inflation adjusted.) You can now do that flight for $1400. Pretty good, but the kicker is that flying business class is now $5300. Even premium economy is $4400. (Prices are all the cheapest I see on Google Flights over the rest of 2024…

Very interesting. A flight from Europe to Sydney, for example, is 1150€ round trip.

I can see round trips from e.g. London for ~1000€ but to be fair business class seems to start at ~4000.

From what I can find e.g. SF to Sydney was $2300 US in 1986 (over $6000 now).

London - Sydney. Allegedly might have been as low $600 (~$2200) both ways in 1980 (though I don't think economy back then was even remotely close to modern business class...)

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

#302

Post by alwa » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 8:56 PM UTC

stonogo wrote: post #203

Wytwwww wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

offering jobs well above prevailing local wages = exploiting I would assume you also believe that every single person working for a wage is also by definition exploiting regardless of where they are? Otherwise it would make very little sense...

Offering jobs in areas with laxer worker protections is arguably exploitative because in most or all of america this sort of work comes with counseling, due to the horrific nature of some of the content to be moderated. I don't know offhand of OpenAI ensured this was available; if not, that's a substantial financial savings at a cost of human suffering, which fits some folks' definition of exploitation.

If I remember correctly the labor protections sounded commensurate, at least in form, with American standards: counseling (for whatever it’s worth), attempting to restrict hiring to people over age 18 (although the journalists did interview a person who fraudulently used a relative’s ID to get hired at age 15), etc.

I don’t know about the quality of those services. It might be that the company operates in a cruel trashy way. But if we call it a hypothetical, and stipulate that the company unilaterally extends worker protections approximately equal to American worker protections (and much more attractive than local protections), would that change the calculus?

It’s the same difficult work wherever it’s done. But in one context, it pays a really attractive wage and reflects good working conditions compared to the other options available to the worker. In the home context, the same wages would not provide a remotely adequate standard of living, and the worker has better options and should probably take them.

In that framework, isn’t it more humane to take the work where it does the most good for the people doing the job? For that matter, doesn’t it help raise the standards in the remote job market: when a company comes around that’s rich enough to offer workers the choice of a job with better protections, doesn’t that encourage local businesses to make their protections more attractive too?

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

#303

Post by betepeppers » Fri, Jul 26, 2024, 11:47 PM UTC

I don't think screen scraping should be illegal unless there is a form in the way requiring interactive acceptance of terms.

Of course, now with AI that's a different story, but barring AI scraping a page for data should not be illegal just because the company wants to sell you API access.