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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

#61

Post by FDSGSG »

whimsicalism wrote: post #30
lp0_on_fire wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have the standard boilerplate: " American Airlines also reserves the right in its sole and unfettered discretion to deny you access to the Site at any time. " "You agree that this Agreement is made and entered into in Tarrant County, Texas. You agree that Texas law governs this Agreement's interpretation and/or any dispute arising from your access to, dealings with, or use of the Site, without regard to conflict…

I don't see how that gives AA the right to sue.

It is actually the right of petition enumerated in the first amendment which gives AA the right to sue.

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

#62

Post by paxys »

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?

FYI the title is editorialized. This suit has nothing to do with screen scraping, but just data access in general. Services like these nowadays almost always use private APIs (built for mobile clients and SPAs) rather than parse HTML.

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

#63

Post by maxmorlocke »

ceejayoz wrote: post #45
tantalor wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You may not ... use the content of the Site for public or commercial purposes That's not what the app was doing: > The app ... had been ‘screen scraping’ accounts for members So it wasn't "public or commercial", it was for people who had accounts to view/manage their account details. Same as Plaid or Mint for banks, or (more generally) any old web browser for literally any website.

It was absolutely "for commercial purposes" for The Points Guy.

And where did TPG enter into a commercial relationship or affirmatively agree to these terms?

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

#64

Post by lowercased »

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…

"agents" and "bots" were proposed as a thing of the future back in the 90s. "you'll have all these agents that can buy stuff for you and book travel and ..."

but not if you write it yourself, apparently.

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

#65

Post by whimsicalism »

FDSGSG wrote: post #61
whimsicalism wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how that gives AA the right to sue.

It is actually the right of petition enumerated in the first amendment which gives AA the right to sue.

Fair enough. I guess I meant a good case.

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

#66

Post by Nextgrid »

maxmorlocke wrote: post #60
cbtacy wrote: post #6

https://www.aa.com/i18n/customer-service/support/legal-infor... "Unless otherwise noted, all information, AAdvantage® account information, articles, data, images, passwords, Personal Identification Numbers ("PINs"), screens, text, user names, Web pages, or other materials (collectively "Content") appearing on the Site are the exclusive property of American Airlines Group, Inc., or American Airlines, Inc., or their su…

Disclaimer: Founder of a company in the travel space that relies heavily on scraping. What's interesting here is that there's conflicting precedent... and fundamentally that is what matters. hiQ vs LinkedIn is a great example of accessing data via a scraper that potentially violates the Terms of Services agreement, but found that Microsoft/LinkedIn violated antitrust laws. EF Cultural Travel vs Explorica is another e…

A fair test would be that if you are able to delegate manually retrieving the information to a friend or colleague, you should be allowed to delegate it to a machine.

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

#67

Post by darkwizard42 »

sabujp wrote: post #28
chrismeller wrote: post #3

I honestly don’t know who to root for here. TPG is one of my favorite sites, but American is one of my favorite airlines.

Favoritism should have aboslutely nothing to do with this. Public stuff on the internet should be exactly that, public. You have no expectation of privacy and it's up to you as an owner/operator to maintain the security of your site, make sure you aren't being dos'd, screen scraped (use strong captchas, validated accounts), etc.

Yeah but this is about PRIVATE data like your miles and points after logging in to AA.

So not even sure your comment applies here.

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

#68

Post by oh_sigh »

ceejayoz wrote: post #53
icehawk wrote: post #42

The funny thing is, American sends points data to my email. I wonder if that sort of thing could be leveraged for something similar.

Do it enough and they'll stop. All of my Amazon order emails now only tell me the order number and the total cost, with zero information on what products are included.

I wonder if Amazon was worried about companies like Google mining sales data from emails? Or something along those lines

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

#69

Post by enos_feedler »

lowercased wrote: post #64
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…

"agents" and "bots" were proposed as a thing of the future back in the 90s. "you'll have all these agents that can buy stuff for you and book travel and ..." but not if you write it yourself, apparently.

And they are still a growing thing in business with RPA. I guess consumers aren't allowed to access the technology afforded to enterprise employees.

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

#70

Post by ACow_Adonis »

cbtacy wrote: post #6

https://www.aa.com/i18n/customer-service/support/legal-infor... "Unless otherwise noted, all information, AAdvantage® account information, articles, data, images, passwords, Personal Identification Numbers ("PINs"), screens, text, user names, Web pages, or other materials (collectively "Content") appearing on the Site are the exclusive property of American Airlines Group, Inc., or American Airlines, Inc., or their su…

If I hang a book on a public street and put on the first page "if you read from this book you owe me money and if you use the information contained within I will sue you because it's all mine", it's not at all cut and dried. indeed I think a lot of people would note it sounds like bullshit.

And additional observation is that they're claiming ownership and exclusive rights to things over things which:

a) as broken and dystopian as our intellectual property laws are, it's not immediately apparent you can claim exclusive ownership of. Can you claim property rights on a pin number? on your customer's name? on your customer's phone number? is data even ownable?

b) as above, even if you could, it's not apparent that the airline is the one with the greatest claim to that ownership. Does the airline own my name if I fly with them?

c) the issue with screen scraping may just be scale, automation and commercial value, and it's not apparent you can just wilfully ban competitors from that because you say so. Indeed, is it a violation if an individual uses the information within without screen scraping? cause a lot of those exclusions and terms would seem like they restrict the use of the website and the information for its actual intended purpose on an individual level, screen scraping or not.

d) what are we doing when we read a website but biological screen scraping?

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