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Texas Court Blocks Screen-Scraper
An anonymous reader writes "A Texas court has granted American Airlines
an injunction against Farechaser to stop them from using a screen-scraper to copy airfare information from their website in violation of the terms and conditions. In a stunning display of hypocrisy, Farechase.com's own terms and conditions prohibit users from doing to them exactly what they are doing to AA.com. The EFF is involved, but it's unclear whether they're supporting the enforceability of a website's terms and conditions or Farechase's right to violate them."
They put their info up on the web.. anyone can do anything they want to with it. Losers.
Legislations, counter-legislations.
Did the web die suddenly or did it just wither away without anyone noticing?
Yes, I am a Muslim. No, I am not a Terrorist.
If you are making information available to the public, what right do you have to be angry when someone, *gasp* uses that information?
The article also fails to mention that Farechaser was sentenced to death by lethal injection in the same decision...
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
I would hope they would be supporting our right to copy information that is made public. Is their position really that ambiguous?
---
Fortunately, American isn't basing their case on the idea that their prices are their "intellectual property," but instead are claiming that Farechase was trespassing on their chattel. I wonder if the decision on this could effect cases involving DoS attacks?
My employer has "requested" that I write a screen scraper to grab information from a competitor's site. The data will then be put into our databases, and sold as our own. This is in violation of the competitor's terms of agreement, and I have thus far not done this.
I am unable to find anything on Google relating to the legality of this, but I believe that it is probably not legal. However, I was told to "do it and let the lawyers deal with it".
Whether it is legal or not, I do not feel that it is ethical, and may leave the company if I am pushed to do this.
Does anybody know where I can read any case law on screen scraping? Aside from the current article, that is.
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
Now all their monitors will get burn-in!
Wait-- I misread that, didn't I?
GPL be damned!
As much as I love them, this is is one of those cases where they can't tell if they're coming or going. Maybe they'll write an Amicus Curae for both sides, and confuse the shit out of the judge.
:P
And for the record, I sent in my annual EFF cheque last month
Cue The Sun...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There is a fundamental distinction between programmatically scraping someone else's site and posting it as your own and an individual drawing down the website via a browser: fair use.
Provided fair use conditions are posted, I don't see where the scraper has a leg to stand on. If you are a competitor, you have different rules, as your intention and the actions that follow your intentions separate you from a normal consumer. To illustrate, it is fair use for me to go to the library and photocopy an article out of a journal and use it as source material for a paper. It is NOT fair use for me to photocopy the article and put it in my own magazine, publishing it as if it was mine, copyright and all.
That being said, I would be very interested in an informed reply from a lawyer that specializes in these matters.
And therefore protectible?
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
I didn't realize those damn squeegee guys were still around. Ours seem to have died off on their own. Guess Texas winters aren't cold enough.
Can't they just track the IP address of the scraper program and either feed it bogus information or block it all together?
Of course they don't allow others to do it to them; nobody likes a dose of their own medicine.
They aren't supposed to have a morality. They are supposed to have views on the law, and the two are quite different. The ACLU supports freedom of speech, even when it's for hate groups like the KKK. At the same time, they support the rights of all people to have equal access to education and the like. It's not a question of morality, it's a question of law.
It's obviously not legal to steal content(articles) from other sites due to copyrights, but do fares/prices fall into the category of copyrightable material?
If you recall an article about Fatwallet getting in trouble for posting prices obtained from other sources, it was determined that prices were copyrightable. AA has a good arguement based on that precedent.
Regardless, Farechaser should not tell its customers one thing then turn right around and do it themselves. Especially when they stand to make money doing so. Sure, it's legal, but that doesn't make it right. Personally I think they ought to nationalize most of the airlines given the current economic situation but that's not likely given the stockholders interests and the current administration.
As long as there is a Second Amendment, there will always be a First Amendment.
In Bidder's Edge, the federal court granted eBay an injunction preventing Bidder's Edge from harvesting information from eBay's website for the purpose of using it on the Bidder's Edge site.
IANAL (but I will be in a couple years), so don't expect legal advice from me.
I think the Bidder's Edge case was decided on a weird basis (eBay has a right to protect its servers from harm), rather than the reasons you'd expect (eBay's data shouldn't be jacked by competitors and used to hurt eBay's business). Nonetheless, I expect other courts would rule the same way on a similar case.
Note: in this case, eBay has specifically told Bidder's Edge not to take the data.
And a screen-scraper begins?
I understand the need and want for internet resources to be free, so maybe that sways some people to say that it is ok to scrape an airline's website...but it just isn't the case. To make an (imperfect) analogy, this is just like spam. A lot of bandwidth and effort is used to try to filter out the unwanted hits while allowing the full bandwidth to go to legitimate customers. If more people begin to scrape AA, service degrades abd they can lose customers (a good argument against this point is that they are still selling the tickets and making a profit, just that this other site is making money off of their efforts).
That being said, I think their are simple technical solutions to this like just using some sort of random number letter generator that creates a blurry human readable (but not computer readable) representation and make the users enter that in to get airfare.
Just for fun, click on farechase's link a few times and see if they enjoy losing bandwidth. It has a sort of simple irony to it.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
Copyright, that's what.
Copyright has nothing to do with it.
They're using data, not copyrighted material.
The circumstances are not exactly the same
Actually, the circumstances are not remotely the same. You're talking about copyrighted material, and data.
the law is basically the same.
No, it isn't. Copyright cannot be applied to facts. Pricing is a fact, therefore it's not subject to copyright.
You can copyright the format of the data, but not the data itself. Since the screen-scaper is extracting the data, it's not subject to copyright.
The grammar in the second AC posting is flawless. Plus -- and this is only a guess -- the author is probably possessed of extraordinary intelligence and rugged good looks. I could be wrong, but I doubt it.
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
Jon Udell created a bookmarklet called LibraryLookup to take the URL of the page you are on and pull off the ISBN and check your local library for the book. It can be used at places like Amazon.com. It is a very creative idea of using different websites to create the useful application. Now one would hate to see applications like this be outlawed. Maybe the difference is that the use is personal (fair use) and not "commerical".
I would hope that, if they do become involved, they will agree on the side of the recent FatWallet case, in which posted price information was decided not copyrightable.
It's really not fair to say people are involved merely because they are posting information for public benefit.
If American Airlines wins this case, what happens to froogle.google.com?
http://archive.aclu.org/news/w032197a.html
How about in deed?
Part of the Terms stated You agree that you will not take any action that imposes an unreasonable or disproportionately large load on our infrastructure.
Does posting the link on Slashdot count?
How about...
- KKK Sues Pittsburgh Over Mayor's Refusal To Permit Peaceful Political Rally
- Acting on Behalf of KKK and its Opponents, MN ACLU Questions Delay in Rally Permit Applications
- ACLU Praises Cleveland Mayor's Support Of KKK's First Amendment Right to March
Shall I continue?here and here. And that's just in a couple moments spent searching on the ACLU's own site.
--Dg
From the homepage of farechase.com ...
There has been a problem using this website.
This could be due to one of the following problems:
* Your browser is not supported - this website supports Internet Explorer 4 and higher on Windows platforms, and Netscape 4.7.x on Windows and Mac platforms (Explorer on Mac platforms will be supported soon)
* Cookies are disabled in your browser
Click here to download Internet explorer 5.5
Click here to download Netscape Communicator 4.77
Please contact us at webmaster@farechase.com with any questions or comments.
This goes along with the article on pricing. In industries where pricing is heavily competitive (e.g. airlines, rental cars, computer equipment) pricing information is constantly shopped. The companies can't ask each other for rates because it is banned by by anti price fixing laws. So they shop competitors' prices on information services, some even have shopbots to do the work. Sabre, the largest travel booking network in North America, which is a closed network, has blocked some paying customers due to excessive shopping. They block shopping because automated shopbots elevate CPU and network usage. These shopbots can't tell when rates have changed, so they continuously hit Sabre. Wonder how hard Farechase was hitting AA.com?
At my company, a major major market site, we publish all kinds of advice, hot socks, bond rates, mutual fund performance calculations etc., etc., etc... All this is publicly avalible on the site.
I noticed that a bunch of smaller companies were scraping our content, stuff we owned, and redisplayed it on their sites..
So, what we did was block the servers that were scraping us, and it largely has stopped the problem. Trying to stop the remaining theifs from manually copying our content isn't worth our legal department's time, and since they are all teny tiny sites doing this, we don't care that much anymore.
But the larger theifs who were profiting from out content --and scraping in large amounts-- don't do so anymore as a result from denying their scraping servers.
They could generate all their data using gifs. To confound software that performed screen captures and then OCR'ed the site, they could use a funky font or place noise in the background color.
<a href="http://www.joblessjimmy.com">Work is dumb and so is Jobless Jimmy.</a>
There is a connection between screen scraping and privacy arguments.
Many here are posting "What's wrong with screen scraping? The information is there, I can get it, what's the problem?"
By the same token, many decry things like Amazon.com selling their address just because "they have it".
Information is information. If you have the "right" to scrape whatever you want and distribute it however you want, then companies have the right to distribute your personal information to whomever they want, under whatever circumstances they want.
I prefer to live in the world where control over information on the societal level is still allowed; no concept of privacy can exist without it. Not letting people screen scrape isn't even something I'd consider a "price".
To be a bit more theoretical, there is value in information transfer.
This is a summary of a much longer and more complete argument, but it should get a lot of the point across. I won't be defending this on a point-by-point basis in replies as a result.
Those squeegie guys standing at the intersections?
:-P
haha
Damn, only in Texas.
Yeah, read my post that I just wrote a minute ago.. its about the same time you asked this quiestion:
= 5507332
its a top level post down a few from yours...
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=57030&cid
Block their scraping servers (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 13, @05:54PM (#5507332)
Sadly, what's stunning?
IMHO There's no such thing as a "Stunning Display of Hipocracy" anymore...
My advice here is make sure you have a new job lined up. I "took a stand" about 14 months ago, ended up being pushed out, and just got a new job a few days ago. Moral of the story? Have a fallback position, or a big bank account.
See, they can't fire you for refusing to break the law, but "you're not a team player" situations like this can lead to people getting fired for forgetting to refill the printer paper, or failing to turn off the lights on Friday night or something stupid like that...
And definitely don't tell somebody you're interviewing with the reason you want to leave--You will almost automagically be eliminated from consideration for saying something "negative" about your former employer...Even if it is the truth.
You have to come up with a creative quasi-lie to explain your desire to take the risk of changing jobs in a shitty economy.
Who did what now?
Its much easier to block a proxy than to create a new one (on an IP) once it's blocked. Unless you own the ISP and have a zillion to rotate through.
We do that, and after about 6 attempts, they stop scraping cause its so much work for them.
Then they would lose in Court and yopu wouldn't have anything to worry about.
The wonderful thing about the rule of law is that in the end the meaning of a law including the constitution is decided by the courts. thats what they are there for. so if the court says x and you say y then you are wrong.
That robot thing rules btw :) Had fun driving around and talking to the owner a bit ;)
Hate me!
You've come to the right place, pardner. While none of us really _is_ a lawyer, each of us is more than willing to pretend.
/.ers. They will try to make these fit the definintion of the laws avalible any way possible. Often, we argue a case against several laws, trying to point out how it does, or doesn't apply. If one works, Yahoo, we win that one, and try to prove another law one way or the other. Tricky part is, you can't go bananas and try to hit the court with zillions of examples for your case. Gotta pick 3-6 solid laws that show a violation or not, was the case. Sometimes, the seemingly smallest aspect of the volation to the non-law savy turns out to be the most powerful example for your case, and you win.
Alas, this is my last post as an AC for the day so I can't really be replying a whole lot.
But, you can expect lawyers from each side to take similar stances on all of these points raised by
And why AC? Because I'm a lawyer of course.
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They can't force customers not to tell their friends about the prices, so how the hell do they have a right to stop anyone from relaying that information automatically? This kind of nonsense reminds me of software EULAS: You can't see the license before you buy it, but you must agree to the license to use the software and you can't return the software if you don't like the license because there aren't any stores in the world that accept returns on opened software. They're esssentially extorting rights from you without giving you any choice other than to throw away the software you just paid $$$ for. Posting something on a website is equivalent to posting a comment on slashdot, which is equivalent to yelling it out in public. You can't have a website listing prices or goods and have a website EULA prohibiting other sites from parroting it (xxxxxxxx company is selling xxxxxx for $xxx) any more than you can yell something out on the street and then force others to not tell anyone what you just said (or else get sued) by then dictating a verbal EULA for whatever you just yelled out.
Repeal the DMCA!
The only real case here is whether a web server is automatically equal access for everyone, or can a company can legally refuse to allow certain people to use the server. I doubt price data is copyrightable. The case involves the fairness of Fairchase using AA's equipment for their own profit, and whether AA can legally restrict this behavior. Certainly, if I walked into an AA office and started asking prices and writing them down, AA could refuse and boot me out. Is the same the case on a web server?
Vote for Pedro
You cannot copyright raw information, such as a list of phone numbers in a telephone book.
I think this precedence should be applied here as well. It should also be applied to the perl module that "screen scraped" a TV's listing page. Although you can't copy the overall look of the page, the raw information is free (as in speech) to be used.
It's unfortunate that licensing agreements are now trumping copyright limits.
Don't steal. The government hates competition.
when you scrape the screen, you do not know exactly what the format of their database is. Your database is a "clean-room" implementation, and probably does not exactly reflect their database in terms of schema. Any database you create is thus legal. Same as a "clean-room" BIOS.
In a previous story about the POS world, related to the high tech pricing game, there is a passage about airfare pricing, where each airline publishes about 17 times a week the price of seats for all their flights..
..unless the prices publishes on those websites do NOT concord with the ones they advertise to ATPCO?
So the big story here seems to be the tech behind fetching these prices from the website and not the prices themselves.
All of the major airlines ( except Southwest ) participate in a joint fare-publishing enterprise called ATPCO. ATPCO collects fares and rules ( such as advance-purchase requirements, refundability, and so on ) from each airline. ATPCO then publishes those fares back out to the airlines and to the reservation services.
Nouvelles de jeux et technologies en français. TC
This decision made by the Texas court could set a precidence for all future cases revolving around this sort of alleged violation.
Once a court makes a decision like this, future cases will reference this decision in future litigation.
I for one, as a lawyer for several extremely major tech companies, pay close attention to events like this. These decisions will outline the legal ground on which this activity will be judged in the future. Asside from my personal involvement, this also could have major rammifications on the way business develops on the internet.
No, this might not be impacting you directally, but it could modify the way you do business on, use, or enjoy the internet, or the free market in a very general perspective. Essentially, these seemingly benign legal events can have tremendous impacts on society, business, legal, and a host of other realms that make up your life.
Yeah, this seems insignificant, and in most cases will be for you, but... don't blow these things off so easily.
When it comes to spam, these same people get on their high horses and pontificate about abuse/theft of services and bandwidth, yet when it's someone else's resources that are being abused it's "I'll take what I like and I don't care what you think."
As screen-scraping becomes more commonplace, you can expect services to disappear becuase they've been ripped off too much. And that benefits nobody, even the screen-scrapers.
To clarify EFF's position, we're not involved in the case at this point. We do strongly support Farechase's right to access a publicly available website and repost uncopyrightable facts gathered from it.
We may get involved with the case as it proceeds, but for the moment, we've just posted a copy of the injunction for reference.
-- Openlaw: Fighting for fair use and the public domain
publicly release the software for non-commercial use. American is complaining about the bandwidth a few web-crawlers have on their infrastructure. I'd like to see them deal with 5 million users crawling their website every day.
I want whatever crack the judge is smoking. I can see how the web pages TOS could apply after the user signs the thing. But, this non-commercial use clause sounds too anti-competitive to be legal (I don't even think a non-commercial organization like the Red Cross should be able to get anyone to sign that contract, much less a commercial organization with a huge portion of the market). If I were the judge I would have hinted to the defense to seak a injunction against the AA TOS and then suspended this trial while trying American for economic harm to Farechase with their illegal contract terms.
I wonder how massive this Judge's bribe was. Oh wait! Texas.. Was this judge appointed by President Dunce? Maybe the Judge's 70 on his IQ test looked like a very high "C average" to someone...
It is unclear what the EFF stands for.
To illustrate, it is fair use for me to go to the library and photocopy an article out of a journal and use it as source material for a paper. It is NOT fair use for me to photocopy the article and put it in my own magazine, publishing it as if it was mine, copyright and all.
First, as already mentioned, airline fares aren't copyrightable (common facts clause in copyright code, yadda yadda). So that's out the window. Now we have to ask ourselves if they are in some other way violating the law (trade secrets or whatnot).
Consider a non-internet example. If these guys are breaking copyright, then so is every store that runs a newspaper ad with a competitor's price. Does it matter if the scraping is done by bot or by hand? Am I in violation if I sit there and write the prices down? No, of course not, because when it is published it becomes a fact, which isn't protected.
For it to be a violation of ANYTHING, it has to not be commonly known - hence, sites that published Best Buy's black friday prices before they were published got in trouble (I think it was best buy). But once you publish it, you can't claim secrecy.
Ultimately, this will not have to do with copyright law, but whether their no-scraping user agreement is enforceable. We shall see.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
business as usual, in other words?
C|N>K
Normally I agree except that the pilots unions are ruining the industry like they did steel and came close to doing in automobiles. Unions are great when working conditions are miserable and they serve a great role until they begin extorting money from employers based on what they think they can get. United had pilots gettin $300,000+ for 80 hours of work a month, Delta was reporting less extreme but similar cases, Pan AM, Eastern, Piedmont, and lots of other airlines got shut down by greedy union workers and nationalization would help put an end to this. At the very least the feds need to step in and regulate the industry for a while before airline service is only allowed between a handful of cities where the routes are that profitable. Granted, smaller airlines are loving every minute of this since they don't have the same scontracts and don't have that kind of overhead, but we need to shore up the jobs already in existence to prevent the current recession from getting any worse. Look at what the mostly non-college educated members of the longshoreman's union did out in the West Coast with their union: they make well over $100k /year and nearly choked stores for good over Christmas. If this happens to airlines, businesses would take a serious hit from the inability to travel. I also think we need a unified infrastructure where all of the airlines display what their fares are and where they fly to that's more comprehensive than expedia or orbitz, like what was in place back in the 70s where they did this at the counter instead of online.
As long as there is a Second Amendment, there will always be a First Amendment.
Fair Use doctrine applies to copyright material. facts aren't copyrightable, hence there is no "fair use" restriction. You can do anything you want to with facts. Ask any politician. (or Enron's accountants, for a counter-example)
You may also be interested to read my resignation from Live Picture after they announced they were moving the company from Santa Cruz County to Silicon Valley.
Having both these pages on my consulting business' website might well be losing me some business. I'll never know - if a potential client thinks I'm a troublemaker after reading them and decides not to hire me, they just click away from my site and never say anything to me.
However, one of the reasons why I am self-employed is so that I can live in a way that is true to my conscience, which was never really fully possible when I worked for corporations.
Also I feel that I'm doing a valuable public service. For example, I can tell from my server logs that many of the people who find my resignation on search engines are looking for examples of resignation letters, I imagine so they can figure out how to write one of their own. I'm glad that I'm able to be helpful that way.
A number of the other responses say that one should only make a moral stand if you have money in the bank, or if you have another job lined up. Certainly not having those things will make your decision more difficult, but I should point out that history is full of courageous people who took moral stands despite knowing full well the terrible consequences that would befall them. We all, as a society, would be better off if more people would do that, but it would come at the cost of much sufferring for a few brave individuals.
I can't say it's been easy being a consultant the last couple years, and I'm pretty sure those pages have made it harder for me. But I think it's the right thing to do. Money is tight but I'm sure I'll manage one way or another. At least I am able to make peace with my conscience by doing such things.
Here's a couple other things I wrote to check out while you're at it:
-
Is This the America I Love?
-
Important Note for Recruiters and Contract Agencies
Thank you for your attention.Request your free CD of my piano music.
I've developed a free program called MileTracker that consolidates users' frequent flier accounts. One of the accounts that I pull information from is of course at AA.com. I haven't received any complaints yet, but there are several reasons why I can think of that:
- I do the scraping from the client. There is no central server involved at any point.
- There are only a few hundred users at this point, each generating at most 2-3 requests a day. More likely they're only generating 1 request every few days.
- I've been very careful to simulate an actual human user using a Web browser. There are some steps that I skip for performance reasons (such as downloading images which could be cached anyway), but I make sure to handle all cookies, redirects, Javascript, etc. I also throw in some delays and randomization.
Someone looking through logs would probably have a lot of trouble telling the difference between a real user and my "ghost" user.The application really isn't harmful to AA. In fact, there's a good chance that I actually increase real traffic to AA.com amongst their loyal customers. When there is a change in a user's frequent flier account balance, I provide an easy way for them to actually login to AA.com so that they can view the details. If AA complains, I'd probably obey since I have more to lose than I do to gain. It's AA's customers that use MileTracker that would suffer.
You are correct. But, you can't use a bot to copy a price list. A bot copies the entire page, then searches that page for the prices.
There is a standard, robots.txt, that any robot write should follow to see where they can go on a website.
Fight Spammers!
Our company gave up its internal call center ops. Another company bought it lock, stock, and server.
They also made an offer to all the current phone people for continued employment. Not all accepted.
Now...we (I) had written a personnel database to manage the phone peoples schedules, hiring, firing. This included name, address, phone, SSAN, paygrade, etc, etc. The new company also bought this.
I get a phone call from the IT VP "Send so and so a copy (incl design, etc) of the personnel program. Including all the data. They want to get up and running as soona s possible."
"WHAT??? We can't give out all that personal information! What about all the people who did NOT join the new company?"
He pushed, I pushed back.
"OK...I'll do it, on one condition. A signed letter (not an email) from:
The head of HR
The CEO
The COO
The head of our law firm
and you (the IT VP)
Otherwise, I'll send them a sanitized copy. No personal data whatsoever."
After much discussion, they backed down.
I went over and installed the sanitized program.
Bottom line...if you feel it is illegal/immoral, stand up and be counted. If you're wrong, you'll find out soon enough. They you do whatever they want.
If you're right, the powers that be will not stick their neck out that far.
Protect yourself. Otherwise, when the shit hits the fan, you will be one of the scapegoats.
If I were them I would have simply updated the web site in such a way to thwart some automated robot, or blocked the IP blocks or something similar.
We had a client whose web site was crippled due to one of those price-comparison-robots hitting the server so fast, with so many simultaneous requests that it couldn't serve the public. I can see both sides of the story but it seems like a reasonable and fair idea to request permission before automating a process to scrape data from someone else's system for your own commercial gain. I'd categorize companies that do this (without permission) only a hair better than spammers on the scum scale.
No, it is the same. The airline companies can't do business with you without showing their prices, anymore then you can do business without given them your address. The fact they appear to be "broadcasting" is an artefact of the fact that they want to do business with everybody. There's nothing special about being a corporation; you are free to start a business and if you do, you might also have to broadcast your address.
There is no real asymmetry between businesses and people in this case; either there information once aquired can be shared with anybody, or there is grounds to limit it, perhaps only to potential customers, as both in the Amazon case (with your address) or in this case, to the potential customers of the airline, which Farechase is not.
Also, quantity counts. Your billboard metaphor is entirely pointless on two grounds: One, it does not have enough information to be applicable to this discussion, and two, putting something on a billboard does not release the content into the public domain! It is still copyrighted and trademarked.
There isn't a difference that matters. If any sort of protection can exist, then the airline can claim it and prevent Farechase from scraping. If no sort of protection of data can exist, then there's no such thing as privacy. "Putting it out to the public" is not a meaningful way of looking at it; almost nobody truly puts out data to the public, rather they put it out to potential customers.
My gripe is with the overpaid pilots of national airlines as they were reporting from local media here, particularly United airlines after it declared bankruptcy. Regional airlines can't afford that kind ot overpay, hence why I said they were loving this economy. AirTran, Braniff, JetBlue et. al don't seem to have this problem since they don't have the outlandish contracts. Thanks for the info on piloting aircraft. Best of luck to your friend.
As long as there is a Second Amendment, there will always be a First Amendment.
Let me ask this... What if somone scraped 'information' from a favorite of people around here, O'Reiley.
How would you feel then?
Farechase presents you a list of webfares (e.g. American Airlines flight 123 for $250.00) then if you choose it, they send you to American Airlines's website to buy that fare. So what's the difference again between Froogle and Farechase?
American uses Sabre internally (in fact used to own the WHOLE thing) and owns 25% of Worldspan (got it when they bought TWA): both customers of Farechase.
Ultimatly this is about controlling the distribution channel for tickets: first stop paying commission to travel agents (that's right! they make 0% commission now) and now try to put a clamp around screen scrapers.
Then there's the the fact that Orbitz is owned by the majors and is the very definition of collusion.
The owners of Worldspan (which powers Orbitz and is Delta, American and Northwest) plan on bypassing SABRE and putting inventory on Worldspan for sale through Orbitz. This has already been announced. Why? Because if you buy a ticket through a SABRE channel (like travelocity), SABRE charges AA (and every other airline) a $4 segment fee. Not so when you buy it through your own CRS/GDS system.
Again, it's about controlling the distribution channel.
I wouldn't know this except I used to be employed by American as a SABRE programmer.
American is nothing more than a bunch of slimy bastards (like all airlines with the exceptions of Southwest and JetBlue) and will deserve their bankruptcy filing when they do it.
And they WILL given the failed airline economic model that the "majors" subscribe to. In a very funny ironic turn of events two new 747s are valued at more than the whole of AMR (AA's parent).
Don't buy their stock anytime soon except to short it.
Lots of people are wealthy enough to be jobless - it's a matter of how much suffering and humbling they are willing to endure.
Often they're not even given a choice. Are the masses of people laid off wealthy enough to be jobless? Most of them survive somehow, some even living off garbage and/or other people's charity.
Do you hold your beliefs as more important than a CFO's belief in the bottom line and how best to improve it? If they are, then be willing to do as the CFO does. If they aren't then how much really are your beliefs worth?
Also, it's a good idea to always live beneath your means, so that when push comes to shove, you are in a better position to handle it. I know lots of people who don't, while they might still refuse when asked to do the wrong thing, they sure will be under a lot of pressure and stress - zero in the bank account, rent, loans and bills to pay. If you have a choice, why put yourself in such a bad strategic position?
Pick your luxuries. I find the luxury of being able to tell the boss "Sorry, I don't do that sort of thing" beats that of an expensive item/car/house/etc.
Many people are willing to die for their beliefs. There are so many cases where they might as well be willing, because people are going to kill them for their beliefs anyway.
>Then they would lose in Court and yopu wouldn't have anything to worry about.
If the system wasn't such a screw-up, maybe that's how it'd be. The problem is that since the Constitution never made the Supreme Court the judge of constitutionality and since the Supreme Court has a history of making stuff up as they go along, any sort of wild interpretation stands until a new court decides otherwise.
If I'm not mistaken, American Airlines has the web's longest disclaimer / usage policy. With terms like this, it's no wonder the law found in their favor.
"The judicial power shall extend to all cases, in law and equity, arising under this Constitution, the laws of the United States, and treaties made, or which shall be made, under their authority;"
To me, that sounds like they have the power to determine whether laws are in fact Cosntitutional. Whether they abuse their power is another question, but I do believe they have at least this ability.
this is one of those cases I hope they both lose.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
it's not "stealing". It wouldn't even be "stealing" if this information was worthy of copyright. HOWEVER, the fact remains that this information is NOT worthy of copright protection.
But, its not just about the information, they are accessing their hardware using their bandwidth ignoring the agreement. Its the same thing spamers do that make everyone here yell. Funny how people can change their opinion when the afected is a for-profit company.
I can open a restaurant and give menus away so my clients can order by phone, but if a fellow comes every day and takes a menu of mine just to copy the precies to his own menu I would never give one to him again, is my damn right after all since are my menus I printed in the paper i bought with the ink i bought, same with bandwidth.
Sigs are for morons... Wait a minute...
It's not the schema that's covered by the compilation copyright, it's the content. A "clean room" re-implementation of the same database is legal, but means going out and getting the data manually rather than by sucking it out of someone else's database.
"if you work less than this, your considered lazy and a threat to the company's existance."
And the opposite is known as burnout. Bet the machinery gets better treatment.
1) File lawsuits to restrict customers' access to your fares.
2) Watch revenues nose dive
3) Bankruptcy!
The Legislature: Makes laws
The Executive: Administers Law
The Judiciary: Judges transgressions and in Constitutional cases determins if laws are 'lawful'
I'm sure its the same in the US though in all jurisdictions high level executive and legislative powers tend to mix a bit, which makes an independent judiciary even more important.
The body of the unidentified man was found early on Wednesday by a passerby, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio said. Arpaio said the victim, who was in his 30s, had been shot at close range, his hands bound behind his back.
"We're positive that all the murders are related," Arpaio told Reuters.
Eight other illegal immigrants have been slain since last March, killed in much the same manner before being dumped by the roadside. All the victims were male, bound before they were killed and all but one of those murdered was shot.
- from CNN report 3-6-03; google: arizona border killings for more
There are no copyright issues here -- this is an injunction given in a state district court, which has no jurisdiction on copyright questions. The only legal basis cited in the order is the suggestion that use of American's computer in violation of its terms and conditions "may" constitute some form of computer crime.
Alas, the federal courts appear to have take the lead in the screen-scraping arena. The First Circuit Court recently upheld a similar claim arising under the Copyright Act.
This is a bad sign -- manifesting profound ignorance as to how these technologies work. Hopefully, better lawyering will develop these cases more credibly in the future.
The only terms and conditions I'm obligated to abide by when getting whatever a company puts on the web for public consumption are defined by the HTTP protocol.
Even if the content is public, surely compilations/translations etc can be copyrighted?
Isnt this what most Linux distributions are doing?
I once created a screen scraper to grab the prices for our competitor's products and stick them in a database. Then we did this calculation: Our Price = Their Price * 0.95
To this day I'm still not convinced that it was unethical because even large stores compare their prices to other stores all the time in an attempt to have the "lowest price". When you have two gas stations across the street from each other, they often set their prices based on the price of their competitor. In general, prices are considered public information.
It's all irrelevant now... our competitor found out about us, dropped their price by 10% for a few months to put us out of business, and then jacked their prices right back to their original levels. I guess, for a while, we did something good for customers, and for that I'm satisfied.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
His website is chock full of interesting little tidbits, like this one.
Hmm this one is a bit more perplexing though than just public doman vs copyright. I looked at farechase's website and they make software for the travel industry to quickly compare rates. This software, i assume, does the screenscraping on multiple sites to gather fare information on different airlines/hotels/etc. The problem is air fare rates is not really something you can copyright. There really is no difference in using a screenscraper and paying someone to surf the website, record the information, and then publish on their own site. I believe the screen scraper is a good thing since fares are so dynamic and thus change frequently...you'd have to hire an army to keep up on the changes. Though there is already subscription services such as WIZCOM that most hotels and airline spublish rates to. But the part about terms & conditions, those are lame.
They were using a screenscraper as an interface to replicate our information. Some of our clients were logging into their system, posting data to their website, and the website was basically using a screenscraper to make our systems match.
The problem was that it wasn't authorized, and we'd never heard of them, yet they claimed they were fully compatible with us to our clients. It was also impacting our systems adversely. Potentially, their systems may have accidentally created massive duplicate data too.
We put a stop to it, but we did it by tech means. I hope the robot writer went nuts trying to get around the bits I implemented. heheheheheh.
- show databases;
- use aa_flights;
- select * from flight_info where date = date();
then your argument would hold water.I don't know about their sliminess quotient, but I *do* know they're a shitty airline. Heathrow/Atlanta return (via Chicago) a couple of years back - worst flights I've ever been on. Uncomfortable (even by airline standards) and shabby seats, rude and unhelpful staff, lousy (again, even by airline standards) food, flickering and tiny overhead monitors for the movie (no multi-channel seat-back TVs here) and the plane itself was grubby, battered, smelly and generally an unpleasant place to spend seven hours. Normally I fly Virgin Atlantic, which is usually pretty good even in economy (the one time when I flew First Class... oh, the luxury! Even an in-flight massage!), but compared to American, even Virgin's economy seemed like business class. Ever since, I've taken every opportunity to slag American off purely on principle. Like now.
You must think in Russian.
I have a web site. It resides on a server sitting next to me here in my home. To get to it, you have to enter my home, either physically or electronically. I think there is a legitimate case that this is different from information sent to your home via radio, TV, or newspaper. You must enter my private property to retrieve information from my web site and I can legally stipulate how you act on my property, whether you are allowed on my property at all and what you are able to do with any information you obtain there. Yes, My web site is connected to what can be considered a public conveyance...the Internet. My home is also connected to public access...the street. Anyone can look up my address and come to my house. Simply because I open my door to strangers, does not make my house, or my server, public property. I do recognize the difference when we are talking about a commercial web site or a store. However, aside from certain rules of non-discrimination, I don't see a significant difference. When I provide information on my business property to my customers, I can stipulate who has access to it and how it is used. For example, many of the great artworks hanging in museums are not under copyright. However, the museums can, and often do, prohibit visitors from taking photos of such works while visiting, just as I can prohibit people from duplicating information while visiting my private property.
this is loaner...my sig is in the shop