Slashdot Mirror
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."
Copyright, that's what.
Imagine if you write excellent articles, which indirectly pays for your website, and another (probably bigger) website just copies your stuff without paying you or even crediting you.
The circumstances are not exactly the same, but the law is basically the same. Past fair use (such as quoting a paragraph in a review), you need permission to republish.
If its criminal law, which it might be under the DMCA, an employer can't force you to do it. It's a basic employment right. Just like your employer can't fire you because you refuse to dump toxic chemicals.
Civil though, I have no idea...
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
You cannot copyright figures, numbers, prices, etc.
Remember Walmart trying to sue over the Black Friday?
ianal; Court cases have held in the past that if the information is held on a public site, it is public, despite any agreement to the contrary. That information if under copyright, still is held by those restrictions (and rights).
/. articles.
If the information is in a restricted site, (must register to access) Then it is not public, and the agreements are generally held in more cases. If anything courts have been leaning against screen scraping, even on 'public' sites.
findlaw or the cornell law site likely has information regarding this. There's also been past
It's of questionable ethics, but I also don't see how you're company will be able to sell something that people can get for free elsewhere. (And if it is not free, the courts are much less likely to side in your company's favor)
Facts are not copyrightable. Airfares are facts. There was a big case between the bells and 3rd party phonebook makers where this was determined to be the case.
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
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.
Er, dude, that wasn't precendent. That was what Walmart claimed. They then proceeded to back down when their victim pointed out that they'd claimed that under penalty of perjury.
At least try to pay attention.
True, but compilations of facts have been determined to be copyrightable (such as each individual phonebook).
It is a weird and not entirely logical batch of case law.
"Flame away, I wear asbestos underwear"
Provided fair use conditions are posted, I don't see where the scraper has a leg to stand on.
Fair use conditions don't have to be posted. They are implicitly granted to the user by copyright law, not explicitly by the copyright holder.
IANAL, but common sense tells me that quoting one airfare from a website falls under fare use, but taking an entire table of data and republishing it with your own copyright statement on it does not.
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?
This comes up alot. It's because the GPL does not restrict any of your normal rights under copyright law, but rather grants you additional rights if you agree to it. You can choose to not agree to the GPL and yet still retain the use of any GPL code or program. This is not the case with your typical EULA (which is presented to you as a pre-condition of usage), or of website terms of service (which couldn't have any signifigant legal weight, since theres not even the token agreement of an EULA).
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
Yes, and its antonym, "uncopyrightable", is the longest word in the English language without repeated letters.
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
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.
What kind of phone books? The white pages, for example, are NOT copyrightable. This was decided by the Supreme Court, in Fiest vs. Rural Telephone.
The court agreed with the lower courts that putting together a phone book was a lot of work, but decided that the Constitution requires that there be some creativity, and "take the names of everyone with a phone and put them in alphabetical order" doesn't count.