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Texas Court Blocks Screen-Scraper

Posted by timothy on from the bits-is-bits dept.

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."

3 of 364 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Dude, it's their own damn fault... by neurostar · · Score: 5, Insightful

    what right do you have to be angry when someone, *gasp* uses that information?

    Well, it's one thing if the people 'using' the information aren't charging for it. I'm not familiar with the circumstances of this particular case. If you are charging for the information you're grabbing then it gets into the grey area...

    neurostar
  2. A fundamental distinction by DohDamit · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:A fundamental distinction by fgb · · Score: 5, Insightful

      But are things like airfares copyrightable? I could understand it if they took the whole web page and posted it as their own, then there is definite copyright infringement. But just taking raw numbers off the page? What if a person went to the page, wrote down all the fares and then created a page using those fares. Would that still be infringement? What's the difference if a piece of software does the web surfing?