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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."
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.
The "Copyright Basics" page of the US Copyright Office lists the following as not copyrightable:
- Titles, names, short phrases, and slogans; familiar symbols or designs; mere variations of typographic ornamentation, lettering, or coloring; mere listings of ingredients or contents
- Ideas, procedures, methods, systems, processes, concepts, principles, discoveries, or devices, as distinguished from a description, explanation, or illustration
- Works consisting entirely of information that is common property and containing no original authorship (for example: standard calendars, height and weight charts, tape measures and rulers, and lists or tables taken from public documents or other common sources)
I don't see how "prices" or "facts" immediately fit in, and I don't have the ability to interpret the actual law, so I'll stop right here.In any case, I don't feel too much sympathy for somebody who plucks airfares from airline sites. The accuracy is questionable (unlike a real travel agent site, who can in fact realize the price for you), to say the least.
If what you say is true, can I just rip off the numbers from, say, Tom's Hardware, and republish benchmarks with my own text?
That's apples and oranges. Froogle Google et all like DealTime use scraping (or whatever they do) to SUPPORT the original owners by directing traffic their way. Froogle Google is no different than any other search engine except it specializes in merchant sites.
The people in this case are stealing information solely for their own gain.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
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.
You have indeed touched upon an important point. Fair use isn't really the issue here. It can easily be argued that airline fares are facts. Facts can't be copyrighted.
Feist Publications, INC. v. Rural Tel. Service Co., 499 US 340 (1991)
I'll never forget their position on Microsoft "Smart Tags." That's when I realized I didn't understand EFF anymore. The very idea that a web browser displaying a page "incorrectly" could possibly be copyright infringement... *sigh*
This was no simple case of "incorrectly" displaying a web page. This was a case of intentionally modifying the text of a potentially copyrighted work, providing links to some external site.
In my opinion, and obviously many others (since it seems to have gone away on its own anyway), what they did was sneaky and wrong, not unlike many similar spyware programs.
As for this case, hm, I'm not sure exactly where I stand on this. I kinda want to say that, copyright aside, just the fact that they took the time to compile the list, and are making it available *to their visitors*, makes it wrong to just copy the data and post it on your own site. But, then again, I'm not sure. It's a tough one...
NGWave - Fast Sound Editor for Windows
This is where I go out on a limb because I could not find the citation. I remember reading that the Supreme Court ruled in a case where a map publisher sued another publisher for copyright infringement. The defendant used the plaintiffs map to create a new map. The plaintiff had introduced small errors into the maps in order detect such copying. The court ruled in favor of the defendant on the basis that since it was a new representation, it did not copy the creative aspect of the map. The introduction of errors is not a basis for copyright protection because nobody would ever be able to copy facts.
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.