Is Data Mining for Product Pricing, Illegal?

wessman asks: "I started to read Orin S. Kerr's 80-page paper looking for how his proposal would pertain to: ripping music/movies, P2P, corporate espionage, and lastly, the use of web scraper robots. Little did I know just how relevant his paper would be in regards to that last item! Kerr makes note of EF Cultural Travel v. Explorica in which Explorica is caught hiring a consultant to program a scraping robot to gather pricing information from a competitor, EF Cultural Travel. Well, I do consulting on the side from home and am currently working a project whereby I gather pricing information from all the major travel conglomerates (Orbitz, Expedia, Lodging.com, WorldRes, Sabre, etc.) so that the travel booking business that hired me can meet or beat all their prices. Granted, the circumstances of the Explorica case are different and the case was an example of an extreme ruling, but my questions to the Slashdot community are: Do I notify the company that hired me of the Explorica case? Why is using a scraper robot so different from, say, walking into Best Buy with a handheld and recording product pricing manually? Should I continue with this project and the similar projects I do in this area of programming?" Now, add in the text in the "deliverables" section of this press release and it seems we may have some contradictory information. Who is right, and under what circumstances is price harvesting off of the internet not allowed?

Comments

I swear

[cultobill]

In what sane land would PRICES be protected under law? You can't really keep them secret, so "trade secret" is right out. It's not a identifying mark (unless you're a dollar store), so much for trademark. There's nothing useful that hasn't been done before, fuck patenting them. Copyright? It's a simple derivation of what the supplier charges you.

There is nothing creative about pricing stuff. Good lord.

Re:I swear

[anonymous loser]

Pricewatch doesnt mine.

No, but froogle.google.com does.

TOS and more ideal markets

[weston]

I think any large business where the pricing structure isn't directly related to costs is probably deeply afraid of agents that aggregate their data with competitors. You end up with a more ideal market, a more frictionless market, if you will, and they'll be forced to compete on narrower and narrower margins of profit. Of course they'll want to throw up barriers to that.

But I'll bet this issue comes down to Terms of Service and what a company can reasonably expect to be able to legally require/forbid about the use of data provided via an automated means...

You have a contract?

[gpinzone]

As long as you get paid, let them worry about the lawsuit. They're the ones who are going to actually use it. Keep your mouth shut.

Re:You have a contract?

[vandan]

Would you apply this line of reasoning to ALL areas?
What if the job were researching Bush's all-feared biological weapons?
Or GM products?

The problem is that if everybody decides to look the other way (and everyone can find a reason why they should take their money and shut up), then some pretty fucked up things get done, and people are left wondering, "How did it come to this?"

Now I'm not saying that the world is going to end because someone's harvesting prices off the net. I'm just questioning your "Me first, no-one else 2nd" argument.

Re:You have a contract?

[stiller]

I do hope that every /. reader at least can discriminate between building life-threatening devices and products that may or may not just fall under some crazy copyright law. It's the user's responsibility not his. They assigned him, they carry the consequences.
It's your way of extreme reasoning that gets us nowhere. We must be reasonable, and it's reasonable to expect that no judge in his right mind would convict anyone for this.

Rules of Thumb to Live By

[release7]

I'm not going to pretend to know what the laws are in this case. It seems that the only law these days is "He who can afford the best, most impressive lawyer wins." Here's some other cynical words of wisdom I've come to believe:

If powerful people get screwed, it's illegal.
If it forces large corporations have to work harder to earn a profit, it's illegal.
If it give the little guy a leg up or levels the playing field in any way, it's illegal.
If it's illegal and you're big and powerful, don't worry about it, you can probably get away with it with little damage to your business or career and keep almost all of you cash minus legal fees.

Re:Rules of Thumb to Live By

[poot_rootbeer]

It seems that the only law these days is "He who can afford the best, most impressive lawyer wins."

I can see how someone could be fooled into believing this, if the only news they get about what's happening in the courts is the fearmongering they read in "Your Rights Online."

I suggest you obtain a copy of the verdict records from a court that deals with a wide variety of cases. Ten bucks says you'll come to the conclusion that regardless of who the legal counsel is on both sides, justice is truly served far more often than not.

well....duh

[mrpuffypants]

Look, I I can visit a web site and the business (Let's say Amazon) publicly posts their prices for anybody to see then you sure as hell can use them! If suddently using bots to do work are illegal then I'd wadger that every shell script that I write is an affront to US Laws. Rotating log files and all sorts of other "make my job easier so that I can play Quake" scripts are perfectly legal, so how the hell can it be questionable just to go to a site and record prices???

Jebus, please help the Unites States Gub'ment!

web servers are not protected

[Provincialist]

accesses a protected computer without authorization, or exceeds authorized access [18 U.S.C. 1030(a)(4) of the CFAA]

How does one receive authorization to access a web server? Hmm, maybe with a simple html GET? The basic fact here is that of judicial cluelessness. If I put information on a public web server, pretend to "protect" it with a disclaimer (of everything) at the bottom of the page, and then get pissed off because somebody browsed that information, I'm an idiot. In addition, I am legless in court. Web servers make information available to the world. If I had wanted to make information available to certain parties that I trust not to compete with me, I should have set up a secure server with some provision for authentication and authorization.

It really is that simple

later,
Jess

Easy answer

[Lurgen]

Once their prices hit the Internet, they're in the public domain. It would be like posting your prices in the window, and complaining that a car driving past could photograph them.

We all know that bots crawl the web - Google, Altavista, spam-bots... they're all common knowledge. You put information on a website, and it's going to be viewed by an automated process. Surely with that knowledge, it's ridiculous to think you can ban people for using the information you've posted publicly in whatever way they desire.

Perhaps these companies (airlines, computer stores, whatever) need to start offering their services at the price they really mean to sell it for, rather than this stupid haggling they expect from us. Or maybe it's time they focused on quality of service, value-add, etc rather than price wars (which never help anybody in the long term).

Bottom line? If you don't want your competitors seeing your prices, don't make them available to them - this means no junkmail, no spam, no website, no prices in the store window, no prices inside the store, nothing.

hmm, anybody rfta?

[lingqi]

on the ground that Explorica had used confidential information obtained from EF to assist in obtaining this pricing information in violation of confidentially agreements executed by former EF employees now working for Explorica.

seems like it's the using confidential information part that got the scrapper capped.

I don't see why accessing *public* information be problematic.

the only thing that may be of trouble is the website EULA, but then the EULA would be saying the same thing as "don't visit my store unless you intend to buy," which would be rediculous in brick-and-mortar world (and should be similarly in cyberspace).

last question, though - why the heck would you ask this kind of stuff HERE? wouldn't a law-forum be a better choice?

Seek real legal advice.

[Gerad]

I am not a lawyer.

Slashdot is not a lawyer.

Slashdot is not a replacement for a lawyer.

Individual posters on slashdot may be lawyers, but are you really willing to trust your future to what some random person online says, when they could be a lawyer, but could also be some 14 year old kid who thinks it's amusing to screw with people?

Repeat after me:

I will seek proper legal advice.

Seriously, this comes up time and time again. If you're in a situation where you need actual concrete legal advice, SLASHDOT IS NOT THE PLACE TO GO. Sending in an Ask Slashdot is fine for theoretical questions, but when your ass is at stake if a lawsuit comes around, do you really want to trust your future to the legal advice given to you by Anonymous Cowards and karma whores?