back to article Top EU court: Ryanair data barrel must be left unscraped

Irish low-cost airline Ryanair can stop whomever it wishes from scraping content, according to the European Court of Justice (ECJ). PR Aviation – which runs price comparison websites WeGoLo.com and flylowcost.com – had sought to use the EU’s Database Directive to prove that Ryanair was wrong to impose contractual terms …

  1. Stuart 22

    And the answer is?

    For those of us whose 'O' level Latin has taken a short walk - can you explain who Sue Genitals is and how can we meet. Or didn't you understand it either?

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It meant that Ryanair's database was not sufficiently unique to warrant a special/separate interpretation to be made under law. It means that they went with the argument that the Ryanair data was not really considered "public" as defined under that law as the data scraper had to accept terms to access it.

    I wonder if this would not be the way for newspapers to prevent Google News from scraping (and Huffpost, for that matter)

    1. Oninoshiko

      "I wonder if this would not be the way for newspapers to prevent Google News from scraping (and Huffpost, for that matter)"

      Irrelevant. Newspapers don't want to stop google news. In every case they where given the opportunity to, publishers have showed an opposition to actually using the rights.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Uh ? How is it not unique ? Considering you can't book a Crapair flight with anyone else but them and the public has access, I would consider that unique and public.

    3. Voland's right hand Silver badge

      Close

      I read it slightly differently. The definition of the directive is public + one that warrants copyright protection based on standard originality, etc criteria.

      The way I read it is that the court has CORRECTLY identified that Ryanair's database is _NOT_ a database. It is an interim representation of machine generated price data which does not fit the copyright requirement of originaltity. Hence it is _NOT_ copyrightable and a directive which is written for copyrightable databases cannot be applied.

      However, if that does not apply, what should apply is contract law/usage agreement which Ryanair has said "no scraping".

    4. DaLo

      "I wonder if this would not be the way for newspapers to prevent Google News from scraping "

      It is as simple as writing two lines of text to a robots.txt file in the root of your website - it'll literally takes 1 minute to do.

      User-agent: Googlebot-News

      Disallow: /

      Yes, yes I know what you're thinking "if it is that easy why is there such massive fuss and legislation being passed in various countries to stop Google's vicious news site from accessing all their lovely content?"

      Why indeed? I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to ponder that one!

      PS: if any new article website wants to pay me just 50% of their lawyers rate for trying to stop Google News I will do this change for them and stop the nasty Google News in it's tracks without risking a court appearance.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    How does this apply to unique content?

    I founded and run a rather sucessful forum. As you can imagine the information in the forums DB is acessable to the public.

    About 18 months back we were approached by a company who, very brazenly, declared that they had, for a little while now, been scraping our content, analysing it for industry trends and selling this information on to unspecified clients.

    How on earth does that work.?! They take my content sell it and the EU makes a bloody directive allowing them to get away with it!

    Surely this can't be right?

    1. AlbertH

      Re: How does this apply to unique content?

      They take my content sell it and the EU makes a bloody directive allowing them to get away with it!

      Surely this can't be right?

      You made your data publically available by putting it on the 'net, so yes they can. Anything you publish is fair game.

    2. Stuart 22

      Re: How does this apply to unique content?

      If you know who they are and can spot them from their headers or IP it might be fun to feed them a spoof site instead. Bots can sometimes be a bit slow in realising they have been taken for a ride. Their clients might be a bit faster ...

      Have fun!

    3. The Nazz

      Actually

      As you yourself suggest, if the public enter their content on your forum, it's more theirs than yours. Presumably you gain a financial benefit from that. Be grateful for it.

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: How does this apply to unique content?

      It is wierd, but it is right.

      Database of original content (original as in copyright law) is subject to regulation under Eu database directive.

      Database of unoriginal content which is a machine generated interim result from an algorithm is not a subject to regulation to Eu directives so you can apply contract law.

      Classic case of "law is an ass" - you have less protection for original content than for non-original.

      By the way - in the particular case of a forum each item of content is probably under own copyright so you can apply the rest of copyright law (not the database portion).

      All in all - if you think that you can get money for it not being right, talk to a lawyer. By the way, IANAL (I know a bit here and there around my SWMBO - she does both Eu patent & copyright).

  4. The Nazz

    Ref : The English Premier League, and lesser leagues.

    If i understand the situation correctly, how does it affect the English Premier League who make their "database" (of team names and fixture lists) accessible to the public. Thus the European Directive would mandate that others are free to use this data as they wish, including for commercial purposes.

    Yet currently, the EPL get away with charging Newspapers and the like, a hefty fee for the use of said data.

    Should that situation now change or am i missing something?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Ref : The English Premier League, and lesser leagues.

      I doubt they can charge purely for that information, it will be a package of things that they charge for. The information of just names and fixture lists is a bunch of facts and therefore is not subject to copyright.

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