Ryanair begins screen-scraping lawsuit

Sure there's an extra service to passengers!

I love sites like skyscanner and bravofly - they show me in one page, what day and time - over a week/month - the cheapest flight from A to B is.

Now that is Value Added as I see it, rather than checking loads of days for different airlines on different sites.

That O'Leary guy is just sore because it makes it too easy to buy the cheapest seats.

It'll be about £1 more if you click through the site rather than go direct to the airline, but then you run the risk of the price changing while you're mucking around - and the change could well be much more than £1.

You pays yer moolah.

How dare they show there are cheaper flights!!

"We make a really big effort to be Europe's cheapest low fares airline and then these companies top up our basic fare," said the spokesman.

On air travel ...

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/dayart/20080618/Cartoon20080618.gif

'nuff said ...

Hey if it works...

...in Opera, it's definitely helping them sell tickets.

Am I the only one who has gone all the way through the process to find that nothing happens when you click the final "buy now" button?

Ah well, when the oil drought hits aviation fuel a bit harder, Ryanair will be first against the wall -- their target market will be the first to stop flying.

Ryanair barrel-scraping

Anybody discover the t&c about wheelchair charges - fair!

Mines the Green One with a Shamrock - I fly Aer Lingus

http://flightchecker.moneysavingexpert.com/

Will this be next?

It's true though - Ryanair is scum. O'Leary slags off the ASA when it rules against him... and then uses it against EasyJet when it suits him! He put(s) a "wheelchair tax" on every fare cos he had a fight with the airports over who was going to pay to provide assistance for the disabled. He is happy to go on about how expensive the top train fares are, yet NOBODY KNOWS how expensive his top fares are because he can charge whatever the computer program calculates the customer can stand. And he dismisses complaints with a "what do you expect paying so little?" when some people clearly pay far more.

Is this what Webwise/Phorm/BT does?

Ok the method is slightly different as Phorm would get the initial screen scape via their in-line DPI spyware unbeknown to the innocent subscriber/ISPcustomer who has most probably innocently opted into the BT WebWise system and is browsing the copyright site.

Nevertheless, it surely must be the same copyright laws the person really responsible (Phorm / BT? ) could be breaking.

Oh... is that the share price I can see dipping?

Paris, because she knows a thing about losing privacy,

Screen Scrapeing

Screen scraping on this scale is done by some reasonably chunky servers, surely its not beyond the intelligence of the Easyjet/Ryanair IT depts to work out the IP addresses of the servers from their logs and block them. While there might be a bit of address hoping going on, it won't be much.

Or is this all just a publicity stunt?

Mines the one with the blacklist in the pocket ......

Search Engines?

From what I understand from the article, sites like Expedia and Bravofly function as search engines, except that unlike Google, Yahoo et. al. who scrape the entire Internet, these sites confine their scraping to airline sites. Now, when Google scrapes my company's websites, they display part of the content of our sites on their SERPs - along with those of our competitors. We of course don't have a problem with that, since most of our traffic comes from SERPs and this drives most of our revenue. We could say that Google is effectively violating our copyright by so displaying the content of our sites on their pages, yet if we were to make a stink about that, we would be cutting our own throats.

So it seems to me that if Ryanair win this case, that would potentially make ALL search engines by their very nature illegal. I can think of a number of powerful entities who might like this to become the case, yet the Internet would be very much the poorer for it. Any sane judge in this case would need to consider the precedent it sets very damn carefully!

So what if Bravo actually typed them in?

Would it be legal for BravoFly to employ someone to actually read the information and type it in again in their database? If it is, then what's the difference in getting a computer to do the same stuff?

Besides, terms and conditions of a website are legally dubious unless they're merely reaffirming a right already granted by law, such as copyright. Otherwise I might create a site which states "You hereby accept and agree to pay me a couple of grand every week for the next year." Oh, and price lists cannot be copyrighted.

Wouldn't be so bad if...

Their website actually worked!!

I spent over two hours last night trying to book a flight to Dublin for 14 people, every time I entered all of the passenger names and clicked next, the damn thing kept timing out..

Useless Bastards!

Bravo does add value!

And the point is: I can see in one go who's got the cheapest ticket. And guess what, at times British Airways is cheaper then Ryanair...

Tell you what, lately I just fly normal airlines. We are talking about a save of 50 quid, in EU, and for business pourposes it isn't worth the pain of flying low-cost.

Grey area

I think any case hinges on whether Ryanair is able to restrict someone else from selling their flights. Technically they own the data and the form in which is presented and this copyrightable in an electronic form. It might, however, be difficult to claim a restrictive copyright over price information. There have been similar cases for telephone books - electronic copies are illegal but copies made manually are perfectly legit.

Personally I hope the tax parasites lose as it will be a case of the biter bit: Ryanair's business model is based on sucking up state subsidies and fooling the customer rather than efficient practices.

Paris, because she's more intelligent than Ryanair's web site.