By Kelly Fiveash for The Register. This
story was reproduced with permission.
As we revealed
earlier this week, the budget airline company wrote to
Expedia.co.uk telling it to stop punting easyJet flights via its
website or face the possibility of legal action. And they're not
the only ones.
An easyJet spokeswoman said: “I can clarify that we have written
to several websites who have been screen scraping, who have been
advised to cease or we will take further legal action.” However,
the firm refused to reveal which other websites it was
targeting.
When asked for an explanation as to why the airline was
unwilling to provide further information about the potential legal
spat it was pursuing with other travel sites, the spokeswoman told
us: “No, we're not going to give free advertising to these websites
and we're choosing not to go into details of when letters were
sent.”
“Screen scraping” is a practice commonly employed by travel and
news aggregation sites, where one website mines information from
another, or many others before pulling out the relevant data and
reformatting it for its own use.
What isn’t clear at this stage is what legal action easyJet
might take against the websites if they continue to ignore the
airline’s warnings.
We asked Kim Walker partner at law firm Pinsent Masons what
options easyJet has.
He said "easyJet could consider claiming copyright infringement
but my guess would be that a breach of database rights would
ultimately be the most telling argument from easyJet’s point of
view."
Walker added that now Expedia has received a written warning
from easyJet about extracting the firm's flight data without
consent, the travel site's "position has been weakened". He said it
could no longer, for example, argue the defence that it was unaware
of easyJet's terms and conditions, which prohibit screen
scraping.
We asked Walker why easyJet didn't simply filter out Expedia and
other websites' IP addresses to prevent data being scraped.
"You can use measures to block IP addresses," he said. "But
[price comparision website] Moneysupermarket.com for example uses
something in the region of two million IP addresses making the
website very hard to block."
We asked Expedia if it was willing to give us a statement about
easyJet's complaints. A spokeswoman told us: "We can make no
further comment on this matter."
© The Register
2008
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