Screen scraping is when one company takes information from
another's website by automatically filling in forms and harvesting
the results. Some travel companies scrape airline sites to offer
their customers flights.
The practice is common amongst aggregators in the personal
finance and travel industries and many companies welcome the extra
business aggregators' scraping brings, but Ryanair vehemently
opposes the practice. It has just begun a court case in Dublin
against an operator it accuses of scraping its site.
Ryanair told OUT-LAW.COM that the Hamburg court has issued an
injunction preventing Vtours from conducting scraping.
"This order effectively prevents Vtours GmBH from unlawfully
accessing Ryanair’s website, and presenting Ryanair’s flights and
timetables for sale to Vtours GmBH customers," said a Ryanair
statement.
Ryanair's terms and conditions forbid commercial use of
information from its website, and it counts screen scraping as
commercial use.
The company said that scraping is infringement of its copyright
and terms of use, and outlined other problems it has with the
practice.
"Many of these screen-scrapers charge consumers a handling fee
for their non existent service of showing them Ryanair’s lowest
prices … fail to provide passengers with Ryanair’s terms and
conditions of travel …[and] do not pass on Ryanair email messages
about flight changes, delays or policy changes," the statement
said.
"Ryanair believes these screen-scrapers are nothing more than
video or software pirates and we will continue to campaign across
Europe for legislation to prohibit this unlawful screen-scraping
and this breach of copyright laws, which will prevent these
profiteering middlemen from engaging in the mis-selling of
Ryanair’s flights and information," said Ryanair's Michael
Cawley.
"It is simply unacceptable that consumers are being misled by
these screen-scrapers into paying 'handling charges' for Ryanair’s
flights when they can purchase the same flights with no handling
charge on www.ryanair.com," said Cawley. "We remain deeply
concerned at the failure of many of these screen-scrapers to
properly communicate Ryanair’s terms and conditions, our policies
or up to date flight changes and flight information, to customers
who mistakenly believe that they have made bookings directly with
Ryanair."
Ryanair this week began a case in the Irish courts against
Bravofly accusing it of screen scraping its site, which it said
breaks laws on trade marks, copyright and amounts to 'passing
off'.
Struan Robertson, a technology lawyer with Pinsent Masons and
editor of OUT-LAW.COM, said that the argument about breaching
Ryanair's terms and conditions is a weaker one than asserting
infringement of copyright or database rights.
"The site that is being scraped might say that its terms and
conditions forbid any form of scraping. The site that is doing the
scraping might counter that those terms and conditions do not count
because they are not incorporated into any contract between the
parties," he said. "It may be a fair argument if those terms of use
are just an optional link like they are on Ryanair's website."
"Arguing infringement of database rights might be a more
powerful argument," he said. "Websites can fit the definition of a
database in these rules, which apply across Europe, though
there is some uncertainty about the extent of the rights."
