[arghwhat]

This lawsuit is not about scraping, it is about booking.com acting as a reseller of ryanair products without a reseller agreement - to which they mention that booking.com adds their own profits to the transaction and makes ryanair unable to communicate with the real customer - through "unauthorized access" (scraping).

What we on hackernews would consider scraping is not covered by this lawsuit, and ryanair's vendetta is not against scraping but "pirate online travel agencies" (resellers).

[wcedmisten]

Would a restaurant have the same case against Doordash? Seems like a fairly common business model

[arghwhat]

Depends. Established, well-behaved food delivery apps have agreements with the restaurants and have direct integration - not scraping. They take absurd margins, but that's a separate issue.

When the food delivery apps "scrape", it's sometimes okay, but often not: The food offered by a place might be made to be eaten immediately, in which case a 60 minute delivery might guarantee a horrible experience. The food might not even be safe to transport by intermediate handlers, such as if the food is not packaged in sealed containers. In both cases, the food place ends up with dissatisfied customers and bad reputation for something they neither did nor wanted to do.

John Oliver had an interesting video on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFsfJYWpqII

[ericd]

Why is the CFAA mentioned, then? That’s historically been used as a bludgeon against scraping.

“A US court ruled that Booking.com violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by accessing part of Ryanair's website without permission, court documents showed, a ruling the airline said would help end unauthorised screen scraping by booking sites.”

[lesuorac]

Ryanair had previously send Cease & Desist letters to Booking.com so they were very explicitly unauthorized Booking.com from accessing their website.

The part that annoys me is the losses are redacted [1]. Judging by the length of the redaction its much more than the $5000 they were ultimately awarded. I'm also very unclear what harm will actually befall Ryanair if the losses weren't redacted.

[1]: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18414221/354/ryanair-da...

[ericd]

I’m not a lawyer, and I haven’t kept up very closely with the movements in scraping legality, but my impression was that it was ruled in the past few years that if it’s on the public internet with no login-wall being circumvented, then CFAA isn’t applicable? I seem to recall a collective sigh of relief around some of those rulings.