Somehow not front page news Air Canada has sued award search website Seats.Aero in Delaware court for pulling award availability from its website. They claim (1) trademark infringement for use of its marks, and (2) violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for accessing its systems without authorization.
There may be a real problem for Air Canada here, but their legal claims appear weak – and certainly bad from a public policy standpoint. They have deeper pockets, though, and sometimes that’s enough to prevail.
- Seats.Aero certainly scrapes data from Air Canada Aeroplan. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act has been… abused to extremes, in the past allowing the effective criminalization of violations of a website’s terms and conditions. However in recent years more egregious readings of the law have been reined in.
- The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit says screen scraping a publicly accessible site isn’t illegal under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. I am not familiar with the state of the law jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction, but this reading is certainly the best one from a public policy perspective.
- Air Canada suggests there’s more than screen scraping, though, suggesting that Seats.Aero ‘falsifies’ requests to get around their website’s blocking procedures. That’s not really accurate though. There’s no forging of credentials – just changing the HTTP header of the requests (not illegal).
Seats.Aero does use the Air Canada Aeroplan name and Air Canada logo on its site when displaying results. There’s no chance of consumer confusion, however, suggesting that the site is somehow Aeroplan, or that Air Canada endorses it when displaying its logo beside the results from other airlines.
Air Canada claims that their website service is degraded for all users as a result of Seats.Aero scraping, but doesn’t appear to meaningfully substantiate this claim. Here I’d be sympathetic to Air Canada at least.