Air Canada Would Rather Sue A Website That Helps People Book More Flights Than Hire Competent Web Engineers
from the time-to-cross-air-canada-off-the-flight-list dept
I am so frequently confused by companies that sue other companies for making their own sites and services more useful. It happens quite often. And quite often, the lawsuits are questionable CFAA claims against websites that scrape data to provide a better consumer experience, but one that still ultimately benefits the originating site.
Over the last few years various airlines have really been leading the way on this, with Southwest being particularly aggressive in suing companies that help people find Southwest flights to purchase. Unfortunately, many of these lawsuits are succeeding, to the point that a court has literally said that a travel company can’t tell others how much Southwest flights cost.
But the latest lawsuit of this nature doesn’t involve Southwest, and is quite possibly the dumbest one. Air Canada has sued the site Seats.aero that helps users figure out the best flights for their frequent flyer miles. Seats.aero is a small operation run by the company with the best name ever: Localhost, meaning that the lawsuit is technically “Air Canada v. Localhost” which sounds almost as dumb as this lawsuit is.
The Air Canada Group brings this action because Mr. Ian Carroll—through Defendant Localhost LLC—created a for-profit website and computer application (or “app”)— both called Seats.aero—that use substantial amounts of data unlawfully scraped from the Air Canada Group’s website and computer systems. In direct violation of the Air Canada Group’s web terms and conditions, Carroll uses automated digital robots (or “bots”) to continuously search for and harvest data from the Air Canada Group’s website and database. His intrusions are frequent and rapacious, causing multiple levels of harm, e.g., placing an immense strain on the Air Canada Group’s computer infrastructure, impairing the integrity and availability of the Air Canada Group’s data, soiling the customer experience with the Air Canada Group, interfering with the Air Canada Group’s business relations with its partners and customers, and diverting the Air Canada Group’s resources to repair the damage. Making matters worse, Carroll uses the Air Canada Group’s federally registered trademarks and logo to mislead people into believing that his site, app, and activities are connected with and/or approved by the real Air Canada Group and lending an air of legitimacy to his site and app. The Air Canada Group has tried to stop Carroll’s activities via a number of technological blocking measures. But each time, he employs subterfuge to fraudulently access and take the data—all the while boasting about his exploits and circumvention online.
Almost nothing in this makes any sense. Having third parties scrape sites for data about prices is… how the internet works. Whining about it is stupid beyond belief. And here, it’s doubly stupid, because anyone who finds a flight via seats.aero is then sent to Air Canada’s own website to book that flight. Air Canada is making money because Carroll’s company is helping people find Air Canada flights they can take.
Why are they mad?
Air Canada’s lawyers also seem technically incompetent. I mean, what the fuck is this?
Through screen scraping, Carroll extracts all of the data displayed on the website, including the text and images.
Carroll also employs the more intrusive API scraping to further feed Defendant’s website.
If the “API scraping” is “more intrusive” than screen scraping, you’re doing your APIs wrong. Is Air Canada saying that its tech team is so incompetent that its API puts more load on the site than scraping? Because, if so, Air Canada should fire its tech team. The whole point of an API is to make it easier for those accessing data from your website without needing to do the more cumbersome process of scraping.
And, yes, this lawsuit really calls into question Air Canada’s tech team and their ability to run a modern website. If your website can’t handle having its flights and prices scraped a few times every day, then you shouldn’t have a website. Get some modern technology, Air Canada:
Defendant’s avaricious data scraping generates frequent and myriad requests to the Air Canada Group’s database—far in excess of what the Air Canada Group’s infrastructure was designed to handle. Its scraping collects a large volume of data, including flight data within a wide date range and across extensive flight origins and destinations—multiple times per day.
Maybe… invest in better infrastructure like basically every other website that can handle some basic scraping? Or, set up your API so it doesn’t fall over when used for normal API things? Because this is embarrassing:
At times, Defendant’s voluminous requests have placed such immense burdens on the Air Canada Group’s infrastructure that it has caused “brownouts.” During a brownout, a website is unresponsive for a period of time because the capacity of requests exceeds the capacity the website was designed to accommodate. During brownouts caused by Defendant’s data scraping, legitimate customers are unable to use or the Air Canada + Aeroplan mobile app, including to search for available rewards, redeem Aeroplan points for the rewards, search for and view reward travel availability, book reward flights, contact Aeroplan customer support, and/or obtain service through the Aeroplan contact center due to the high volume of calls during brownouts.
Air Canada’s lawyers also seem wholly unfamiliar with the concept of nominative fair use for trademarks. If you’re displaying someone’s trademarks for the sake of accurately talking about them, there’s no likelihood of confusion and no concern about the source of the information. Air Canada claiming that this is trademark infringement is ridiculous:
I guarantee that no one using Seats.aero thinks that they’re on Air Canada’s website.
The whole thing is so stupid that it makes me never want to fly Air Canada again. I don’t trust an airline that can’t set up its website/API to handle someone making its flights more attractive to buyers.
But, of course, in these crazy times with the way the CFAA has been interpreted, there’s a decent chance Air Canada could win.
For its part, Carroll says that he and his lawyers have reached out to Air Canada “repeatedly” to try to work with them on how they “retrieve availability information,” and that “Air Canada has ignored these offers.” He also notes that tons of other websites are scraping the very same information, and he has no idea why he’s been singled out. He further notes that he’s always been open to adjusting the frequency of searches and working with the airlines to make sure that his activities don’t burden the website.
But, really, the whole thing is stupid. The only thing that Carroll’s website does is help people buy more flights. It points people to the Air Canada site to buy tickets. It makes people want to fly more on Air Canada.
Why would Air Canada want to stop that other than that it can’t admit that it’s website operations should all be replaced by a more competent team?
Filed Under: api, cfaa, flights, frequent fliers, scraping, screen scraping, trademark
Companies: air canada, localhost, seats.aero
Comments on “Air Canada Would Rather Sue A Website That Helps People Book More Flights Than Hire Competent Web Engineers”
Well, most of the time, people use theses websites to get cheaper flights, without dark patterns to be forced to take extra luggage fees, useless assurances or change their plan because of falsely overbooked fights.
I’m not sure that most of airline companies would still be there if they can’t sell more expensive flights that a conscientious (and very patient) buyer would pay.
Without wading into the world of points and miles, the business interests are far less straightforward than you suggest — these customers are redeeming points, not cash, and in fact, the type of business seats.aero is sending toward Air Canada is likely precisely the type of business they don’t want to encourage, but have to offer because of the way these programs are structured.
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If they don’t like how their own program operates, they shouldn’t offer it.
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But then less people would use them. Worse those points can be earned by flying with rivals. Better make it annoyingly hard to exchange them then so those rivals end up with the costs of free flights and not them.
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Indeed. There are parallels here between Air Canada and Intuit – when you go to redeem points on the actual website, you then find that “free” is an awful lot of work to get a reasonable flight, even though the flight you want is sitting right there in their database at a regular rate.
As a result, people are pressured to spend those points earned via paid Air Canada flights on another airlines’ ticket, saving Air Canada money. Also, people end up using more points to fly the same distance than they technically have to, draining the points out of the system faster and saving Air Canada money.
Mike, this IS how their system operates; it’s by design. And it very carefully skirts legal issues to stay above board.
I suspect they have more lawyers working on their website than they do DB admins or UX designers.
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Unlike tax services and software, though, airlines are apparently just a terrible business to be in. If you strip them of all their bullshit—loyalty programs, dark patterns, probably personal-data misuse—you’re left with a hopelessly unprofitable company. Because “everyone” will go with the morally bankrupt competitor if they’re offering “the same thing” for $50 less.
Of course, if you’re not exceptionally adept at navigating fine print, it’s not till you get there you find out it wasn’t really the same thing and now you’ve got luggage fees, coin-operated toilets, and stand-up seats. And maybe a twelve-hour layover in Luton, if you really weren’t paying attention.
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I fail to see how this is different from tax services? For a large number of taxpayers, Intuit is competing with free, and winning, because they’re adept at diverting people from the free options and tacking on extra “required” fees for services the taxpayers don’t actually need.
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Intuit, as a legitimate business, would basically be doing the job of an accountant. Sure, accounting’s easy enough that one could do it oneself, US taxes should be simplified to encourage entrepreneurship, and software shouldn’t be copyrightable anyway… but even countries that don’t require individuals to “do taxes” have accountants. One pays a fee for service, and maybe the fee’s higher than one would like, but an accountant doesn’t need bullshit to be profitable—many honest people make a living that way.
By contrast, in most of the world, the bullshit-free airlines went out of business decades ago. Look up the economics of airlines. People who’ve looked at the numbers have said that without points programs, baggage fees, cancelation fees, etc., they’d be losing money. It’s a classic “confusopoly.”
….
YOU LOSER PEASANTS WILL HAVE THE TERRIBLE USER EXPERIENCE WE MADE FOR YOU!
Like.. seriously.
The only thing to get out of this is that air canada is a pos monopoly that should be DESTROYED and replaced with things that aren’t shit.Because the goal here seems to be to prevent consumers from making educated purchasing decisions. Which in my opinion should see the ceo and executives jailed and banned from ever owning or being in charge of any business.
Air Canada: “HOW DARE YOU IMPROVE OUR SERVICES. I’LL SLAM YOUR ASS IN COURT.”
Air Canada is now suing Techdirt for reporting in its frivolous lawsuits…
Well considering they recently forgot Canadas Chief Accessibility Officers wheelchair back in Toronto when she took flight somewhere else, I would say yes Air Canada is extremely incompetent as a whole company
Streisand Effect!
I didn’t even know about this site until this report, now I am intrigued.
Thanks Air Canada!
Pathetically stupid as Gmarket trying to stop the sharing of facts that are publicly available.
In case you didn’t know very few shopping sites also hate scrapers, and one of them go great lengths to disable rightclicks on its site – http://gmarket.co.kr/ even though automated scrapers don’t actually NEED to rightclick at all. Another one was a clothing site that I can’t remember (think was a link from an extension that counteract the disabling of rightclicks).
The text on the bottom of the page also admits that it does not like web scraping, despite it being a FRICKEN SHOPPING SITE OF PHYSICAL GOODS. This tells me this isn’t for the purpose of copyright (duh, 99% of stuff on there are more of facts then creative content), rather to do the practices that airports that techdirt pointed out are doing to make it harder for consumers to save money.
The act of being incompetent also reminds me of Getty Images attacking google for letting users accessing the image URLs directly (which is why the view image button feature got removed, angering users). They could’ve use robots.txt, some anti-hotlink measures or just require an account to enable access to protected content, which by the way, is COMPLETELY FREE compared to the cost of a lawsuit against a search engine for indexing your publicly available content that you set it up for.
far in excess of what the Air Canada Group’s infrastructure was designed to handle.
Oh. The IT department (or its overlords) is just following SOP for anything that has anything to do with airlines.
Why don’t you just skip the site, open the API, and let competent third parties handle the web for you? Hell, you could just make a static downloadable DB once an hour, ffs.
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In fact, why not go whole hog and just withdraw the API entirely? After all, the idea is not to reveal the best rates, it’s to soak the customer for as much as possible, right?
And in this day and age, if anyone looks at you with a “duh” expression, asking “what’s robots.txt?”, then you had best fire them if they already work for you, or shit-can their application if they don’t. There’s no excuse in the world for someone to claim “I’m a webmaster extraordinaire” while not knowing about robots.txt – it’s literally demonstrated in every class on ‘how to build a website’ ever given in the last two decades.
What’s really puzzling is that Air Canada is based in Toronto, CA, not one of the Torontos found in Kansas, Illinois or Indiana. LocalHost LLC (aka seats.aero) is based in California, USA. Yet AC wants to abuse an American law to cripple an American company? All just because AC flies into (and hopefully right the fuck back out of) America? Something doesn’t add up here….
Woohoo free advertising
Thanks air Canada, you helped me find a really useful new app!
Simple explanation
In short, the airlines don’t want you to be able to easily redeem points for flight awards. They prefer to sell those seats life hard cash and push you to use them for other things like hotels, rental cars, and sky shop junk. It has been years since I was last able to successfully book a flight on miles….
calculated misery
“It’s the theory behind what we all know deep down: airlines want us to be miserable so we pay more for upgrades.”
https://thehill.com/business/4268539-calculated-misery-heres-why-airlines-want-you-to-be-uncomfortable/
The point of points is not to redeem them
I’m a high status Aeroplan member, and he’s right. It is a pain to use Air Canada points to book flights, and it is double pain to figure out the best combination of points you have, certificates that change the number of points needed, and purchased points if you’re close to having enough. That is surely not an accident, since every seat booked with points is one they can’t sell.
I’m not surprised that they would be annoyed at someone who figures that out for you.
inflammatory adjectives!
Wow, rapacious AND avaricious!
A menace, clearly.
Surprised they didn’t try to run the table with
mendacious
vexatious
bumptious
multifarious
pernicious
nefarious
(bootylicious?)
How specious and non-serious.
Let’s hope this guy is sufficiently pugnacious to battle them in court
the truth hurts
Air Canada: “This guy’s site does all the stuff we should be doing but can’t and that’s MEAN. Make him stooooooopppppp!!!
He has no idea why he’s been singled out
Because he’s doing a good job and making Air Canada look bad?
“…a court has literally said that a travel company can’t tell others how much Southwest flights cost.”
So travel companies are legally forbidden to find out how much a particular air fare is on behalf of customers and pass on that knowledge? So, travelling down that road, at some point we may be legally forbidden from telling others plot details from books or movies, advertising those through word of mouth. I’m guessing one’s IQ doesn’t have to be very high for one to be a judge. *facepalms*
Air Canada motto
I have heard it said by many of Air Canada travelers that I know that Air Canada has a silent motto of “we are not happy until you (our passenger) is unhappy” so this law suit is not surprising.