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Texas Court Bans Screen-Scraping
Posted by James Grimmelmann on Friday, March 14 @ 10:24:32 EST Computer Crime
American Airlines features various "Net SAAver Alerts" on its web page. Since these alerts are designed both to pull customers to AA.com and as a form of price discrimination, American isn't happy if you can find out about these fares in any other way. FareChase is more or less in the business of making American unhappy: they run a special screen-scraping browser to visit AA.com and extract the fares, which they then compile and resell to travel distributors and airline industry analysts. American and FareChase have been engaged in a self-help duel for a while: American tried to block FareChase's HTTP requests; FareChase found ways to disguise those requests.

American has had better luck with the legal system, however. It sued FareChase in a Texas court (American is based in Dallas, so that's its home turf) and got a preliminary injunction against FareChase's screen-scraping practices. The court decided that the screen-scraping constituted an "interfer[ence] with American's personal property," also known these days as a trespass to chattels. The court also noted that FareChase's actions might be a criminal violation of Texas Law, which states, "A person commits an offense if the person knowingly accesses a computer, computer network, or computer system without the effective consent of the owner." Tex. Penal Code § 33.02(a).

That said, this is a state trial court ruling that cites neither judicial precedent nor statutory terms for its conclusions that Texas law actually protects AA from FareChase's actions. Such a result would be consistent with some of the other trespass to chattels cases working their way up through various court systems, but we're a long way from a statement by the Texas Supreme Court. Even if an appellate court reaches the same legal result, it will likely be on a much more detailed review of the issues involved. Today's particular ruling is significant mostly for FareChase and American.

And while we're resurrecting the obscure torts of previous centuries, why don't we bring back criminal conversation and alienation of affections for dealing with Internet pr0n? Or maybe we should call spam a breach of the king's peace.

 
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Re: Texas Court Bans Screen-Scraping (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Friday, March 14 @ 23:06:52 EST
Good idea, but first we'll need to find a king around here somewhere...


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