The winners and losers of screen scraping

2010-01-28

Screen scraping has affected many companies in both negative and positive capacities. When it is the former, however, there are both winners and losers, as has been seen in the past.

One company that is taking the fight to screen scrapers, and has been doing so for some time now, is Ryanair. It has been interesting to see that various successes and losses it has had in this area, and even this January the company has seen changing fortunes in tackling the screen scraping activity of its website.

Earlier this month, a court in Barcelona ruled that eDreams' screen scraping of the Ryanair website was legal. According to the Barcelona Reporter, the airline said that screen scraping "causes a deterioration of its reputation and constitutes an act of unfair competition and violation of their efforts and intellectual property".

The paper cited the court decision as saying that eDreams' "behaviour fosters competition because it allows consumers to compare different offers of flights that fit their interests better". As well as having to accept the screen scraping activity as legal, Ryanair was told to pay the costs of prosecution.

Any bad feelings the company may have had about this news may have been counteracted almost immediately, with the airline celebrating a Regional Court of Hamburg ruling that prevented German website, Vtours, from screen scraping the Ryanair website.

Ryanair's Stephen McNamara was evidently pleased with how proceedings had gone, saying: "Ryanair will continue its fight against screen scrapers in the interests of passengers until this practice of misleading consumers has been outlawed across Europe. Today's result is a milestone achievement in that fight."

In other events, the High Court in Auckland granted directory company Yellow an injunction against Image Marketing Group. The former has accused the latter of selling a pirated version of Yellow's database, the National Business Review reported.

Yellow claimed that IMG illegally got hold of around 315,000 business names from its directory. It is alleged that IMG, trading as NZ Data, sold these names in a product named New Zealand Data Database Version 3.0.

Legal counsel at Yellow Toby Sharpe spoke to the publication, saying it was not known how IMG owner Brendan Battles managed to get hold of Yellow's database and this will be addressed at trial, which is expected to go ahead this year.

However, Mr Sharpe referred to data scraping tools that let copyright infringers automate the process of copying listings in large quantities from a public site such as yellow.co.nz. Whether or not data scraping was used remains to be decided at the trial.

So what can people do if they have been affected by screen scraping? Frank Jennings, partner for and on behalf of law firm DMH Stallard, recommended manually blocking the scraper's IP address as well as introducing tools to slow down the scraping such as password access or Capcha.

He also advised installing anti-scraping software such as Sentor's "widely-regarded" ASSASSIN (automated anti scraping surveillance network) software. The system analyses website traffic and raises an alarm once scraping is suspected. Sentor security operators then look into the specific case and respond with a plan devised by the company and the client.

Sentor guarantees that all scraping activity affecting the relevant firm's website will be blocked within 45 minutes of being identified. Intellectual property will therefore be protected, the company says.