Originally Posted by
lewinr
How is it prohibited? By the Terms of Service? Which part of ToS exactly does it violate? Most critics of KVS have said that ToS often forbid scraping, so I assume that is what you are saying. Scrapers generally read the information and store it which KVS does not do. KVS immediately presents the information in a different format without storing anything. Therefore KVS tool should be considered as an alternative browser.
This sounds exactly like reading KVS arguments. However, KVS will punish
you if
you breach KVS's TOS - done that and been punished. What I did? Discovered the sources, usernames and passwords of scraped sites for GTC method (no longer available) by monitoring network traffic on my router. So I actually even did not breach KVS's TOS since there is nothing about analysing your own router's traffic, but I was still punished for supposedly "reverse engineering" the tool.
Alternative browser would just display given information somehow differently - like you see subtle differences between IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari. All they do is interpret underlying html code. However, KVS does lots of "behind the scene work, including correlation, aggregation, temporary storage etc" before displaying (i.e. not immediately) it in completely different form.
Originally Posted by
lewinr
If you want to argue that the ToS can forbid alternative presentation of a site, I am not sure that the law supports that*. And such a stance would mean that anybody who (for example) turns off of displaying images, changes the font size, uses a translation or similar widget, or has a disability that requires a special browser cannot access any such sites. And that they (or the vendors of those browsers) are also thieves.
This argument is completely incorrect. You are comparing apples and oranges here.
Originally Posted by
wheresmybagba
Presumably the providers of the data disagree with you...that being the reason the 'Availability' tab is no more and the POS of the mobile companion availability search changes from one unknown source to another.
Exactly.