Originally Posted by
paulwuk
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This is the reason KVS is a computer program - it runs code on your machine that talks to ba.com (and other airline sites, travel agents, etc). But you surely know all this as a KVS user.
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You should search a definitions of "computer program"... KVS Availability Tool is a computer program, Internet Explorer is a computer program, Firefox is a computer program. Basically everything on your computer is a computer program since it runs code on your machine as you say...
Originally Posted by
lewinr
If KVS did a large number of automated searches and saved that data, I would agree with you in calling it a scraper. But it doesn't. I use KVS for only one search at a time, similar to my activity when I use Internet Explorer to view the website. KVS simply presents the data to me differently than IE.
That's where you are wrong. In many cases, KVS queries either various sources or one source repeatedly before presenting aggregated results. I can prove that KVS indeed stores data in volatile memory before presenting them...
Originally Posted by
lewinr
Yes, KVS behaves badly here by not identifying itself as the user-agent. It breaks convention. But that does not make it illegitimate or illegal, it just makes it badly behaved.
To be fair to KVS, KVS is not the only culprit here. You should do more reading before saying "It breaks convention"... AFAIK, "user-agent" does not say "who I am" but is says to whom I am compatible with... So for example, Opera uses "Mozilla/5.0"...
I have done more reading recently and interestingly, I found that in my own country (Australia), the
Spam Act 2003 makes harvesting of e-mail addresses from websites illegal... I know, it is different from what KVS does, but I am going to do more reading about tis...