Originally Posted by
Adam Smith
Not really. Let me illustrate with a hypothetical - I have no idea what the real numbers are, but it's a useful thought exercise. If the bot searches have spiked AC's traffic by 100x, and seats.aero is 5% of that, seats.aero is still increasing AC's traffic by 5x from the baseline and adding a huge amount of strain, even if there are others who are bigger.
I'm not saying the ends justify the means, but I liken this to the call centre. If you're ALWAYS experiencing higher than normal call volumes, you need to adjust your definition of normal. The difference here, is it doesn't require more human employees to accept more traffic. If you're finding that searches are up 100x hypothetically, wouldn't you want to figure out why, and then deliver the best experience and results possible to your customers? If you could display multiple results at once, I wouldn't have to search each one individually. Or if you put up better safeguards to stop scraping, rather than suing, you could see how much your traffic went down and/or stayed there and then decided what to do going forward.
I can't say I know the IT department, I'm sure they're nice, hardworking people just like anyone else, but you can't just establish a website and then kick your feet up and not adjust, improve, tweak. They've added this ability to cancel/change AP bookings, in some cases, that's a tangible way you can alleviate some traffic from the call centre. But it's taken forever to roll out and is only available to some bookings, presumably all AC metal ones? I don't know, but I know my flight had 1 TK leg cancelled and it was easy to replace, plenty of options available but I was forced to call and waste someone else's time to do it and my own cuz I couldn't just do it overnight online.
Originally Posted by
yyzspan
Very curious, is selling the data you are pulling from a public website also legal? So you are saying I can scrap other people's blogs/articles on the internet since they are public and sell it to my subscribers and that's totally allowed?
Interesting, wouldn't that be different though, because a blog is a creative endeavor, so you'd be stealing creative content. Which is different than data isn't? I'm not even trying to just push back I'm genuinely curious. If I have complex math on a site and you sell an explanation with the math, I wouldn't think of that as stealing because nothing about the data would be proprietary would it? This is just information being aggregated and put on to a new site, that has a paid membership. Maybe I'm totally barking up the wrong tree, but I guess in my mind data and creative content would be different things and one would be an issue and the other not, as long as it's not secret data, which in this case isn't.