Originally Posted by RatherBeInYOW

I’m sorry, from a technology perspective this is just incorrect. It has been repeatedly upheld that screen scraping is allowed, putting technological barriers in place to prevent that is not relevant in the slightest. Unless Air Canada can prove that that this was data secured behind credentials and these were bypassed to do this (which they cannot because they were not - unless I am missing something major here in the complaint and what I can see from looking at API interactions with ACs website).

And Air Canada doesn’t have a “lack of robust security” they don’t have any security at all. If they wanted to secure this data they would generate a token when you log in, limit the API access to this token, and rate limit the API access based on the token. They have done none of these things. They are posting data on the open Internet. The entire internet is based on the premise that if you do that your data is open to be used / scraped by others (see the EFF link to screen scraping above). I hope the EFF or someone takes this on and brings the hammer down on AC because this lawsuit goes against the fundamental way the Internet is built, and also very settled jurisprudence in the US that pulling data from a public website is absolutely allowed.

Originally Posted by Sean Peever

Apologies if my reply was not direct enough, I did not say anything about scraping. And pretending to be an API that you are not is not scraping.