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Old Oct 20, 2023 | 3:55 am
  #53  
GrayAnderson
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I'm not a lawyer and I'm only going to express a layman's view, but it would seem that between including a disclaimer on the front page and the logo use being, I believe, limited to a little logo next to the airline name is probably not likely to cause much, if any, confusion. "We are not affiliated with any airline, and besides we list a bunch of direct competitors' space alongside one another" seems to be a decent rejoinder. "Golly gee, AC is showing me how to find award space on Delta! How nice of them!" seems absurd on its face, and the fact that they direct you to the airline website to do the booking doesn't help here, either. Trying to allege that the site misrepresents AC's stuff also seems strange since it's a direct scrape. If they're only taking data from AC's website, not altering it, and posting it...then wouldn't the only way they would be misrepresenting what AC is offering be for AC to be misrepresenting it?

Basically, the Lanham Act stuff feels like it's not going anywhere beyond an injunction to stop using AC's logo (which I'd note, at first glance, seems to have just been a dumb thing for the website to do...that's just begging for a nasty twist with the airlines) since claiming a demonstrable harm there seems quite tough.

The other stuff is harder to predict in my mind, but as others have said...showing actual damage is likely to be tricky, especially if they can credibly claim that they're saving users from making lots of inquiries. I also have to wonder, if AC knew that seats.aero was the source of a lot of inquires, why they didn't send them a cease-and-desist letter back in May rather than (apparently) deciding to wait until they'd exhausted all other avenues to try and make this stop? "We spent a lot of money on trying to make them stop before we asked" doesn't feel like a great argument, and AC themselves indicate that they knew that some chunk of traffic was coming from seats.aero. [That their demand was ultimately rejected probably helps their case, but it would seem that if nothing else, AC should have moved in that direction sooner, even if in parallel with pursuing technical solutions.]

[I know it is a legal technicality, but I love how AC nominally restates a bunch of claims like eight times even if some of the points are irrelevant to a given complaint.]
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