Originally Posted by
RatherBeInYOW
It is exactly technically correct. Open an incognito browser and do a search for award visibility on ac.com and tell me what you see. This information is made available publicly by Air Canada on the open internet. This is black and white.
If you put data on the internet without requiring authentication then people can come and get it. If Air Canada wants to restrict this information then they can put it behind authentication. There is not some magic solution here, nor have I pretended there is one. This website is not "knowingly and fraudulently present identification to misrepresent who you are, such as stealing someone else's credentials and logging in with them" - it is hitting a public endpoint that AC makes available and collecting the resulting data.
The context is being explicitly misrepresented. Using Akamai Bot Manager is not "preventing unauthorized access".
Air Canada doesn't get to put information on the public Internet and then say "you can't access it" - this has been pretty effectively settled.
I guess the bottom line for me is that the public internet only works because it is interconnected, and this needs to be protected. There are ways to make information private, and Air Canada chooses not to use them here. Trying to use terms of service, lawsuits, etc. to restrict access to information you make public has been pretty effectively upheld as wrong by the courts in the US. The EFFs
amicus brief on this from the last court case reflects my feelings pretty well, and I'm reasonably confident that on at least these claims Air Canada will lose, although of course IANAL.
I'll bow out of this now, ciao.
I certainly am no expert in this area, but I think there are layers of complexities in this that can't just be "hand waved" away because people want/demand access to award availability from seats.aero
First, Avianca Lifemiles
does require an account/login to search award availability and yet seats.aero had been providing that data. How do you explain that one away? (hint: mysteriously, without any explanation, Aviana Lifemiles has been conveniently "greyed out" now and no longer provides access on seats.aero) The founder claims that no other airline programs have complained, yet Aviana Lifemiles, who does require an account, is now no longer available. Hmmm... why do you suppose that is? Additionally, it's possible that other programs seats.aero supports require accounts, I'm not sure and I'm too lazy to check all the programs I don't use. So one of your arguments was this data is publicly accessible and not "behind closed doors" but in the case of Avianca Lifemiles, it was not "publicly available"and yet seats.aero was still presenting it. Your assertions cannot simultaneously be true in one case but not the other.
Second, like others, I believe there is a difference between webscraping for say, personal use vs. web scraping for commercial use. Seats.aero is scraping data and then selling users a subscription to obtain that data (at least for awards more than 90 days out). I am certainly no legal expert and I'm humble enough to say I don't know if that is legal or not, but I believe it certainly merits understanding. Courts have often provided legal protections for personal use vs. commercial use. For example, courts allowed home users to record TV shows and movies when VHS came out for personal use. However, I couldn't just record a TV show or movie and make a bunch of copies and sell them to people walking in front of my house. This isn't a perfect analogy, but my point is that courts have certainly recognized rights of a citizen in the area of personal use that do not necessarily extend to commercial use.
I'm just perplexed by the level of certainty projected by people in this thread (irrespective of which side one is on). There is an awfully lot of "no, you are absolutely wrong and I am absolutely right" type of posts. Unfortunately, this is just not an area that is as black and white as a few posters in this forum are implying and attempting to yell the loudest doesn't make it so.
Finally, though I certainly don't agree that what all large companies do is right, I struggle to believe that Air Canada doesn't have a fundamental understanding of the law here. If things are as cut and dry as all the anonymous internet experts here are claiming, I seriously doubt they would be going down this path.
At the end of the day, if you are betting on the outcome here, you have to ask yourself, are you putting your money on this guy:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ian-carroll-a56b8758/
or on Air Canada and their legal team?
Regards