zkzkz

Most of this complaint, like the trademark infringement stuff, is a side-show. I'm not a lawyer but I would guess it's just there to make it easier to show damages and/or more expensive to defend against.

The star of the show is the CFAA claim. The CFAA is a beast of a law and whatever you think about what the law *should* be what matters here is what the CFAA says and how the courts have interpreted it. And... it's complicated. There have been some very oppressive interpretations that basically make using the internet a federal crime based on the say-so of any random site.

The Justice Department has a policy now not to prosecute CFAA violations based purely on a contractual violation but that doesn't stop companies from suing under the law. And companies have and do sue under it. It's an active issue with security research where in some cases companies have sued to keep their security vulnerabilities from being published.

The CFAA is the scariest thing in the IT legal world and something every IT professional should be aware of.

https://www.cybersecurityeducationgu...and-abuse-act/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz

expert7700

Will there be countersuits?

​​​​​​There's clearly was an unfilled demand by AC's loyal customers for useful award searching, to enable the public to get the advertised benefits of the program.

If a couple IT nerds can do this in a few weeks on a part time, unpaid basis, was this a nerarious hack? Or done out of frustration due to years of inaction or improvement by the company.

An airline stands to gain much more if a customer buys a $6000 business class seat than if they redeem 75,000 miles for a award seat.
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I'd love to see a judge require AC in court to demonstrate the time and effort it would take to find, say, 3 base price redemptions through end of schedule in J only, on AC or their many partners like Emirates who they specifically name in the suit.

A retired AC/Aeroplan customer with millions of miles, might be stuck on AC's website for many hours/ days to get this information to get the same value for their mileage redemption. How much data transfer is consumed with 365 searches performed by an individual on AC (page reloads etc), versus 365 API calls?

What is AC's total data transfer if even 1% or the millions of Aeroplan customers log in and each perform a search like that? Have they designd their systems properly to scale?

How much labor, overhead, and data does a phone call to a live agent, to seek the same 365 days of searches cost AC/Aeroplan? Is an agent allowed or willing to spend the time doing so?

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canopus27

That's true for the "purchase for cash" ticketing process. For the aeroplan rewards redemption flow, requiring that people login first seems much more reasonable to me - especially given the fact that the prices shown might be influenced by the current status & other account details.

zombietooth

This is true in my case. I like to do my searches anonymously and use VPNs because I sometimes find better routings and prices that way (including award searches). After I find the inventory I want, I'll log-in to make the purchase. I assume Google Flights scrapes data the same as Aero. And they allow you to track price drops, which I do all the time to save money-I'll book a trip at the best fare and then set-up a price drop alert. If I get one, I'll cancel and rebook my flight at the lower price. I've saved 2K this year so far doing this. Why isn't AC upset at Google for doing this? They're costing AC money through their price drop alerts and it seems like AC should be upset about them too.

abari

Damn first cow tool now this...

Is there a consensus on the best way to search for AP availability now?

billdokes

Who do you think is easier to go after seats.aero or Google? Based on what you describe, Google is doing on Revenue Tickets what seats.aero is doing with reward space. And all those ads you see adjacent to the routing/pricing info you are looking at is Google making money off of the data they have scraped off of the Airline websites.

RangerNS

I don't think that is the case at all; as the Cow said, ACs loyal customers are typically Canadian, and who fly in Canada, or at least from Canada, and mostly are well served by ac.ca.

The users of the 3rd party tools were mostly the weirdos searching for weird off-metal deals. Which is an entirely reasonable thing for weirdos to do, but not what ACs target audience would be expected to do.

Sean Peever

Google Flights pulls data straight from GDS, with a few direct API partnerships and a few aggregators and data providers. All legit, paid for and above board. I'm glad you brought this up actually, it's a great example of how this type of business should be conducted and is in stark opposition to what seats.aero does.

canadiancow

How do you do it "legit, paid for and above board" if the airline won't respond to inquiries?

Sean Peever

Not having direct deals with all airlines is why direct GDS is used, along with other aggregators. So then the data is not pulled from the airlines (where there is no partnership) but instead via GDS or the aggregator.

canopus27

Is the award ticket "price" also available in Amadeus? And for other airlines, I guess the question is more about award availability than the price ... but in both cases, is there a path available through Amadeus for that data? Or is Amadeus (and more generally, the GDS systems) focused exclusively on cash ticket prices, leaving the reward ticket price & availability outside the GDS realm?

canadiancow

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Reward inventory is not made available to GDS or even the "open" Amadeus APIs.

jerseytom

Having perused through the document... AC says they tried several (unsuccessful) different ways of mitigating data scraping. 3rd party just changed their approach. Yatta yatta.

During all of this... did AC ever reach out and say, "Hey ya gotta stop" or any sort of communication? Or did they burn a bunch of time and money on unsuccessful internal solutions and now escalate to lawsuit?

I'm a software guy but desktop only; I don't know much about web API's or what's legal or not with data scraping. Naively, I feel like I'd be in a position of, "Sure, they changed their interface, and I changed with it; nobody reached out to ask me to stop 🤷‍♂️."

Regardless, from a practical standpoint there's the question of (a) how to deal with points brokers and (b) how to facilitate legitimate customers like ourselves trying to make the most of partner awards etc.

I don't have enough hands-on experience to know how to deal with (a). For the second bit though, if AC acknowledges that trying to do calendar views etc. has caused some unhappy phone calls from Partner XYZ, is this something where at an alliance level these companies need to get with the 21st century and figure out how to facilitate these things?

canadiancow

A cease and desist was sent a couple weeks ago, but I'm pretty confident Ian received nothing before then.

I certainly never received anything about cowtool, and I explicitly wanted to ask them about it, but they wouldn't talk to me.

My opinion had always been "if they're not okay with this, they know who I am, and they have my email/phone/address".

The issue is that probably 95% of customers want to book short-haul flights with their "free points", probably on the home airline. And 4.9% want to go visit family somewhere else in the world, on their home airline. It's the "FlyertTalkers" and the brokers who want to do fancy stuff.

a) could be solved through various means. Don't release space back immediately when it's cancelled. Don't allow free cancellation for anyone willing to drop an extra 10k points on a ticket. There are other approaches (I have not thought through them all)... don't allow an account to book a flight for someone else until they've booked and flown one for themself (unless they're on the PNR). If you look through my redemption history, it's very obvious I'm not selling points. I've made bookings for other people, but I'm on the PNR, or on the flight, or have flown with them before, or they're in my family sharing pool.

Heck, how about to use Aeroplan points, you need to go to an airport that AC serves and have your passport scanned before you can book for anyone other than yourself? If you're manufacturing points in Chengdu, yeah, that's going to suck. But it doesn't seem like a huge burden on users, since I bet 95+% only redeem for themselves (or themselves plus companions), and the rest of the legitimate users likely live in Canada/US, where it wouldn't be too challenging to swing by an airport served by AC. Or they could use their Digital ID platform to do it virtually.

keneshhagard

I believe point.me has some agreements behind the scenes. Came up in a VC offering my friend has for point.me.