Lobby group weighs in against Ryanair in US legal battle
Ryanair sued the website in 2020 in Delaware, alleging that it was screen-scraping the airline's fares without permission. Screen-scraping involves accessing an airline's ticket prices and flight data, and then selling tickets for those flights through a third-party website.
After a four-day trial last July, a jury in Delaware convicted Booking.com of having caused economic harm to Ryanair.
The jury awarded the Irish airline just $5,000 (€4,293) – the minimum threshold required to state a claim under the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).
However, the district court judge who heard the case then agreed with Booking.com that Ryanair had not met the requirement of proving that at least $5,000 of loss was attributable to Booking.com, which is a prerequisite to any finding of civil liability under the CFAA. Accordingly, the judge overturned the ruling.
Ryanair has now appealed against that decision, seeking to have the judge's decision reversed, or to have a new trial.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has weighed in behind Booking.com.
The lobby group's founders were US author and lyricist John Barlow and entrepreneur Mitch Kapor. Its backers also included Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.
It has argued that the continued reliance on the CFAA by companies to take legal actions could stymie competition.
'If unauthorised access can be predicated on a violation of a website owner's stated preferences, rather than hacking technological barriers, then companies will continue to use the CFAA to fend off competition,' the lobby group has claimed in its submission to the US Court of Appeals.
'For example, companies commonly use automated web browsing products to gather web data for a wide variety of uses.'
Those practices include manufacturers tracking performance ranking of products in the search results of retailer websites, or monitoring posts on social media, it points out.
Inhibiting competition is precisely what Ryanair sought to do here
'If the use of valid credentials in a way that has been disallowed as a matter of stated – or even unstated – policy were a CFAA violation, a company could create a password-protected 'gate', make the key freely available to all, and then send cease-and-desist letters to anyone they don't like,' Electronic Frontier Foundation said in its submission.
'This concern is not speculative. Inhibiting competition is precisely what Ryanair sought to do here, and in keeping with what companies have repeatedly tried to do in the past, with partial success.'
Ryanair has already claimed that the travel firm has 'escaped liability' after the Delaware judge overturned the jury's verdict.
'The court impermissibly usurped the role of the jury as the ultimate finder of fact when it found that no reasonable jury could conclude that Ryanair's costs due to Booking's conduct from March 1, 2022, to February 28, 2023 would have exceeded $5,000,' it has claimed.
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