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Ryanair takes on Dutch screenscraper

By Johanna Gibson, David Pearce, Jeremy Phillips and Ilanah Simon.

Fresh from The Post, via the smiling Deirdre Kilroy, comes the exciting story that cut-price (or is it cut-throat) economy airline Ryanair has commenced copyright infringement proceedings against Bravofly before the Commercial Court, Dublin, to prevent it from using Ryanair?s booking engine to sell flights online. Bravofly, a Dutch-based business with offices in Dublin, Switzerland and Italy, is allegedly practising the subtle skill of screenscraping, contrary to the published terms for the website's use.

Right: now passengers can save money by flying in the bus that takes them to their airport.

Ryanair?s website offers the ability to make flight bookings on its website to individual passengers only and opposes the practice of others piggybacking off its booking infrastructure in order to offer flights to customers without going on to its own website directly. By screenscraping Bravofly helps users of its own website compare prices and flight times for routes operated by a number of airlines. For this benefit Bravofly adds an administrative fee of up to ?10 to the price charged by the airlines chosen by its web-users. Customers who use Bravofly's services miss the chance to read the ads and choose the offers on Ryanair's site.

The IPKat says this action raises serious issues for cut-price airlines in a recessionary economy, whose profit-margins may be squeezed by higher overheads and lower volume: a decline in click-throughs can make all the difference. Merpel demurs: what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, she says. If screenscraping is so profitable, why doesn't Ryanair do it back to Bravofly?

Screenscraping here
Windscreen wiping here
Fly on the Windscreen here

Full post as published by IPKat on July 09, 2008 (boomark / email).