Free for a Fee

We blog pretty much every scraping case we see; we just don’t see many of them. As I’ve told you before, scraping is ubiquitous but of dubious legality. Today’s case reiterates just how hard it is for scrapers to win in court if challenged.

The case involves competitors in the online coupon industry. The facts alleged by the plaintiff look very typical for competitive scraping. CouponCabin alleges that Savings.com and several other sites scrape offers from its site, either on an automated or manual basis. In response, CouponCabin allegedly deployed technological blocks against “all traffic, including legitimate users, emanating from certain cloud computing providers and internet service providers identified as being used particularly heavily by the Defendants to conduct scraping activities.” CouponCabin also allegedly sent cease-and-desist letters to most of the defendants. Despite the technological blocks and demand notices, CouponCabin alleges “the Defendants knowingly and intentionally circumvented [the Plaintiff’s] security measures in order to continue their data scraping activities.”

Case citation: Couponcabin LLC v. Savings.com, Inc., 2016 WL 3181826 (N.D. Ind. June 8, 2016)

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The content in this post was found at http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2016/06/scraping-lawsuit-survives-dismissal-motion-couponcabin-v-savings-com.htm and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.