Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (the “CDA” or “Section 230”), known prolifically as “the 26 words that created the internet,” remains the subject of ongoing controversy. As extensively reported on this blog, the world of social media, user-generated content, and e-commerce has been consistently

On March 21, 2024, in a bold regulatory move, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed the Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security (“ELVIS”) Act (Tenn. Code Ann. §47-25-1101 et seq.) – a law which, as Gov. Lee stated, covers “new, personalized generative AI cloning models and services that enable human

Generative AI has been most synonymous in the public mind with “AI” since the commercial breakout of ChatGPT in November 2022. Consumers and businesses have seen the fruits of impressive innovation in various generative models’ ability to create audio, video, images and text, analyze and transform data, perform Q&A chatbot

  • Flight and travel data has always been valuable for data aggregators and online travel services and has prompted litigation over the years.
  • Latest suit from Air Canada against a rewards travel search site raises some interesting liability issues under the CFAA.
  • The implications of this case, if the plaintiffs are successful, could impact the legal analysis of web scraping in a variety of circumstances, including for the training of generative AI models.

In a recent post, we recounted the myriad of issues raised by recently-filed data scraping suits involving job listings, company reviews and employment data.  Soon after, another interesting scraping suit was filed, this time by a major airline against an award travel search site that aggregates fare and award travel data.  Air Canada alleges that Defendant Localhost LLC (“Localhost” or “Defendant”), operator of the Seats.aero website, unlawfully bypassed technical measures and violated Air Canada’s website terms when it scraped “vast amounts” of flight data without permission and purportedly caused slowdowns to Air Canada’s site and other problems. (Air Canada v. Localhost LLC, No. 23-01177 (D. Del. Filed Oct. 19, 2023)).[1]   

The complaint alleges that Localhost harvested data from Air Canada’s site and systems to populate the seats.aero site, which claims to be “the fastest search engine for award travel.” 

It also alleged that in addition to scraping the Air Canada website, Localhost engaged in “API scraping” by impersonating authorized requests to Air Canada’s application programming interface.  

UPDATE: On February 5, 2024, the California district court granted the defendant Aspen Technology Labs, Inc.’s motion to dismiss Jobiak LLC’s web scraping complaint for lack of personal jurisdiction, with leave to amend. The court found that Jobiak had not adequately alleged that its copyright and tort-related claims arose out of the defendant’s forum-related activities and that there were no allegations that Jobiak’s database or website was hosted on servers in the California forum.  On March 8, 2024, the court dismissed the action with prejudice, as Jobiak did not submit an amended complaint within the time allowed by the court.  

In recent years there has been a great demand for information about job listings, company reviews and employment data.   Recruiters, consultants, analysts and employment-related service providers, amongst others, are aggressively scraping job-posting sites to extract that type of information. Recall, for example, the long-running, landmark hiQ scraping litigation over the scraping of public LinkedIn data.

The two most recent disputes regarding scraping of employment and job-related data were brought by Jobiak LLC (“Jobiak”), an AI-based recruitment platform.  Jobiak filed two nearly-identical scraping suits in California district court alleging that competitors unlawfully scraped its database and copied its optimized job listings without authorization. (Jobiak LLC v. Botmakers LLC, No. 23-08604 (C.D. Cal. Filed Oct. 12, 2023); Jobiak LLC v. Aspen Technology Labs, Inc., No. 23-08728 (C.D. Cal. Filed Oct. 17, 2023)).

Back in October 2022, the Supreme Court granted certiorari in Gonzalez v. Google, an appeal that challenged whether YouTube’s targeted algorithmic recommendations qualify as “traditional editorial functions” protected by the CDA — or, rather, whether such recommendations are not the actions of a “publisher” and thus fall outside of

Competition between Amazon’s third-party merchants is notoriously fierce. The online retail giant often finds itself playing the role of referee, banning what it considers unfair business practices (such as offering free products in exchange for perfect reviews, or targeting competitors with so-called “review bombing”). Last month, in the latest round

At the close of 2022, New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed the “Digital Fair Repair Act” (S4101A/A7006-B) (to be codified at N.Y. GBL §399-nn) (the “Act”). The law makes New York the first state in the country to pass a consumer electronics right-to-repair law.[1] Similar bills are pending in other states. The Act is a slimmed down version of the bill that was first passed by the legislature last July.

Generally speaking, the Act will require original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), or their authorized repair providers, to make parts and tools and diagnostic and repair information required for the maintenance and repair of “digital electronic equipment” available to independent repair providers and consumers, on “fair and reasonable terms” (subject to certain exceptions). The law only applies to products that are both manufactured for the first time as well as sold or used in the state for the first time on or after the law’s effective date of July 1, 2023 (thus exempting electronic products currently owned by consumers).

On October 24, 2022, a Delaware district court held that certain claims under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) relating to the controversial practice of web scraping were sufficient to survive the defendant’s motion to dismiss. (Ryanair DAC v. Booking Holdings Inc., No. 20-01191 (D. Del. Oct. 24, 2022)). The opinion potentially breathes life into the use of the CFAA to combat unwanted scraping.

In the case, Ryanair DAC (“Ryanair”), a European low-fare airline, brought various claims against Booking Holdings Inc. (and its well-known suite of online travel and hotel booking websites) (collectively, “Defendants”) for allegedly scraping the ticketing portion of the Ryanair site. Ryanair asserted that the ticketing portion of the site is only accessible to logged-in users and therefore the data on the site is not public data.

The decision is important as it offers answers (at least from one district court) to several unsettled legal issues about the scope of CFAA liability related to screen scraping. In particular, the decision addresses:

  • the potential for vicarious liability under the CFAA (which is important as many entities retain third party service providers to perform scraping)
  • how a data scraper’s use of evasive measures (e.g., spoofed email addresses, rotating IP addresses) may be considered under a CFAA claim centered on an “intent to defraud”
  • clarification as to the potential role of technical website-access limitations in analyzing CFAA “unauthorized access” liability

To find answers to these questions, the court’s opinion distills the holdings of two important CFAA rulings from this year – the Supreme Court’s holding in Van Buren that adopted a narrow interpretation of “exceeds unauthorized access” under the CFAA and the Ninth Circuit’s holding in the screen scraping hiQ case where that court found that the concept of “without authorization” under the CFAA does not apply to “public” websites.

Roughly two weeks apart, on July 21, 2022 and August 5, 2022, respectively, Amazon made headlines for agreeing to acquire One Medical, “a human-centered and technology-powered primary care organization,” for approximately $3.9 billion and iRobot, a global consumer robot company, known for its creation of the Roomba vacuum,