Court Rules For Ryanair In ‘Screen Scraping’ Dispute

Ryanair, the Irish airline, has been involved in multiple cases concerning alleged 'screen scraping' of its site – the manner in which price-comparison websites automatically collect and compare flight cost data from various air carriers. Europe's highest court, the CJEU, has finally ruled on this issue. It considered whether a business can use its website terms to restrict others from using databases on its site in certain ways. Of particular relevance here was the fact that the databases in question were not protected by copyright or database rights. Despite this fact, Ryanair successfully argued that it can restrict screen-scrapers' use of the Ryanair site by way of the website terms.