This month, an Illinois district court considered another in the
series of web scraping disputes that have been working their way
through our courts. In this dispute,
CouponCabin, Inc. v. PriceTrace, LLC, No. 18-7525 (N.D. Ill.
Apr. 11, 2019), CouponCabin alleged that a competitor, PriceTrace,
scraped coupon codes from CouponCabin's website without
authorization and displayed them on its own website.
After discovering PriceTrace's scraping activities,
CouponCabin sent PriceTrace a cease and desist letter demanding
that PriceTrace stop scraping data from CouponCabin's
website. CouponCabin alleged that PriceTrace continued to
access and scrape data from CouponCabin's website even after
the C&D letter was sent. As a result, CouponCabin brought
several causes of action against PriceTrace, including claims under
the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), tortious interference and
breach of contract.