Ryanair interpretation

[hugoroy]

Comment to: http://blog.nkb.fr/datajournalism-rulings/

You wrote:

A third verdict is of concern, this time from the Court of Justice of the European Union, which rules on the interpretation of European law. In January, it limited the use of a practice known as screen scraping. Scraping is a way to automatically acquire data from a website by creating a robot that browses all pages and selects relevant information. For the judges of Luxembourg, the terms of use of a website can legally restrict the scraping of information, even if it is already published [3].

and…

It would require them to ask an online service for permission before they could scrape their data.

While the first paragraph quoted above is correct, it is overlooking one important issue: whether the terms of use are enforceable against the scraper in the first place.

The EUCJ ruling does not “require to ask for permission before scraping data”, it only says that you can, by contract, limit what others can do with this data. But remember that for a contract to exist, you need to have agreement.

In case of public websites: you do not need to “agree” with anything to read public content (or to scrape public data). The mere existence of “ToS” somewhere on a website does not necessarily mean there's a contract.

A French case covered this already and helps to illustrate the point http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichJuriJudi.do?oldAction=rechJuriJudi&idTexte=JURITEXT000026573989:

Attendu que l'arrêt, après avoir rappelé qu'il incombait à la société M6 Web d'établir que la société SBDS avec laquelle elle avait noué une relation de partenariat, aurait consenti à respecter les restrictions d'usage qu'elle lui reproche d'avoir transgressées, et constaté que l'accès à la page d'accueil des sites m6 replay et w9 replay, aux menus et aux programmes à revoir était libre et direct et ne supposait ni prise de connaissance ni acceptation préalable des conditions générales d'utilisation, retient exactement, sans encourir les griefs du moyen, que la simple mise en ligne de ces dernières, accessibles par un onglet à demi dissimulé en partie inférieure de l'écran, ne suffit pas à mettre à la charge des utilisateurs des services proposés une obligation de nature contractuelle, et que la lettre de mise en demeure que la société M6 Web a adressée à la société SBDS d'avoir à respecter ces conditions générales d'utilisation, ne fait pas naître à la charge de cette dernière une obligation contractuelle de s'y conformer ;

[n-kb]

Thanks a million for this explanation.

On screen scraping, what I found most interesting is the difference between the European Court of Justice and the German Supreme Court (which lies 250km away, in Karlsruhe) of April 2014. In I ZR 224/12, German judges go much further and stated that a portal that advertises a product to a mass audience cannot complain when its assets are scraped.

It seems that the ECJ keeps the door open for claimants in a way the German judges did not and that it remains a bad ruling for journalists.

[hugoroy]

Well, contract law in Germany as ruled by the German Supreme Court is still relevant. The ECJ is only making the interpretation of the database directive, so whether the door is open or closed in the field of German contract law isn't up to them. See paragraph 44 of the ECJ ruling:

However, as regards a database to which Directive 96/9 is not applicable, its author [sic] is not eligible for the system of legal protection instituted by that directive, so that he may claim protection for his database only on the basis of the applicable national law.

But anyway, I'm arguing over a footnote :-) nice article