U.S. Court of Appeals Upholds Injunction Against Website Scraper Tools

In EF Cultural Travel v. Zefer Corporation, the U.S. Court of Appeals (1st Circuit) affirmed the District Court's preliminary injunction prohibiting the Zefer Corporation ("Zefer") from using a "scraper tool" to collect pricing information from EF Cultural Travel BV's ("EF") website. In an earlier decision, the Appeals Court upheld the injunction against co-defendant Explorica Inc. ("Explorica"). Explorica was formed by former EF employees who sought to compete with EF in the student travel business by copying EF's prices from its website and setting lower prices on Explorica's website. Explorica hired Zefer to build a scraper tool, a computer program that accesses information contained in a succession of webpages and downloads the information onto the user's computer. Once these prices were known to Explorica, it would then undercut EF's prices by an average of five percent. In its reasoning, the District Court relied upon a "reasonable expectations" test borne out of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to justify the granting of the injunction. The Court concluded that the scraper tool went beyond the "reasonable expectations" of the plaintiff of the actions of an ordinary user and exceeded authorized access. The Court of Appeals agreed that the injunction should remain as it did not disagree with the outcome of the proceedings at the trial level, but not for the reasons set out by the District Court. The Court of Appeals did not provide any reason for this finding, however, it rejected the "reasonable expectations" test finding that it was highly imprecise and was a "litigation-spawning" standard. The Court of Appeals suggested that a website provider could easily spell out explicitly the uses of information it considered to be forbidden. For a copy of the decision, visit: http://www.ca1.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/getopn.pl?OPINION=01-2001.01A For a copy of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act visit: http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/1030.html