Oct. 12–Can online entrepreneurs legally crawl Walt Disney World's dining-reservations website, then share the information for commercial gain?
Disney says no, and it has been clamping down on sites that alerted customers about available tables at its popular restaurants. One of the last Web pages standing, Disney Dining Scout, plans to fold after receiving a cease-and-desist letter.
"I can't go toe to toe with Disney on this," said Matt Voss, a Texas software developer who originally started Disney Dining Scout as a way for his wife to snag reservations.
QVC, Ticketmaster, Facebook, Craigslist and eBay have all gone to court fighting companies that used computer programs to mine their sites for data — a practice often called "Web scraping." Companies consider the scrapers a nuisance that picks up on proprietary data and can interfere with their online operations.
"I think it is a growing concern for companies," said Chrissie Scelsi, an Orlando attorney whose specialties include intellectual property.
In a letter that Voss shared with the Orlando Sentinel, an attorney for Disney pointed to cases including Facebook's victory in a 2008 lawsuit accusing a company called Power Ventures Inc. of accessing and storing users' log-in data without authorization. Power's now-defunct website allowed users to retrieve Facebook messages.
Disney also mentioned a case in which Craigslist sued a business called 3taps, which made real-estate data from the well-known classifieds website available to other companies. 3taps in June agreed to wind down its business and pay $1 million to Craigslist, which in turn said it would give the money to a nonprofit electronic civil-liberties group.
Other lawsuits:
–QVC last year sued an Internet startup called Resultly that it accused of crashing its system after sending anywhere from 200 to 36,000 search requests a minute. QVC is seeking more than $75,000 in damages.
–Ticketmaster in 2013 sued Higs Tickets, alleging Higs of improperly procuring tickets for resale by using bots to comb its site. A settlement was reached, and Higs agreed not to use computer programs to buy Ticketmaster tickets, court records show.
–A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction in 2000 stopping Bidder's Edge from using bots to search eBay. The Bidder's Edge site no longer exists.
Lawsuits against the scraping websites have claimed everything from trespass to copyright infringement. In a letter to Voss, Disney attorney Carolyn Luedtke said he violated copyright law, trademark law and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Voss' Disney Dining Scout was one of several sites that popped up during the last year or so. They charged customers varying amounts to search for hard-to-book reservations at restaurants such as Be Our Guest. They conducted constant computerized searches of Disney's site to find available tables.
The websites attracted loyal fans and even travel agents. Voss said he had about 6,000 customers and brought in about $13,000 in the six months of his site's operation.
Customers took a dimmer view of another site, however, that actually booked reservations and then sold them. That one, DiSDining Agent, appeared inactive this week.
Disney Dining Buddy and WDWTableFinder both announced last month they would shut down at Disney's request. Another site, WDW Tools, appears to be no longer conducting searches.
When the first sites began ceasing operations, a Disney spokeswoman said last month the company "took action to protect our brand and the high-quality experiences we are committed to providing our guests." Disney declined Friday to comment further.
In her letter, Luedtke told Voss he "made it harder for Disney's guests to secure reservations directly through the Disney Dining site and enjoy their Disney resort vacation without having to pay a scalping fee to you to obtain a dining reservation." She told Voss that because of his actions, people on Disney's dining site sometimes encountered slow searches and even "total system unavailability." Voss said blaming computer problems on him was "ludicrous."
Luedtke also suggested Voss was taking measures to conceal his site's identity when accessing Disney's Web page. Voss denies doing that.
Voss proposed working with Disney through a licensing agreement.
"We weren't looking to harm Disney. We weren't looking to be a competitor to Disney," he said. "I even told them … 'Look, what does it take to come to some kind of business agreement with you? Let's make this all work for everybody. Your customers are out there clamoring for this.'"
Disney told him no thanks.
Disney's website terms of service include a clause saying that users agree not to access the site via computerized robots without permission.
Scelsi said all the legal cases show that website operators should exercise caution when extracting information.
"I wouldn't 100 percent say don't do it, but be smart about it. Be aware of the potential impacts," she said. "If you're getting push-back, you might want to reconsider."
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