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EF Cultural Travel BV v. Zefer Corp.

318 F.3d 58 (2003)

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EF Cultural Travel BV v. Zefer Corp.

United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit
318 F.3d 58 (2003)

AR

Facts

EF Cultural Travel BV (plaintiff) and Explorica, Inc. (defendant) ran competing student-travel businesses. Explorica was started by several former EF employees. EF’s website allowed users to search its tour database and view tour prices that met specified criteria such as length and departure city. Explorica competed with EF by copying EF’s prices from its website and setting Explorica’s prices slightly lower. Explorica hired Zefer Corp. (defendant) to build a scraper tool to take the prices from EF’s website and download them into an Excel spreadsheet. EF discovered what Explorica was doing and sued it and Zefer in federal district court for violations of copyright and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Under the act, a plaintiff could sue a defendant for unauthorized use of a website. EF claimed that the scraper tool constituted unauthorized use under the act because it went beyond the reasonable expectations of ordinary users. The district court agreed and found that a lack of authorization could be inferred from the circumstances, using reasonable expectations as the test. Based on this test, the district court granted a preliminary injunction prohibiting Zefer from using the scraper tool to collect EF’s pricing information. Zefer appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

Rule of Law

Issue

Holding and Reasoning (Boudin, C.J.)

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