QVC sues shopping app for site outage due to scraping
bakedjake
6:07 pm on Dec 5, 2014 (gmt 0)
In the latest scraping dispute, the e-commerce site QVC objected to the Pinterest-like shopping aggregator Resultly’s scraping of QVC’s site for real-time pricing data. In its complaint, QVC claimed that Resultly “excessively crawled” QVC’s retail site (purpotedly sending search requests to QVC’s website at rates ranging from 200-300 requests per minute to up to 36,000 requests per minute) causing a crash that wasn’t resolved for two days, resulting in lost sales.
I'm picturing what would happen if some random WebmasterWorld member posted to complain that some otherwise desirable robot was crawling their site too much. They'd get a series of concrete suggestions-- but "sue their asses!" would not be at the top of the list.
If I were the judge I'd be asking what measures QVC took to mitigate their damages earlier in the venture.
