you'll see Ryanair and the others giving out press releases telling you that they have authorized the scrappers and that they can now provide superior user experience, and the such.

What they will not tell you is that EasyJet and Ryanair will get paid for every single query that they get from the scrappers.

"which will prevent these profiteering middlemen from engaging in the mis-selling of Ryanair’s flights and information"

I guess they don't want anybody taking a slice of the profiteering or mis-selling action.

..cutting off a route to market. It looks like a free sale to me.

"consumers are being misled by these screen-scrapers into paying 'handling charges' for Ryanair’s flights when they can purchase the same flights with no handling charge on www.ryanair.com"....

Ha ha ha. No handling charges on Ryanair.com. Good one. Ryanair, the place where a £20 flight actually costs £80.

"It is simply unacceptable that consumers are being misled by these screen-scrapers into paying 'handling charges' for Ryanair’s flights when they can purchase the same flights with no handling charge on www.ryanair.com,"

RyanAir complaining about people having to pay unwarranted charges???

but for overcharging for their service.

That is all.

" .... video or software pirates ... "

For Ryanair to accuse anyone else of being a "pirate" is frankly unbelievable.

Paris, because even she couldn't afford a ride with Michael O'Leary

Only Ryanair are allowed to overcharge for their shitty service.

a) the service the scrapers provide is comparing ryanairs price with other airlines - I'd pay a little for that

b) ryanair obviously don't want their prices compared...

/bfg

Looking at Martin Lewis’s Budget Airline FlightChecker, I see that Ryanair are currently not included. The statement implies there are technical difficulties preventing the inclusion of Ryanair’s flights, rather than any legal worries.

http://flightchecker.moneysavingexpert.com/

“Ryanair’s website is currently having difficulties so none of its flights are included in any results.”

Are Ryanair so confident they’ve brainwashed the ‘budget’ flier into thinking they’re always the cheapest that they feel they don’t need to be included in any price comparisons? If they are, they’re very brave.

Screen scraping could be a risky business if the scraped data has SQL injections or script injections designed to attack the scarper's database or web applications.