I checked out Zen Arbitrage's site to see what it is they offer and it sounds really interesting -- find cheap popular books sold outside of FBA (Fulfilled By Amazon) with little competition, buy them, and put them up for sale on FBA (so Prime members get free shipping) with > 100% markup. But if it's really that easy and profitable why aren't they just doing this themselves? If you can double your money every month, finance the hell out of it and keep your profit machine private. It always strikes me as suspect when someone offers a sure fire way of making money but instead of using it themselves they just sell you the info.
A possible reason: It's really hard to scale a scrounge-and-resell operation - as you train employees to buy books they begin to wonder why they shouldn't just do it themselves.
Could this come back to bite Zen Arbitrage in the ass if they get sued for damages caused by providing false data with the intention of sabotaging another company?
I understand why they don't like Textbook Money scraping their database and using it to fuel a competing product (and it is a competing product despite OP's constant insistence that it isn't) but it's not necessarily illegal and I think you could argue in court that the "correct" response would have been to deny service instead of to deliberately mislead.
As I understand, the user has the legitimate right to save the data she gets by querying. Just because she automated this process they call her a hacker?
We've found coordinated attempts to scrape our pricing data. As the OP also found, they might have gotten away with it except for being greedy, setting up so many requesters that it affected our site performance and we went to investigate. The trail didn't go directly to a competitor, but to a service that actually specializes in providing price comparison data. Some additional circumstantial evidence led us to believe that they were working on behalf of one of our competitors specifically.
We also had the idea to feed them fake pricing, but in the end our CTO thought it better to just play it straight, so we built a way to identify certain fingerprints of their requests (I don't want to say what, publicly), and blacklist any offending IP addresses for several hours.
No more debased form of internet commenting than laypersons debating the law, but a comment on this article does address some of the legal issues this raises.
The comment is from a non-lawyer but raises good points about selling scraped data and scraping that brings down / slows sites as being particularly illegal.
Here's the (edited) comment (in re: competitors suing over this article):
"I’ve dealt with this kind of law in a tertial way and can second your statement that subpoena powers would be the most dangerous (and stupid) thing they could grant you right now.
I’m not a lawyer, but in my dealings in this area I know that there are a couple things that spell MAJOR federal crime: One is scraping data and then selling it (the selling is where the prison time comes in), and the other is bringing down a site / affecting page load time (sabotaging a competitor and so on).
That doesn’t mention all the aspects of this story I’m sure you couldn’t talk about publicly.
A lawsuit would be fun for us voyeurs admittedly because you would have access to view ALL activity on their servers, email accounts, and so on and on. And once it is public record, it would be available for all of us to see. Now THAT would be a good article!
Yeah these guys would be majorly foolish to give you subpoena power right now!"
