That didn’t take long!  My (now deleted) southwestAutoCheckin mashup has generated some controversy.  Within a few days of posting it, WSO2 received the following email from Southwest Airlines (minus headings and signature):

October 9, 2008

VIA EMAIL

Dear Sanjiva Weerawarana Ph. D,

I represent the Brand Protection Team for Southwest Airlines Co. (“Southwest”). Jonathan, Director of Mashup Technologies at WSO2, recently blogged about offering a service in which your company, without Southwest’s permission, offers online check-in services and boarding passes for Southwest flights. The name of this website is Mooshup.com.

The program offered on Mooshup.com uses southwest.com to check Southwest Customers in for a Southwest Airlines flight in an effort to obtain for them an “A” boarding pass. By using the Southwest Airlines website you are bound by the Terms and Conditions and the Use Agreement which all users are subject to in exchange for using southwest.com. Mooshup.com is in direct violation of the Use Agreement including, but not limited to, the following:

Southwest's web sites and any Company Information is available to you only for your personal use to determine the availability of goods and services offered on the web sites and to transact business with Southwest. Unless you are an authorized Southwest travel agent, you may not use Southwest’s web sites for any commercial use or other purpose.

…

You may not use Southwest’s web sites for or in connection with offering any third party product or service not authorized or approved by Southwest. For example, online check-in service providers may not use the Southwest web sites to check-in Customers online or attempt to obtain for them a boarding pass in any certain boarding group.

…

For any use not specifically listed herein, you may not use Southwest’s web sites after Southwest notifies you that your use is not authorized and requests that you cease such use.

As your company is using southwest.com in an unauthorized manner which Southwest believes to be harmful to its business and its Customers, we are asking you to discontinue this activity immediately.

Southwest hopes that this matter can be quickly and amicably resolved. I'm asking that by October 23, 2008 you either sign and return a copy of this letter to indicate your agreement with the terms, or reply back to this e-mail with an indication that you have discontinued offering this service and removed the entry from Mooshup.com homepage and the blog posting from MSN Windows Live (auburnmarshes.spaces.live.com/blog).

Please be advised if we do not hear from you by the specified date, Southwest reserves the right to take whatever action we deem necessary to enforce our rights.

Very truly yours,

I did the mashup to demonstrate a simple workflow including scraping and notifications.  I wasn’t really trying to undermine Southwest’s business model.  Everyone knows Southwest is my favorite airline.  So, where did I go wrong?  Southwest above outlines two complaints: personal use only, no online check-in service providers.

First of all, personal use seems pretty tricky.  A user of my service is actually using it for personal use, to interact with Southwest’s web sites.  I don’t really think providing the user with a better tool, essentially a better “browser” tailored to Southwest’s site, changes this.  At no time does the mashup contact Southwest except under specific instructions from the user.  So I hold the mashup itself blameless.

However, their second complaint seems a bit more concrete - offering the southwestAutoCheckin service online.  I can see that Southwest would consider mooshup.com, or even my user account on it, as an “online check-in service provider”, and that could be argued as a violation of the second item quoted in the terms above, especially since I made it publicly available.

Are these Terms and Conditions reasonable?  I think they fit within the current norms of society, reflecting the fact that an online service should be used in a way consistent with it’s purpose and limiting abusive behavior.  If for instance, a random user had posted the southwestAutoCheckin service, our mooshup.com Terms and Conditions would have allowed us to remove it for the simple reason of avoiding even a semblance of conflict.  If every service provider had to consider countermeasures for every possible type of abuse we wouldn’t have the array of services we do now.

And I can see if my service became popular that it would cause significant upheaval in Southwest’s customer experience (if 50% of a flight used my service and 50% didn’t, the latter would be disadvantaged in their seat selection, with no recourse through Southwest if they thought the procedure unfair.)

However, I think the norms to have some evolution ahead of them, and it would be nice to have not just Terms and Conditions that allowed the site and its content to be reused freely, but also real Web Services to make this valuable information (some of which is owned by the user after all) available in an easier manner.  It’s unfortunate they can’t do this without changing their checkin and boarding procedures in some way.

The moral of the story – carefully read the terms and conditions of any site you scrape, and make sure you stay within those terms.  If you don’t like the terms, find a different provider, or agitate for better terms.  This is a real danger for mashup authors.

In this case, there is no percentage for me in conflict, real or perceived, with Southwest – definitely not for a simple Mashup Server demo.  So the southwestAutoCheckin mashup is permanently offline.  I don’t see anything in the Terms and Conditions that justifies removing any blog post, and I’m confident that updating the previous post and providing context here will satisfy Southwest while remaining fully transparent.