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Ask HN: Responding to a C&D

6 points by kkoppenhaver ↗ HN
For a little over a year, a classmate and I have been trying to launch a travel website that interfaces with a few regional bus companies and would ultimately direct students to their site. However, upon reaching out to these companies, we've received a cease and desist of any "automated access" of their site instead of them being interested in opening a dialogue with us. Is there any hope to salvage the situation?

6 comments

[ 11.7 ms ] story [ 594 ms ] thread
soneill
Do they post their schedules on their site? If it's public domain information, you may be able to just post it yourselves even if you can't integrate directly with them. If you can generate some traffic for them, that may make them more open to working with you.

Secondly, how are you reaching out to them? Electronic contact is less likely to succeed than calling them and calling them to try and arrange an in-person discussion.

kkoppenhaver
They do and I can find no mention of anything he talks about in his email being prohibited in their terms of service. I can't even find a TOS at all for that matter. However, as he has responded in this way, we might just try and reach out to other companies in the same industry and see if they would be more receptive. Our approach has been by email and postal mail thus far, but I think we'll start making some calls this week. Thank you for your advice.
staunch
It's easier to ask forgiveness than permission. Just be as friendly as possible about it (don't hammer anyone's servers for example).
kkoppenhaver
That's what we were thinking at the beginning, but we had to reach out to them at some point, and it might be past the point of forgiveness at this point.
Lasher
Can you afford to be right in this case? Even if you ultimately win, defending a lawsuit is expensive. Are these companies pretty much in a monopoly situation?

If they have competition, and you can get some of their competitors on board and generate some traffic, that might get them to come around. Otherwise it's going to be a struggle. Hope it all works out for you!

kkoppenhaver
That's the basic thing we're working with. We really can't take this to court, even if we would win. We're currently thinking of going with your strategy of getting the competitors on board, possibly reaching out to them one last time and offering them 6 months to see results from us before we ask them to pay for the traffic we send them. But still, it's definitely going to be interesting. Thanks for your input.