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Comment by guelo | Hacker News Reader

Did yesterday's announcement by AA that they were pulling out of Orbitz affect Hipmunk and the other meta-search sites?

EDIT: I just noticed someone asked that question at the end of the video and Adam didn't have a very good answer. Also, boo on the patents answer.

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I'm no fan of software patents either, but nowadays it really can be a matter of company survival. If some big, entrenched player starts picking on you with their patents, and you don't have anything of your own to defend with or cross-license, you're in bad shape.

Don't hate the player, hate the game.

That's fine but the question was about what you will do when competitors start copying the features, patents is a bad answer to that.

The question was actually, "how are you going to protect your intellectual property and keep competitors from imitating you?" Patents is a fine answer to that.

I bought an AA ticket through them on Sunday and it sent me directly to the AA site. I seem to remember that they weren't even including AA results several months ago, so they must have some direct agreement in place already.

I'm not from Hipmunk but my guess is that yes, it affected them because they are sourcing their flight info from Orbitz. In fact, this is one of the reasons they probably struck a deal with ITA since that will give them access to pricing/availability without going through Orbitz. On the flip side, this probably means they will make no money on any flights referred to AA.com unless they have an agreement in place with them since before the AA pullout, they had been paid by Orbitz for the AA booking.

Am I the only one who thinks their business is completely indefensible? I haven't read their patent applications, but I'd be shocked if you can patent not showing information. What they've done is definitely clever, but it seems to me that the big guys could have one decent designer and UI person duplicate their entire business in a week.

I should add that I've already booked 3 flights through Hipmunk and recommended it to a bunch of friends. I hope I'm wrong.

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