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Comment by KieranMac | Hacker News Reader

As an attorney who focuses in this area, I can say that the most interesting question is first where this case will be decided. Texas, and the Northern District of Texas in particular, has historically been the worst jurisdiction in the country for web scrapers to litigate. Southwest has a long history of litigating successfully there, including two cases from just last year. If TPG is going to win, first they'll need to win the jurisdictional question of whether the case will be decided in Delaware or Texas.

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Kieran! Kieran (OP) is a friend of mine, highly competent, and I highly recommend his comprehensive legal guide to web scraping: https://mccarthygarberlaw.com/a-comprehensive-legal-guide-to...

Thank you sharing the link. I find it amusingly appropriate that viewing this legal guide requires agreeing to Terms & Conditions, but appreciate that it’s one of the shortest Terms & Conditions I’ve ever seen easy to read and understand within seconds.

Haha! Given that the article is about scraping, I figured some prudence with respect to people copying and pasting my work somewhere else was warranted!

Thanks, Tucker!

Just for fun, here is the robots.txt from that site:

    # Default robots file version:2
    User-agent: \*
    Disallow: /calendar/action\* 
    Disallow: /events/action\*
    Allow: /*.css
    Allow: /*.js
    Disallow: /\*?
    Crawl-delay: 3
    Sitemap: https://mccarthygarberlaw.com/sitemap_index.xml

As a non-american reader, it feels bizarre to me that the direction of a case changes so drastically depending on where it will be held, within the same country

We tend to helplessly accept a lot of out in the open corruption here.

For what it's worth the US is more like 51 countries or the EU. There are radically different laws in different states and even different rights

I'm surprised more businesses don't ban all of Texas as customers to prevent any litigation happening there.

Businesses sue? Blame customers! In order to save the village we had to destroy the village! There needs to be some massive reforms, especially with copyright.

Banning the second largest user base in the country isn't usually a good business strategy

It's funny how regionalism pops up on the internet. Thing is, it's less than 10% of the country (and surely not all of those 29MM are on the internet), and there are other businesses surviving just fine foregoing a TAM of the whole country.

How can you be so sure it's not regionalism that's causing you to dismiss nearly 10% of one of the largest, richest countries in the world as inconsequential?

The top comment is from a legal expert basically saying that TPM's success in this lawsuit depends on avoiding Texas a jurisdiction, and the product in question is not possible without winning this lawsuit.

It's not that Texas is inconsequential. It's that the choice is "cut off Texas or risk the entire business in the other 49 states".

Oh, it absolutely is regionalism, in the form of "Texas is a corrupt legal shitshow and it can be a smart business move to refuse to do any business there."

And because HN only allows me like 3 comments a day, I'd like to emphasize "can."

Not all users are created equal. This is why many internet businesses cater exclusively to a wealthy country that contains only 6% (that is, excluding 94% of internet users) of the people on the internet.

It's the second most populous (~29M) state behind California.

> I'm surprised more businesses don't ban all of Texas as customers to prevent any litigation happening there.

Businesses are often the ones structuring agreements so that they can sue customers there and so that customers are forced to sue them there, so...that would seem counterproductive.

Even before considering the size of the market you’d be cutting off.

American Airlines' headquarters is in Fort Worth, so banning Texas customers would be a peculiar move...

In this case, it would be TPM banning Texas customers, since Texas is the favorable venue for AA.

That doesn't seem like as big a deal, since TPM doesn't have a giant corporate headquarters to relocate and can cutting Texas from the TAM isn't that big of a deal.

Please don't take HN threads into regional flamewar.

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