The High Court has ruled that Ryanair can pursue proceedings in Ireland against German-based flight comparison company Billigfluege.de GmbH over its alleged use of information taken from Ryanair’s website.
Billigfluege asked the court to dismiss the proceedings on jurisdictional grounds. It relied on the general rule under the Brussels Regulation that a defendant should ordinarily be sued in the EU member state where it is domiciled. As the company was based in Germany, it argued that any proceedings should be brought there.
Ryanair alleged that Billigfluege operated a price-comparison service which took flight information from Ryanair’s website through automated “screen-scraping” and provided that information to customers for a fee. Ryanair claimed this breached its website Terms of Use as well as trademark, copyright and database rights. Those substantive allegations were not decided in this judgment.
The jurisdiction dispute instead centred on Ryanair’s Terms of Use, which contained a clause stating that Irish courts had exclusive jurisdiction over disputes.
Billigfluege argued that no contract existed because it had never agreed to the terms and because traditional contractual requirements, including consideration and acceptance, were absent.
Mr Justice Hanna rejected that argument. He found that the terms were clearly accessible through a visible hyperlink and that commercial users accessing Ryanair’s website for information had a reasonable opportunity to see them. Ryanair supplied flight and price information, which the court regarded as sufficient consideration, while the defendant’s repeated use of the website amounted to acceptance.
The judge also rejected the contention that only Billigfluege’s customers used Ryanair’s website. A commercial entity systematically extracting information from the site was itself using it.
The court held that the Terms of Use constituted a legally binding agreement for the purposes of Article 23 of the Brussels Regulation and that the Irish jurisdiction clause was binding.
Billigfluege’s application to dismiss Ryanair’s claim for want of jurisdiction was therefore refused.