The Paris Court of First Instance denies an airline company having an exclusive distribution model with the right to prevent an online travel agency from selling its tickets (RyanAir / Opodo)

Summary The well known low-cost airline company RyanAir wishes to have control over online sales of its tickets. It has launched several lawsuits in Europe (in France, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, Spain, Swiss) to protect its websites from “screen-scraping”. Screen-scraping consists in the automatic gathering of information from another website. Ryan air's crusade has been put an end to in France, where it initially intended to forbid French online travel agency, Opodo, from selling seats on its flights. Facts RyanAir does not want its tickets to be sold online through third websites failing to comply with its contractual conditions. At the beginning of its Europe-wide legal battle, the terms of use, as displayed on Ryanair.com, stated that “this website and the Ryanair call centre