Wholesale Apparel Suppliers File Lawsuit Against Software Company
Two wholesale apparel suppliers filed a federal lawsuit on Sept. 16, accusing a North Carolina software company of trademark infringement and trade secrets misappropriation tied to alleged data scraping practices, according to Law.com.
S&S Activewear and Broder Bros. (dba alphabroder) filed the claim in Illinois federal court, claiming software company PromoHunt “misused proprietary data from their sites and accessed scraping tools to extract confidential pricing and real-time inventory data,” Law.com states.
PromoHunt is a free browser extension that allows promotional products distributors and decorators to compare prices across suppliers. S&S Activewear and alphabroder claim PromoHunt’s browser extension and tactics divert sales, confuse customers, and undermine the suppliers’ control over their e-commerce platform.
The plaintiffs allege PromoHunt’s price comparison tool appears on S&S’s site without permission, showing customers competitor products and prices while hiding or overlaying its own content, diverting sales. They also claim PromoHunt obtains customers’ login credentials and uses them to access customer-only areas of the S&S site for real-time inventory details and personalized pricing, the complaint states.
Law.com notes that crawling the web and data scraping from company websites has grown over the last few years.
“Data scraping is the automated extraction of data from the web, which can be used in many different applications, including for cyber attacks, identity fraud, unwanted marketing spams, or to create facial recognition databases,” Law.com’s Marianna Wharry says. “As companies face the challenge of separating users from scrapers to avoid the compliance risks that data scraping may bring, regulators are grappling with drawing the line between unlawful and legitimate scraping.”
Sidley Austin is representing the plaintiffs and asking the court to prohibit PromoHunt from using the tool on S&S Activewear’s sites and, subsequently, scraping its data. Additionally, the plaintiffs are seeking monetary relief, including actual damages, attorney fees, costs, and the profits made from PromoHunt’s alleged infringement.
Read the full complaint here
