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Comment by matt321 | Hacker News Reader

can publicly available data be the property of someone?

It seems to be related to the product images, or the images were easiest to identify and fight over https://www.trolley.co.uk/imgs/cease-and-desist-letter.png While a product name, price could be public (a person can see it in a store), the picture is very specific and trolley didn't take the pictures.

It seems they could also just cease use of the 'offending' informationa nd use generic imagery or descriptions instead. For bandwidth/processing reasons, I'd prefer as much text and as few graphics as possible anyway.

Unfortunately, supermarket products would be difficult to distinguish without imagery.

even then, why does it cost 28k PER YEAR, for photos of product images? Can't you just spend a week in a market taking product photos yourself?

[1] is a report of Tesco reducing the range of distinct products they stock from ~90,000 to ~63,000. Some of which will be seasonal items like easter eggs. Some others will only be available in certain stores.

I suspect taking 63,000 product photos, and keeping them all matched up to the right products is probably more than a week's work.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jan/30/tesco-cuts-...

They could but at this point the (claimed) damage is already done.

The price is high but I'd imagine that company guarantees high resolution professional photos of every product. Chasing the last remaining 10% products might be hard. At 160.000 products, let's say spending 1 minute per product (finding it, post production etc) at 12h/day it takes one person 9 months.

Crowdsourcing the task might work.

The Google logo is publicly available on Google’s website. Does anyone own the Google logo?

Depends. If I spend a ton of time and effort to aggregate data from public sources and license it out, my dataset can still be considered proprietary.

Depends on your country / jurisdiction

Practically, no. Especially when different jurisdictions etc. become a factor.

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