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Comment by mytailorisrich | Hacker News Reader

The whole thing smells fishy.

While pictures would be under copyright (and it's possible copyright is with a third party specialised in this), I can't see how the price listed for a product on, say, Tesco's website and collected by yourself on Tesco's website could be subject to licensing by a third party, even considering database rights.

I am also puzzled by those guys claim that they got a very "generous offer" from that company.

If they are unsure a better first step would be to crowdfund legal advice.

They could then crowdsource taking pictures of all the products from their users.

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Unless there is a third party which is taking photos of all grocery products and then licensing that to the supermarkets, to avoid them all having to take their own photos?

I used to work for one of the major supermarkets and am aware that there are providers of product images, but don't know the specifics in enough detail.

Taking a photo only gives you copyright over that photo, it doesn’t stop other people taking a similar photo.

A lot of business try and claim copyright of a subject (like a tourist attraction) and try and prevent photography of it, but that’s legal BS in any jurisdiction I’ve heard of.

Right, but if you're making a price-comparison website with scraped data, you can't scrape the product image from a supermarket website legally.

You could of course get images from some other source - but you need meticulous organisation when a single brand of tea might have 40, 80, 160, 240 and 600 bag packages.

This assumes that the supermarket took the photos - what I mean is the supermarket might buy those product photos under license.

You absolutely can scrape a product image from a supermarket website legally. Why would you think otherwise?

Whether you can use those images commercially is another matter entirely.

No, I mean they take the actual photographs and then license them to the retailers. Plus they can also capture other product data in a consistent format etc.

See here as an example: https://www.brandbank.com/content-licensing/

So for instance you could scrape a website that licenced images from brandbank above, and then fall foul of their copyright.

Brandbank as an example does work with UK supermarkets, e.g. see below:

https://www.brandbank.com/tag/sainsburys/ https://www.brandbank.com/tesco-case-study/

Well it seems they're not scraping Tesco's website but some aggregator middleman. Like making a package tracking website using Parcels instead of FedEx, UPS, etc individually. Sure it's convenient to write code that only scrapes one website, but now that website is mad because it has a business selling that data.

It's almost certainly the photos that are the issue, not the actual price data which is unable to be copywritten.

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