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Comment by goldcd | Hacker News Reader

I'm also slightly confused.

If they were scraping the information/pictures off the supermarket sites, then I'd have expected the cease and desist to come from the supermarkets.

Given that the letter came from "a company" then I presume they were taking their information from an aggregator - and seems entirely fair that you should "pay the aggregator" (as there's clearly a company out there doing something similar to what they're doing - but they were taking their data).

If this company was just a data-hose, then I'd have thought you could monetize your consumer-focussed product, simply by flogging anonymized data from your users back to the supermarkets. "Customer X, dropped product Y from their weekly basket (or swapped supermarket), when you raised the price of Z (or other supermarket dropped it)"

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> ...then I presume they were taking their information from an aggregator - and seems entirely fair that you should "pay the aggregator"

This seems to be what they are doing. From their FAQ:

"Maintaining this data for over 200,000 products is a costly endeavour and asking them to offer this for free would be a huge ask. We appreciate that the data company is absolutely entitled to request compensation for their work."

In the UK, the aggregator holds the IP on their aggregation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right

The Cease & Desist letter that Trolley received is here: https://www.trolley.co.uk/imgs/cease-and-desist-letter.png

You can see that the aggregator has said that Trolley scraped the images and data in question from the supermarket sites.

The implication seemingly being that the supermarket sites are licensing the images and prices of their own products from this third party (potentially only at a peppercorn price).

But this is only implied and not said, which in legal documents is an important distinction. I would suspect the supermarkets license the info on their sites to this aggregator, who seems put out somebody scraped the same information and is not licensing it from them instead, and is implying trolley needs to get a license, while in actuality perhaps they don’t need to.

I think that your interpretation is slightly off and Nielsen might have actual teeth here (again to remind everyone this is UK, in the US Nielsen would be in the wrong). The supermarket owns the database rights to their online store, which it then exclusively licensed (as far as I know) to Nielsen for re-use of third parties. Regardless of your emotions here (and personally I'm disappointed that this is happening), this is UK law and Nielsen and the supermarkets are correct here. If Trolley instead walked physically in stores and then manually collect the data and bought products to shoot photos of* then they have teeth as they have exerted effort into independently create their own database.

* This is now plain copyright law which raises questions, like if the manufacturer-in-question can stop Trolley from publishing those photos (while Trolley owns the copyright on the photo itself, there are de minimis considerations when it comes to the packaging design which is copyrighted by the manufacturer). It might pass fair dealing though.

Then the onus is still on Nielsen to demonstrate an exclusive license. Otherwise they have no standing when trolley scrapes the sites directly, because only the original copyright holder (the stores) may enforce that.

The pictures are the real red flag. Unless a photograph is bundled with a cc license one always needs to assume somebody will need to grant permission for its reuse, and often that will be for compensation. Trolley should have known this.

> Trolley should have known this

It is entirely possible that Trolley were completely aware of this issue, but decided to ignore it and proceed anyway.

How often do we see the phrase "Ask forgiveness, not permission" get quoted on HN?

That idiom might be useful - until you stray near lawyers.

>>again to remind everyone this is UK, in the US Nielsen would be in the wrong

So then would not the simpler solution be to shut down UK operations and start up US operations via a US Legal entity?

I very much doubt the price of the product is coming from this company, everything else sure, trolley.co.uk should explicitly ask them if they data aggregator provides the price to the website.

It doesn't matter if they also store that information, (might be scraping that themselves), if they don't provide that to the website, its not infringing their database rights, it is infringing the supermarkets.

Yes - the feed likely consists of things like the canonical product name, description, weight/size, recommended price, pack shots, and nutritional info.

Trolley.co.uk might be able sidestep this demand by displaying ONLY the product names and prices, but it'd be a much less visually-appealing site as a result.

Is it aggregation if you're scraping from one site and reordering the items you've scraped?

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