Trolley.co.uk is shutting down – pricing data is apparently owned by a company
trolley.co.uk
trolley.co.uk
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)"
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
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).
* 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.
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.
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?
So then would not the simpler solution be to shut down UK operations and start up US operations via a US Legal entity?
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.
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.
Also, its all a bit vague, especially the reason for the donations - to pay these jokers off? That just enables and encourages the bullying. They should provide more transparency as to who is claiming ownership, and what evidence is being given and legal arguments for paying.
If they went into supermarkets and took pictures of all the products it would be another story, but as is, they are using pictures on the internet in a way that they aren't licensed to. This is not particular to the UK, just because some site display a picture publically does not mean you are allowed to display the same picture on your site.
Having been part of their new store opening team in the past and the way they undercut all other rivals in the area to get people in, which typically runs for a few weeks, depots drop everything to make sure everything is in stock at the expensive of other stores, even running dedicated lorries to the store which is costly but that came out of the Depot Transport budgets, and then Transport would argue with Warehouse if the Warehouse had failed to load cages properly because Wave1/Wave2 picks never go smoothly because goods-in is never to schedule as no one can predict holdups on the road networks, it really is a cut throat business in so many ways. I'm surprised at how many companies put up with Tesco's demands, but thats what you need to do to become a stock market leader! Likewise the public are really just price sensitive before brand loyalty. Life in the UK is very much, you get what you are given, and I've never worked for an entity that didnt have criminal elements either, which is shockingly two faced of the public, but people keep their mouth shut to keep a wage coming in and every community needs an Emmanual Goldstein figure. Massacres are a community's dirty little secret. So when is a simple reminder about general jobs losses, maybe a smattering of innuendo, not a veiled form of intimidation and harassment? Story telling can be so triggering.
Even the legal system in the UK is criminal!
If it was featured on MoneySavingExpert.com and Martin Lewis was ranting about it, then perhaps.
OR.....
Just create a firefox extension that scrapes the pages for your users.
There's many ways to keep this going while giving them the middle finger and serving your users.
This definitely would not work in the UK, and I don't know of many places it would. Asda does 22bn GBP revenue per year
Rule of thumb: as a baseline, you have absolutely no rights in life... that is, no rights unless you're able to enforce them.
It's not about winning in court, it's about not having the resources to go to court & fight it to begin with.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Whether you can use those images commercially is another matter entirely.
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/
One way of getting around this, albeit perhaps at the expense of user experience, is to insert stock photos. E.g. I imagine 'carrots' is not particularly unique. Where stock photos can't be used, i.e. it's a specialist/one-off product, perhaps the classic white-box-black-text approach?
If this is a genuine site with good intentions, staffed by volunteers then it would be a shame to see it stamped down by the supermarkets.
They've got this data from somewhere, so why wouldn't they have looked through the license before using it?
Anyway, speaking of MySupermarket, what happened to them? All I know was one day they decided to shut down, without clear reasons. Does anyone have more insight into why it happened?
On the other hand it makes no sense to accompany a supposed order to c&d screen scraping of multiple (independently maintained) websites with thanks for their generosity and "this company is absolutely entitled to request compensation for their work". Either they're a valuable data provider or an licensing obstacle to using perfectly adequate screen scraping techniques, not both. Not sure why a price comparison website would screen scrape the supermarkets with APIs either...
iirc they were bought out by a supermarket - presumably to prevent customers from realising their prices weren't competitive
But other countries have different rules.
See here for all the details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R....
Stock prices can not be copyrighted.
But stock prices are pretty much public knowledge (no one is coming after you for licencing for quoting a price at someone)
> In regard to collections of facts, O'Connor wrote that copyright can apply only to the creative aspects of collection: the creative choice of what data to include or exclude, the order and style in which the information is presented, etc.—not to the information itself.
So, a list of facts still can be creative and valuable to the society. INAL, but such works should be protected by copyright, or what's the point of copyright in the first place.
So "the creative choice of what data to include or exclude, the order and style in which the information is presented, etc." is very weak. You can copy all the data, and then make your own choice on what to include (for example "everything I can find"), and you would not be violating the copyright.
The quote you gave is for things like making artwork based on certain patterns or letters in the data. But it won't help you if your creative choice is "everything" because there is no creativity there.
> So, a list of facts still can be creative and valuable to the society
A list of facts is not creative, it's simply work. And yes, it might be valuable, but that's not how we decide if something is copyrightable.
> or what's the point of copyright in the first place.
For creativity, rather than effort.
I don't think you can own rights to something other people collected and curated though. Though you can own rights to the individual components, but in this case that would be the specific price of something, which doesn't seem like it should be subject to copyright.
So I'd wager the C&D came from Brandbank - who presumably supply product photos and product data (barcode, pack size, and all the other data like nutritional information you'd find on the packet if you were browsing in store)
[1] https://www.trolley.co.uk/imgs/cease-and-desist-letter.png [2] https://www.brandbank.com/asda-accelerates-their-rich-conten...
In the US it is pretty hard[1], but most other jusdictions find that if the list has some "creative" or "work" element (ie, it isn't just a list of everything) then it can be under copyright (eg [2]).
[1] https://www.justia.com/intellectual-property/copyright/lists...
[2] https://www.smh.com.au/national/list-makers-on-solid-copyrig...
Says who?
"A database right is a sui generis property right, comparable to but distinct from copyright, that exists to recognise the investment that is made in compiling a database, even when this does not involve the "creative" aspect that is reflected by copyright.[1] Such rights are often referred to in the plural: database rights."
How about we try out a reductio ad absurdam: I'm going to start a startup. Our business model is to license the information on customers' websites, and then license it back to them in turn. This then means that anyone who uses our services in the UK can sue for copyright on lists of facts obtained by screen scrapers, as they've been through our database copyright washer. Think flight prices, hotels, cars, anything.
Is that a viable business model? If not, why not?
Someone is creating a phone book as a service to companies.
Elsewhere, these companies are publishing their phone numbers to get more customers.
Then the phone book creators demand license fees anywhere these phone numbers appear in lists.
It's very dubious "database rights" come into play at all.
I find it very unlikely that the price of the products is provided by thirdparty data provider, and think the actual price is not covered by them despite them suggesting it might be.
Really, they don't need product data beyond the name. They could drop pictures and detailed data and build their own database by crowdsourcing pictures and data from their users.
Copyrights are inadvertent and sometimes unintuitive. If the images are created by the product manufacturers, then they hold the copyrights. If the supermarkets edit the images, then they hold copyrights to these edits.
Likewise, if trolley edits the images (undoing the supermarket edits, like cropping around some text) then trolley together with the manufacturer holds the copyright for this new image, not the supermarket.
It doesn't matter where it was scraped from or who was hosting the image, just as it doesn't matter which camera was used.
And old case that is sometimes used to illustrate how copyright works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R....
For example; creating a map from air photographs is not "duplicating" another geo coded database. The geo data exists independently of any map.
"Database rights" are not the same as "data rights", and if your "database" is inadvertently and routinely recreated as by product of other processes, then "database rights" can not apply. Otherwise we are in absurd world.
(In this absurd world, a phone book company could charge license fees to everyone with a phone because their phone books would necessarily contain a subset of the global phone book.)
The EU Court of Justice threw that out, but we're not in the EU any more...
In general, if the data owner says you must take it down, you rarely have a leg to stand on unless you can claim some kind of protected use (e.g. reporting or criticism)
[1] https://www.mondaq.com/copyright/53690/google-news-service-i...
Can you share your research? Because the cease and desist letter they link to clearly says "images and data"...
Regardless, if it was legit then I'd strongly agree with the suggestion of setting up a shell company to not only avoid litigation but to set a trend in teaching these bully companies how the internet works since it seems a few still have to be taught. Anyone using a c&d against a smaller company for data that can be gotten through a web scraper really should fuck off. The UK does seem to be the place where this kind of shitty IP litigation takes place more than is typical.
>The data company digitises and maintains the product information for 98% of grocery products in the UK. They’ve generously worked with us to bring this cost as low as possible.
>Why are you not giving the name of the data company?
>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. We know that providing the name of the data company could bring negative implications for them which we wouldn’t want - especially with how generous they’ve already been.
Like, I assume these do: PriceSpy, PriceRunner, PrisJakt, Shopping.com, PriceGrabber, etc.
> 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.
No. Whoever (as someone pointed out, probably Brandbank, they supply most of the supermarkets with data so if it isn't them, then it's likely a scam) has already received full pay for the data they've supplied - if they're charging you again for the data, that's just greed (sorry, I mean "perfectly valid capitalism") - even at 14p/entry or whatever they're charging.
Some people here have mentioned that facts can't be copyrighted - it reminds me of a problem in 2011 that the people distributing timezone data to a bunch of open source projects were sued because a 3rd party software house "owned" the rights to that data[1]. I don't know where that landed (timezones still work in linux, so I think they found a workaround) but most projects like this capitulate rather than risk the cost of court.
But yes, the product descriptions and images may be copyrightable - certainly, Brandbank do all their imagery in-house, and any typos in the descriptions will be owned by them, because some person being paid peanuts - likely somewhere in the Philippines - is having to sit down with a photo of the can of Campbells soup, reading and re-typing the descriptions word for word.
It's just... ugh.
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.
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-...