[HN Gopher] Trolley.co.uk is shutting down - pricing data is app...
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Trolley.co.uk is shutting down - pricing data is apparently owned
by a company
Author : zikohh
Score : 36 points
Date : 2022-06-27 20:26 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.trolley.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.trolley.co.uk)
| technick wrote:
| Setup a shell company in Bermuda that does the scrapping for you
| and then claim you buy the data from them. When they approach you
| just tell them you have a NDA and can't disclose the company.
| That'll keep them at bay for awhile... then when you're forced to
| disclose, they'll spend the rest of their time chasing a shell
| company in Bermuda.
|
| 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.
| Komodai wrote:
| Doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me... Aren't there tons of
| companies like Trolley that scrape data, etc. without issues?
|
| Like, I assume these do: PriceSpy, PriceRunner, PrisJakt,
| Shopping.com, PriceGrabber, etc.
| sslalready wrote:
| A lot of E-commerce software have data feeds that are ingested
| by parties like pricespy. These feeds are typically either
| public or made available after mutual agreements. Scraping a
| large amount of sites for data is just too much labor in the
| long run.
| verve_rat wrote:
| You can't copyright a list of facts. I'm confused about what they
| have run in to? Maybe they should take some of the money they
| have raised and talk to a lawyer.
| [deleted]
| michaelt wrote:
| The cease & desist mentions Asda [1] and [2] says "Asda chose
| NielsenIQ Brandbank, their existing digital content provider
| for 13 years"
|
| 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...
| esjeon wrote:
| You can if you _curate_ the list. Curating requires collecting
| and processing information, which often can be expensive.
| sdflhasjd wrote:
| Yes, I could understand (if not also somewhat disagree) with it
| regarding photos, but "and data"? What does that entail?
| arcza wrote:
| Seems very off and unsustainable (e.g. what happens in 2023 is
| unclear), along with hiding the licensor's name - that seems
| unreasonable. Who is the end recipient of this donation? I don't
| buy the story.
| goldcd wrote:
| 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)"
| [deleted]
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| 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.
| Arnavion wrote:
| 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.
| Closi wrote:
| 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.
| mr_toad wrote:
| 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.
| michaelt wrote:
| 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.
| Closi wrote:
| This assumes that the supermarket took the photos - what
| I mean is the supermarket might buy those product photos
| under license.
| Closi wrote:
| 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/
| matt321 wrote:
| can publicly available data be the property of someone?
| mtmail wrote:
| 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.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| 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.
| sdflhasjd wrote:
| Unfortunately, supermarket products would be difficult to
| distinguish without imagery.
| itake wrote:
| 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?
| bpicolo wrote:
| Depends on your country / jurisdiction
| lapser wrote:
| As others have said, it seems fishy.
|
| 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?
| Komodai wrote:
| They got it from web scraping, doesn't exactly have a license I
| guess...?
| notahacker wrote:
| Yeah, I'm scratching my head at this. On the one hand, the UK
| does have some weird database trolls (a copyright troll called
| FootballDataCo claimed licence fees from anybody publishing
| football fixture lists irrespective of where they sourced the
| information from, and probably can do again since the EU court
| judgement against them presumably no longer applies)
|
| 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...
| mr_gibbins wrote:
| It looks like a startup that's hit a brick wall viz a viz
| licensing pictures.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
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(page generated 2022-06-27 23:00 UTC)