Am I allowed to take data from other websites without their permission?

BIOSTALL

Hi guys,

Lets take the following example:

I want to build a website that spiders a bunch of car/auto sites and display the vehicles they have for sale on my own site. When a user clicks for more details on my site they get redirected to the site that the actual vehicle is for sale on.

My question is, is this legal? I'm not charging anyone to use the site, it is totally free for everyone and technically I'm driving more traffic towards the dealerships websites anyway. Do I have to get their permission before spidering their site and displaying their information on my own site or can I do it without their knowledge?

Be interested to hear your thoughts on this 🙂

Thanks

NogDog

Frankly, the odds are low that anyone who is a lawyer specializing in copyright law in your jurisdiction is going to respond to this, so what we think won't do you a bit of good if anyone sues you. I'm not saying anyone is, in fact, going to sue you, nor am I going to offer a legal opinion and potentially be liable, as well. What I will suggest is contacting the owners of the sites in question and get written permission from them to do so (being sure to explain to them how you think your site will help their site).

dalecosp

And that's where it gets interesting. I don't know if it would, or wouldn't, be legal or illegal if a human looked up the data and put it on a page, so would or does the law make/see any difference between a person and a web-spider?

BIOSTALL

Thanks for the tips guys. Much appreciated. My thinking behind this was that I will not be taken page content, blog posts or anything unique like that which would have taken time to create by the author. In this case it would be just the core vehicle details; colour, price, a photo (which I would host on my server so as to not use their bandwidth) etc. I will be displaying the dealerships name/logo next to each listing and linking back their site with the possibility of them making more money.

Anyway, I'll keep an eye out for RSS feeds and use these if they exist, else i'll drop a friendly email to the owners of the site letting them know I can remove their data if required.

Thanks for your advice

Res

As long as you don't have to login to view the content and you are not representing yourself as a seller of the product or an authorized reseller it's not illegal. I can think of a good amount of sites that do very similar things. You'll have to be careful of the use of copyrighted materials though, certainly don't use their pictures. If you are grabbing the make model year and price to display it should not be an issue.

That said, it doesn't mean they won't send you a cease and desist letter or start litigation and bury you in lawyer fees until you yield.

Weedpacket

You would probably want to back off using dealers' logos as well; using their trademarks may be construed as a claim that they're endorsing your site (for a similar point, see clauses 3 and 4 of the PHP License).

Aside from that, I agree with Res; I've worked with developing special-interest search engines that operate on this idea.

If you lick to the dealer's site, and track them as they go (via the usual referral-link method, say), then if you become a popular site that people use to make comparisons, you can later go to dealers and show them how much traffic you're generating for their site and would they like to sponsor the link?