

Ask HN: Legality of scraping manufacturer's photos from another website - jackkinsella

A startup I know needs to get photos of certain products onto their website. Other websites have the manufacturer's photos (the photos which the manufacturer has licensed for use by resellers) on their websites. From the startup's point of view the most efficient way to get these photos would be to scrape them from another site selling the same kind of products instead of manually compiling the list themselves.<p>Is it illegal to scrape the photos in this instance? What advice would you give to someone in this position?
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fhars
The only issue I can see right now is that it is seen as a copyright violation
in most jurisdictions. You cannot just reuse other peoples photos just because
you think you need them (they might for example be part of a premium
advertising support deal for registered resellers).

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jackkinsella
I didn't make this very clear in the original post (which I will edit now),
but the photos they want to scrape are the manufacturer's photos, i.e. those
licensed for use by resellers. Scraping them would shortcut approaching the
manufacturers directly. Does this change the legal situation?

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rhizome
Why risk it? Just go to the manufacturers instead of asking anonymous internet
people for legal advice. Of course, if the startup is disposable then this
might not be such a compelling reason.

