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Ask HN: Legality of scraping manufacturer's photos from another website
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.
Is it illegal to scrape the photos in this instance? What advice would you give to someone in this position?
- fhars 15y agoThe 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).
- jackkinsella 15y agoI 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?
- rhizome 15y agoWhy 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.