Website red tape

I

Ipwn 4

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Evening gents,

I'm busy stating my own business and was wondering, am I allowed to copy product info(marketing info and images) from the manufactureres websites? Also some page requires me to do quite alot of formatting, how do I prevent others from taking this formatted data from my site?
 
Hey Guy (I assume women are also allowed to answer this post?),

Depends entirely on the manufacturer whether you can display their marketing and info. ComX (I think it was them) recently got into hot water for using the Dell logo on their website for example. Generally i'd say you're pretty safe using the manufacturers things if you are an authorized distributor or agent. Its also a good idea to have a look on the websites for their disclaimer and legal info to check which of their things are copyrighted and can be copied etc. It may even be sufficient to reference the original material with a link to where it was found.

Regarding your formatting being taken; not a whole lot can be done. If its useful and original information chances are it will be copied elsewhere. You'll be in the clear to display a copyright notice on your website and will have a legitimate action against infringements should you have the patience to deal with it.
 
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hambone said:
Hey Guy (I assume women are also allowed to answer this post?),

Depends entirely on the manufacturer whether you can display their marketing and info. ComX (I think it was them) recently got into hot water for using the Dell logo on their website for example. Generally i'd say you're pretty safe using the manufacturers things if you are an authorized distributor or agent. Its also a good idea to have a look on the websites for their disclaimer and legal info to check which of their things are copyrighted and can be copied etc. It may even be sufficient to reference the original material with a link to where it was found.

Regarding your formatting being taken; not a whole lot can be done. If its useful and original information chances are it will be copied elsewhere. You'll be in the clear to display a copyright notice on your website and will have a legitimate action against infringements should you have the patience to deal with it.
Click to expand...

How is the weather in Grahamstown tonight?
 
Ipwn 4 said:
Evening gents,

I'm busy stating my own business and was wondering, am I allowed to copy product info(marketing info and images) from the manufactureres websites? Also some page requires me to do quite alot of formatting, how do I prevent others from taking this formatted data from my site?
Click to expand...
My irony meter is going haywire.
 
you could use some form of XHR, injecting minified html into the DOM. at least that way the scraped code is ugly and not very usable. you can even go further and embed some tracers into it, i.e. img tags loading opacity: 0, 1 pixel images from a server of yours and keeping tabs on where the calls are coming from as compared to your site access logs.

but i dont think you are quite there yet.

all the best.
 
Ipwn 4 said:
Evening gents,

I'm busy stating my own business and was wondering, am I allowed to copy product info(marketing info and images) from the manufactureres websites? Also some page requires me to do quite alot of formatting, how do I prevent others from taking this formatted data from my site?
Click to expand...

1)yes
2) Use a robots.txt file to block the google image bot from indexing your images
 
I generally contact a business and ask permission.

But, for the biggest part, sign up with something like Amazon.com Associates. There you get permission to make use of that kind of information, images, etc.
 
hambone said:
You've either got incredible Grahamstown intel, know of my five bucket to a leak rule or I've missed the point of the question.
Click to expand...

I just thought it could of been the same as Durbans... I was right..

Enjoy the 3 days of free shower water.
 
bwana said:
My irony meter is going haywire.
Click to expand...

the reason I asked is because a lot of local websites(such as the comX sites) have copyrights on each page. The content on these pages are hard to get hold of and I see why they don't want people taking their info.

All my products so far contain links to the sources of my images and specs etc.

stricken said:
you could use some form of XHR, injecting minified html into the DOM. at least that way the scraped code is ugly and not very usable. you can even go further and embed some tracers into it, i.e. img tags loading opacity: 0, 1 pixel images from a server of yours and keeping tabs on where the calls are coming from as compared to your site access logs.

but i dont think you are quite there yet.

all the best.
Click to expand...

Looked into something similar but that will be overkill.

hambone said:
Hey Guy (I assume women are also allowed to answer this post?),

Depends entirely on the manufacturer whether you can display their marketing and info. ComX (I think it was them) recently got into hot water for using the Dell logo on their website for example. Generally i'd say you're pretty safe using the manufacturers things if you are an authorized distributor or agent. Its also a good idea to have a look on the websites for their disclaimer and legal info to check which of their things are copyrighted and can be copied etc. It may even be sufficient to reference the original material with a link to where it was found.

Regarding your formatting being taken; not a whole lot can be done. If its useful and original information chances are it will be copied elsewhere. You'll be in the clear to display a copyright notice on your website and will have a legitimate action against infringements should you have the patience to deal with it.
Click to expand...

lol, soz for that. Thanks for the info, I'll read up the comx dell case.
 
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