Illegal

kmm5000

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jdturk

i don't get what you mean, could you explain it please. thanks

jdturk

either way if you feel its illegal tell the police, if not I wouldn't tell the other company as you never know when you need to go back there

kmm5000

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jdturk

right got you, I have no clue but I am sure someone will know. however it seems a trivial matter to me and as I said before I wouldn't burn your bridges incase you come across them again

kmm5000

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Amber07

I'm trying to get my head round the explanation

So a dealer wants to advertise in two places.....once with autotrader and again with your company. Autotrader puts the info up then your company copies it to their site.

Is that it? I would have thought as long as you have the permission from the dealer to use the cars details that would have been ok - I would be interested to find out if it is legal or if it breaches some sort of copyright

But if you have already handed in your notice, maybe you should just let it go.....do you already have a new job or might you need a reference from the company at some point?

rupee99

They may be breaching copyright but it is unlikely to be persued by Autotrader as it may backfire on them, e.g. advertisers on Autotrader might be miffed if the widest publicity was not given to their cars, and anyway they don't suffer a loss (unless I am wrong on that point and Autotrader get some kind of commission).

DVardysShadow

The information in the ads is the property of the dealer - and images of vehicles too. I assume that the scraping program is only extracting data and images possibly of the vehicles - but no actual presentational aspects put together by Auto trader. So no grounds for intellectual property complaints.

Autotrader benefit to an extent in that if a vehicle is on their site, it will be more likely to be sold, but if they take commission they may lose out. So the real issue is the act of accessing their servers to scrape data.

Is thsi a fair analysis?

DVardysShadow

computershack wrote: »

Scraping or searching? How is it different to a search engine producing results from retail websites?

It differs because a search engine merely provides pointers to search results.

In this case with scraping, I think that the data is being taken from autotrader once and served out afresh by OP's company devoid of any further involvement by the autotrader site

allydowd

Is the company a member of any professional scheme or organisation? For example is there a "Federation of Car Sales Professionals" or something like that? You'll see the logos on company stationary if you are.

If so, contact that organisation and ask them if it infringes any of their policies?