reachstan (founder) 23 December 2012

Will i get sued, if i take some content from other websites?

Hello, I am starting a price/product comparison website with reviews of the products,

However, since my site will be new I won't have reviews ( user reviews like those on mouthshut.com) , so I thought of the following solution

Parse (crawl sites) 1 or 2 reviews for each product from sites like mouthshut.com, and diplay them on my site and mention below the reviews

' taken from " mouthshut" for more reviews like this please visit "mouthshut" .

So I will be giving credit to them for taking reviews and linking back to the site.

Now ofcurse I would do this only if the websites like mouthshut don't give me permission to use the reviews, I want to know Will I get sued if I do this? inspite of giving them credit? is there any leagal way to solve this issue if I don't get permission?

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2 Replies

Chirag Bhatt (Lawyer Gujarat High Court) 01 January 2013

Dear Reachstan,

If your work is nothing but literal imitation of the copyrighted work with some viration here and there, it would amount to violation of the copyright.

Where a person has copyright in a literary work, and any other person produces or reproduces the work or any substantial or material part thereof in any material form, he is committing an infringement of copy right.

By using others link for review, it is amouting to cheating to the customers, its not the matter of credit to them as you have not taken permission to use that link for your purpose.

Sy.patents (Freelance) 06 January 2013

Copyright infringement is judged considering various factors such as quantity of the matter copied, quality of the matter copied, whether the copying is with the intention of saving oneself of the labour of creativity, impact on the original work (in this case mouthshut site) etc etc. The best option would be to take the permission. Instead of taking content of reviews you may just give hyperlinks, and in doing so make sure that mouthshut doesn’t have any clauses restricting such hyperlinking (As far as hyperlinks are concerned, one can assume implied consent of the website owner unless it is expressly restricted).