Sam
Moderator
Premium Member
Registered: 24th Dec 99
Location: West Midlands
User status: Offline
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What are the legalities of doing this?
I need to get pricing information off a particular website on a daily basis but they don't offer XML feeds or anything like that so at the moment I am having to manually copy and paste the prices from their website.
I've done a fair bit of PHP programming back in my web design/development days so I know how to do it, but my question is, is it OK to do this?
Guessing the answer is probably "no" 
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Ian
Site Administrator
Registered: 28th Aug 99
Location: Liverpool
User status: Offline
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Depends what the information is and what you're going to do with it, it's probably protected as intellectual property but it's also in the public domain and your business case wouldn't necessarily harm the business of the place you get the data, which weakens their case.
Ryanair did have a case a while ago which I think is still ongoing.
I think in the first instance you would be told to stop rather than anything more serious. Speaking positively it could even lead to a proper relationship and proper data if you're actually driving business their way etc. in the case of price comparison or similar.
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Sam
Moderator
Premium Member
Registered: 24th Dec 99
Location: West Midlands
User status: Offline
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Well I use this website's pricing to check against my own prices, and also to check whether they sell anything cheaper than my usual trade suppliers.
I also resell their products sometimes when my usual sources are out of stock, so I need to know when to adjust my prices as I don't want to be making a loss by selling lower than my cost price.
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Ian
Site Administrator
Registered: 28th Aug 99
Location: Liverpool
User status: Offline
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All of which is for your own purposes so it may not even be apparent that you're automating things unless they keep an eye on the access logs. Even then there's absolutely no issue with IP, it's just public domain price information which you are using to conduct your business.
I would think you'll be fine. The supermarkets do this type of thing and make TV adverts about it
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Sam
Moderator
Premium Member
Registered: 24th Dec 99
Location: West Midlands
User status: Offline
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Nice one, cheers mate! 
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pow
Premium Member
Registered: 11th Sep 06
Location: Hazlemere, Buckinghamshire
User status: Offline
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Just randomise the time a little 
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noshua
Member
Registered: 19th Nov 08
User status: Offline
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Did this for a couple website a couple month ago, I found this the easiest way;
http://php.net/manual/en/domxpath.query.php
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ed
Member
Registered: 10th Sep 03
User status: Offline
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This is useful too: http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net/
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