Can I use the rating of different restaurants from different websites like Yelp on my own website? I am thinking of creating a website with restaurants ratings. You would be able to search for restaurants and in the result list you would see the name of the restaurant and the ratings of different websites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, OpenTable, Facebook, and Google (for that restaurant). I am little confused about the rules here. First, I have read that if you use facts from websites it's not copyrighted and it is fair use. Second, I see Google results with the Yelp rating (with stars) in the search result. Third, they are plugins for WordPress that let you show ratings (https://wordpress.org/plugins/widget-yelp-reviews/, https://en-ca.wordpress.org/plugins/yelp-widget-pro/) Fourth, in Yelp API TOS they have: Enhance your app with Yelp ratings, reviews, photos and much more With a check mark in front.. But later it says: display or use Yelp user review ratings (numerical, star or any other representation of the Yelp user review rating calculation) alongside or in conjunction with restaurants where Eat24 is not providing ordering and delivery services (i.e. don’t use Yelp user review ratings for the benefit of an Eat24 competitor); I only want to use the overall rating of a restaurant not every single rating of each users. Does that include review rating calculation and Yelp user review ratings? So is my idea fair use of these websites data or is not because of the TOS?
It is not clear from your question whether you intend to make use of the Yelp API to display Yelp ratings on your own website. You ask: So is my idea fair use of these websites data or is not because of the TOS? The ToS is not for Yelp data, it is for the Yelp API. The ToS will only apply to you if you agree to it. However, if you agree to the ToS for the API, fair use is irrelevant. The ToS is a legally binding contract that trumps fair use. You also brings up Google's display of Yelp stars. This display is not based on the Google using the Yelp API, but on Yelp opting in on a mechansim created by Google called Rich Snippets. Returning to Yelp ToS, it is clear that its purpose is permit re-use of their "ratings, reviews, photos" etc. by to promote your own Yelp-rated business. Also what they clearly do not allow you do do, is to build a competitor to Yelp. Since your planned restaurant rating site would compete with Yelp, you will not be able to use the Yelp API to get the data. What if you didn't use the Yelp API, but simply scraped their site - would fair use apply? What constitutes fair use in borderline cases such as yours is mainly decided by case law. Case law differs from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. My general impression is that it is not fair use if the use is commercial in nature (i.e. you create something intended to directly compete with the site you scrape the data from) and your product or service does not communicate something new and different from the original or expands its utility. As always: If you want specific advice, hire a lawyer.
The store is, as far as i can see, not using the trademarked image to sell their cake. Your family does not intend to sell anything at all. This photo, from the description, could not reasonably be confused with an official image from the trademark holder. (all of this is based on your description, of course). Therefore, the trademark holder probably won't sue for trademark infringement, even if they somehow heard of this event, and if they did sue, they would quite likely lose. You would be making a copy of a presumably copyrighted image. You might have an active defense, but that is very hard to be sure of in advance. (Note that "fair use" is a very specifically US legal concept, and would not apply in the UK. The roughly comparable concept is "fair dealing" but that is more restrictive, and follows somewhat different rules.) In any case, it is possible that the rights holder would sue, and if the situation were a bit different (the was only one person pictured, making the shirt with the protected image very prominent, for example) there might be a larger chance of such a suit being successful. No business is going to want a bakery department manager deciding whether a particular use of a particular image does or does not infringe IP rights, and whether it does or does not expose the business to significant risk. Just to get an opinion from their lawyer on whether this image infringes would probably cost them several times the price of the cake with image printing. The store has no doubt written its guidelines to err well on the side of caution, because one suit, even if they won, would cost far more than the profits of many cakes, and if they lost, could have a very negative effect on their bottom line indeed. The store is entitled to restrict what business it does to keep itself safe from lawsuits. It is going to keep well on the cautious side, in all likelihood, and so it should. I fear you will have to find a store with a different policy, or use a different picture.
Google is very helpful in this regard. I typed nyc restaurant bath and it suggested nyc restaurant bathroom law, the first result being http://www1.nyc.gov/nyc-resources/service/2360/restaurant-bathroom-requirements. It says: You can make reports about any food establishment with 20 or more seats that has no toilet and was established after 1977. These establishments must provide toilets for their patrons. Food establishments that have been in operation since 1977 or before are exempt from this requirement. Food establishments with 19 or fewer customer seats are not required to provide bathroom access to the public. Food establishments are not required to allow public access to their employee toilets. Patrons are not permitted to use any toilets where the patron must walk through the kitchen or any food storage or food preparation area. Call 311 to report a restaurant with 20 or more seats that has no toilet and was opened after 1977.
england-and-wales Yes it is legal. There is no law prohibiting such behaviour. A restaurant menu invites people to ask for items on the menu. People are free to make other offers too, e.g. &quot;no cheese&quot; or &quot;will you add an egg?&quot; or &quot;will you accept £10 for the burger, it's all I have?&quot; The customer is free to make an offer and the restauranteur is free to accept or refuse the offer. &quot;No I don't want to sell you a burger patty on its own for £3.&quot; Unfair contract terms seem irrelevant because there is no contract at the stage when the customer asks the restauranteur for a food item.
We cannot dispense personalized legal advice: that is what your attorney is for. However, I agree with your analysis that this is most likely covered by fair use, and indeed it is not obvious that you have taken anything that is protected. There is no creativity behind a number such as entries in the &quot;I did N pushups&quot; column. The arrangement of data into a web page passes the smidgen of creativity test, but &quot;210&quot; is not a creative number. The terms of service of a website cannot negate your right to use the website however you want in a non-infringing way. If your use is &quot;fair use&quot;, then they can't tell you that you can't use it. In case it turns out that &quot;fair use&quot; fails, the matter would hinge on what exactly the TOS says. They may have granted you permission to make use of their &quot;information&quot;. So there are three positive avenues for you to consider: not protected, fair use, and permitted. A practical difficulty is that a university lawyer is only interested in the interests of the university, and they are as likely to say &quot;don't do that&quot; or &quot;get permission&quot; as they are to say &quot;that is fair use&quot;. You can hire a lawyer who is paid to care about your interest, though there is never a guarantee that the lawyer's advice is correct. I think it is likely that the lawyer will tell you to not say anything until legally forced to, given the apparent rebuff of your request for special permission.
My opinion is that the copying of a single API endpoint, "run" that takes a function as an argument is not infringement. I can think of several lines of argument that get to this same conclusion: Originality: It doesn't exhibit the modicum of creativity required by the originality test. (Feist) Short phrases doctrine: It is a short word or phrase, which both the copyright office (Copyright Office Circular, 37 CFR 202.1) and courts (e.g. Hutchins v. Zoll) have declared ineligible for copyright. Merger: The merger doctrine allows reuse of an expression if it is one of only a very few number of ways of expressing an idea. I can't think of many other ways to express a function intended to run a function other than with the verb "run". Scènes à faire: It is not infringement to use an expression if it has become standard, stock, or common in a particular setting. Naming a function "run" is common in the programming community. Any one of these alone would be enough to rule out copyright infringement by taking this individual component of Excel's API. Note: Whether merger and scènes à faire are part of the originality/copyrightability analysis or part of the infringement analysis is not uniform across circuits. For example, the 6th circuit considers both merger and scènes à faire part of the copyrightability analysis. But, the 2nd and 9th circuits treat them as part of the infringement analysis and in the 9th circuit, they are affirmative defenses.
If the image is protected by copyright (as most modern images are), the uploading it as a profile picture or using it on a web site is copyright infringement unless one has permission from the copyright owner, or an exception to copyright applies. If copyright infringement occurs, the owner can sue for damages, or issue a takedown notice, or both, but does not have to do either. In the vast majority of cases, no one will do anything about such infringements if the owner (or the owner's authorized agent) does not. All the above is true in all of Europe and North America, ad in most other countries as well. Permission can be granted directly by the copyright owner to a user, or granted by the owner releasing the image (or other wrk) under a license. Google's general developer TOS Document](https://policies.google.com/terms#toc-content) reads (in relevant part): Google content Some of our services include content that belongs to Google — for example, many of the visual illustrations you see in Google Maps. You may use Google’s content as allowed by these terms and any service-specific additional terms, but we retain any intellectual property rights that we have in our content. Don’t remove, obscure, or alter any of our branding, logos, or legal notices. If you want to use our branding or logos, please see the Google Brand Permissions page. Other content Finally, some of our services give you access to content that belongs to other people or organizations — for example, a store owner’s description of their own business, or a newspaper article displayed in Google News. You may not use this content without that person or organization’s permission, or as otherwise allowed by law. The views expressed in other people or organizations’ content are theirs, and don’t necessarily reflect Google’s views. It would seem that each Google service has its own terms which indicate in what ways one may use Google content. It would further seem that content originally obtained from others and distributed by Google will have some set of permissions granted by the uploader. These must be checked for each image, I would think. There is no single one-rule-fits-all answer. I gather that the APIs will have methods for determining which images are from Google itself, and which from others, and some method for indicating the permissions that accompany an image. A user of these APIs must learn how to extract ownership and permissions metadata for an image obtained via the API, and how to use it (or not use it) in accordance with the available permissions. Now let us look at exceptions to copyright. These vary by country. Several European countries have an exception for &quot;personal use&quot; which might cover the profile pictures, but probably will not cover general use on a web site. There are exceptions for &quot;news reporting&quot; which might cover images illustrating recent news events. Some have exceptions for educational or instructional use. The UK (and several othe countries) have the concept of fair dealing which bundles several exceptions together. This might cover an image used in a personal profile, use of images in news reports, and limited educational use, but will probably not cover general use on a website. The US has the concept of fair use which is rather complex, but does not specifically include a &quot;personal use&quot; exception. See Is this copyright infringement? Is it fair use? What if I don&#39;t make any money off it? and other threads here tagged with fair-use for more on this. It is somewhat unlikely that any of these exceptions will cover general use on a web site of images obtained via Google APIs and used beyond the permissions listed in the metadata accompanying the image. But it will very much depend on the specifics of the case. If the image fetching is doe not by you in building a site or an app, but by your app's users who may then use them improperly, strictly speaking that is each user's own responsibility, you cannot effectively police what your users do, and have no duty to try. It will be a good practice if you include text explaining to your users that not all images are free for general use. You might want to link to the Google TOS. If the API returns metadata indicating the permissions status of each image fetched, yo0u might well want to provide this metadata in a useful form to your users. You might even want to allow a user to filter images obtained by permission status. But whether this is practical or useful to users will depend on the purpose and design of an app.
Yes One could certainly put up a site whose only content was a link to another domain. And I can't find any law which this would violate. If the link is a &quot;deep link&quot;, and if it bypasses a log-in page, while the other site is so designed that all access is intended to go through the login, I believe (but cannot at the moment verify) that the owner of the other site could claim that this violates their copyright. In any case it is not a good idea.But a link to an appropriate page should have no problem, nor should pointing your domain at an appropriate entry page. Therefor, since simply re-pointing a domain should have the same effect as simply linking, in those cases where it works at all, it should be legal. Doing it with an iframe, which would truly open another site within your site, may not be if the other site forbids such use, as in the ToS. The case law on that is not settled, but many sites object to it, as the answer by @BlueDogRanch points out. I don't see a good reason why one would want to do this, but that isn't the question. Copying the HTML of another site and modifying the URLs while keeping the content the same would pretty clearly be a copyright infringement, besides being a lot of work to little obvious point. It also isn't what the question asked about. Building a one-page site that has only a simple link or a redirect would clearly be legal, and would serve the purpose of causing your domain to lead a user to another site, but it isn't, strictly speaking, what was asked about either.