TripAdvisor makes a grab for your website content.

[Rupert]

Not verified this, waiting for Sue to tell me if she is aware if she has already agreed to it. :

https://blog.freetobook.com/2021/03/tripadvisor-website-grab/

Late last week TripAdvisor sent out an email advising of a change in their terms and conditions. This was no trivial change, they demand access to all text and images on your website which they can harvest anytime and have perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable rights over. This is a grab for all the content on your website forever. TripAdvisor can then use any of those images and text as they see fit and for their potential profit without any payment to you (A copy of the terms at the bottom of the page).

[ergophobe]

I wonder what's behind this. Traditionally, hotels build data feeds using a third party and generally want Trip Advisor to grab as many images as possible to enhance their property listing... but not to use willy nilly. Our problem was always figuring out how to get old images off and new images on.

[Rupert]

I hoped you might have an interesting take on this I was not aware of, and you do.

OK, so we have not been made to agree to this either, so it might be some sort of clickbait, hate post against Tripadvisor (I don't think so, as Freetobook I think are genuine).

We load our own images to TA, and I am not sure why they might want to scrape my site, but equally, I can see why they might want others to rank lower, which they might well if all the content is copied by a stronger site.

I guess we wait and see.

[buckworks]

Might be relevant ... in a different situation a Texas lawyer once told me that they liked to get user agreement for all sorts of things that they didn't actually intend to do because it headed off a lot of complaints about the things they did plan to do.

[Travoli]

I think buckworks highlights an important point.

Also, TA might just be trying to remain competitive with Google, which already uses publisher content however they want.

[ergophobe]

Reading the actual language, they are just asking for permission to use your Marks and images of your rooms and property on your Property Listing and in other advertising. So it's not a blanket permission to scrape your site, but it does give them permission to use your rooms images in other content.

I'm not sure it's nefarious. Generally speaking, hotels are jockeying to get TA and their brethren to use their materials in exactly that way. We, of course, would assert copyright on our images just to prevent use in a "Hotel X Sucks" post or site. But in general, we always hoped people would steal our rooms images. I mentioned in a previous thread that a really good rooms photographer charges over $1000/composition. You want to shoot a room from two angles? $2000, maybe more. But the images those top photographers get are nice and present the rooms really well. The more often those are stolen, the better the return on the cost of the photography, as long as they are labelled with the name of the property.

A few years ago I noticed that TripAdvisor and Booking.com were dominating "Best X in Y" searches (Best hotel in Austin) with auto-generated listicles. The quality was atrocious, but they were having great success in Google Search and they were pulling images automatically from many sources, not just the rooms images uploaded to the partner portal. Perhaps people objected to their images being used there (but why would you do that?) or perhaps the TA lawyers just worried that eventually someone would.

So I suspect that Buckworks and Trav are right - if you get people to agree to the broadest possible usage of your materials, then you're covered for whatever you do with those images.

[Rupert]

They have not made us as a small property sign it yet.