In the last few weeks, Snap has sent two emails to its entire database and published two (March 7, January 24) blog posts on the very serious issue of image scrapers. We've also privately attempted to contact EVERY group who's been scraping our image database, but most of them left fake email addresses in our database.

Then we flipped the switch and replaced all those images with a placeholder.

Today, TechCrunch has written about the first high-profile site to be shut down, a search engine start-up called ManagedQ which was building a business around using our technology without asking.

Since we launched Snap Shots in November 2006, we have invested millions of dollars to build a massive infrastructure (hundreds of servers), pay a team of world-class developers to work overtime, and build the largest database of website previews in the known universe.

We consider this database to be immensely valuable, but we give it away free as part of Snap Shots. For companies like ManagedQ that want license an image feed, we strongly recommend Girafa as Snap does not license its feed.

Lastly, the content contained within Snap Shots is licensed according to specific agreements with its owners including Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, Wikipedia, etc. Image previews are covered under Fair Use statutes, but Snap always honors requests to remove them from our database.