[mythtv] Listings concept idea

[Trevor Wagner]

On 7/4/07, Michael George <mgeorge3 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Indeed. Most (all?) of the tv listing sites stay up due to ad revenue
> and screenscraping removes the ability for them to get that revenue.
> Setting up a central server to do it would setup a nice legal target
> that can be proven to be removing revenue by breaking their usage
> agreements and/or copyright restrictions (
> http://www.tvguide.com/services/Terms.aspx for an
example, "Except for
> that information which is in the public domain or for which you have
> been given written permission by TV Guide or the copyright owner, you
> may not copy, modify, publish, transmit, distribute, perform, display,
> participate in the transfer or sale, create derivative works, or in
> any way exploit the content of tvguide.com or any portion thereof." )
>

The idea of screen scraping individual channel sites has been
discussed.  This would most likely avoid legal issues from scraping
something like tvguide.com.  One of the problems with this idea is the
frequency of updates when scraping so many various sources.  Using a
central server to do the scraping would help with this issue because
only the server's scraper would need to be updated to match.