[mythtv] mythmovie grabber issue (ToS)

Josh Lefler joshlefler at leflerinc.com
Wed Jan 14 19:31:12 UTC 2009


I'll leave the legal discussion to the developers with commit rights or 
the legal experts except to say that the Cineworld ToS says:
"Except as expressly permitted herein, no portion of the information on 
the Web Site may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without 
prior written permission from the Mark owner."

and the Empire Cinemas ToS Says:
"Save as expressly permitted in these Terms of Use or elsewhere in this 
website material from this website may not be copied, reproduced, 
republished, uploaded, posted, transmitted, or distributed in any way."

As to the technical issue I raised:

I understand your point, but I think there is a chance for conflicts in 
some scenarios.

In your scenario with different companies providing their own theater 
data for a set area, you are absolutely right that conflicts wouldn't be 
an issue. However, I could easily see a scenario where a company has 
theaters in City A, City B, and City C. On their page for City A it 
lists movies from both A and B and on their page for City C it lists 
movies for both City B and C. (This would be most likely to occur if 
City B was between A and C and they wanted individuals in each market to 
see all of their reasonably close choices.)

If a consumer lived in City B and wanted to see listings for A, B, and 
C, they would run into duplicates.

It may not be a big enough concern to eventually write code to address, 
but I do think its a large enough concern to be considered.

Best of luck implementing whatever solution works out.

Josh Lefler

xavier hervy wrote:
> xavier hervy wrote:
>   
>> Josh Lefler wrote:
>>   
>>     
>>> MythMovies shells out to the grabber as an external program, then 
>>> receives back XML. It would be possible to write a sort of "MetaGrabber" 
>>> that shells out to various other grabbers then combines the results into 
>>> one XML block to be returned to MythMovies.
>>>   
>>>     
>>>       
>> That is not the point
>>   
>>     
>>> I'm not necessarily advocating this approach and wouldn't have a problem 
>>> with the idea of multiple grabbers in MythMovies itself, but its an 
>>> option to consider.
>>>   
>>>     
>>>       
>> It is about legal issue not feasibility.
>>   
>>     
>>> If someone did implement multiple grabbers in MythMovies itself, they 
>>> would need to consider what to do with multiple listings for a given 
>>> theater or movie in the various sources - especially if these entries 
>>> have conflicting data.
>>>
>>>   
>>>     
>>>       
>> No conflict possible, on theater is own by only one company or franchise
>>   
>>     
>>> Josh Lefler
>>>   
>>>     
>>>       
>>   
>>     
> Just correcting my awful english:
>
> You are missing the point here.
> Technically it is far better/easier to have only one source with all the 
> data. But in practice, it can be illegal.
>
> The idea is to create a grabber for each company/franchise which own 
> theaters.
> For example a grabber for Cineworld would get the data  from 
> http://www.cineworld.co.uk/ and a grabber for Empire Cinema would get 
> its data from http://www.empirecinemas.co.uk.
>
> By definition cineworld website would not display Empire Cinema Theaters 
> show times information as they don't really want their customer to go to a 
> concurrent company.
>
> So having twice the same theater from different sources should not be 
> possible and then not a problem .
>
> Nobody would really prefer to write a grabber for each company, but it 
> might be a way to avoid the google ToS problem (or other sources).
> It does basicly means that mythmovie would freely advertises the 
> theaters's show times of each franchise.
>
> If I was Cineworld or Empire Cinema, why would I forbid my potential 
> customer to scrap my page in order to display in a more accessible 
> manner my show times information?
>
>
> My question is:
> Would this approach solve the ToS problem ?
> (I am mainly talking to the dev with commit right to svn)
>
> Regards,
> Xavier
>
>
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>   
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