[mythtv-users] IMDB Screen Scrap... legal?

Jay R. Ashworth jra at baylink.com
Fri Jul 8 19:23:11 EDT 2005


On Fri, Jul 08, 2005 at 11:13:37PM +0100, Stuart Morgan wrote:
> On Fri 8 July 2005 21:56, Nick wrote:
> > IANAL - I don't think that scraping would be covered under that ruling
> > due to the definition of a 'collection of facts'. I agree that if a
> > site states that certain uses of its data are forbidden then it should
> > be respected, especially as the data concerned is the property of the
> > site. It is however quite hard to regulate access to a busy site if
> > data is coming from a 'normal' request and being used
> > non-commercially. This seems to be a situation similar to the
> > gathering of TV listings e.g Tribune, and whereby a pay service would
> > allow the content to be licensed for a particular use.
> 
> It comes down to a moral, if not legal issue. You can look for and probably 
> find loopholes in their request, but it goes against the spirit if not the 
> letter of the terms to do so.

Of course, given the hijacking of publically contributed information
that lead to that database existing in the first place...

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
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