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

[Nick Rout]

On Fri, 2005-07-08 at 14:40 -0700, Gabe Rubin wrote: 
> The Feist Decision held that one can't get a proprietary interest in
> the unorigianl assembalage of facts (like a phone book listing in
> alphabetical order, which was the precise question in that case). 
> However, it leaves open protection for an original arrangement which
> IMDB could arguably present a case for.
> 
> Nevertheless, there are many causes of actions that iumbd could have
> outside the scope of copyright law.  If you are accessing their site
> in a way they have expressly forbidden (screenscraping), they could
> press a tresspass to chattels cause of action.  Other companies such
> as eBay and Verio (I believe, whoever maintains the Whois database)
> has been succesful on this theory.
> 
> Feist gives small comfort to someone who is screenscraping a site like
> imdb against their express wishes.

Does anyone have a definition of screenscraping? Is it the
smei-automatic harvesting of less than the full page and then storing it
your own database for later retrieval? Or does it require a wholesale
downloading of the larger part of a site?

There must be degrees of behavior here, for example surely to store
just, for example, the uid of an entry in your database cannot be a
problem? EG I store 0317705 for the incredibles, and nothing more. The
mythvideo module then downloads the page each time I want to see info
about the incredibles, and displays it in mythbrowser. A slight delay
perhaps. How could they object?

Anyway google must surely be bigger transgressors than any mythtv user.
The whole of imdb is mirrored there, so perhaps we should scrape from
there. is it any harder for the imdb.pl script to search and retrieve
from google's api?



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-- 
Nick Rout <nick at rout.co.nz>