[mythtv-users] Free US/Canada Listings

[Brian Wood]

R. G. Newbury wrote:

> Screen scraping a website for TV schedule listings data enters a 
> decidedly grey area in North America. The actual data may not be 
> copyrightable, but the presentation by whoever, is. It may be presented 
> in ways which use technological measures to protect the copyright in the 
> presentation (yeah, well that would be the argument!). An individual 
> user may fit within the fair use exemption, or even the more limited 
> Canadian fair dealing limitation. But the DCMA makes the scraper writer 
> a criminal. Proposed amendments to the Copyright Act in Canada would 
> make a scraper writer a criminal too, even for allowed private copies of 
> sound recordings.

Lots of people have thrown the word "criminal" around on this list. As
has been said by others, that implies the violation of some criminal
statute.

Violating the DMCA might make somebody a civil violator, a litigant, a
defendant, or what lawyers often call a "client", it would not make him
or her a "criminal", except perhaps in the very broadest vernacular
sense, certainly not in a statutory sense.

beww