[mythtv-users] MS media center

[Chris Petersen]

Christopher Meredith wrote:
> I'm not a lawyer either, but I will be in August. ;-) And companies
> can restrict the use of data they provide, but they do so in the form
> of licences. The MCE EULA (which is a form of a contract which you
> must ACCEPT to be bound to) says that you can only access their
> servers with MCE. But the data is not copyrighted (at least not by
> Microsoft or Zap2It) and as long as you have not accepted the MCE
> EULA, there's nothing to violate.

TMS claims a very strong copyright on the data they license to MS, SD, 
and others.  They employ a huge staff of copy writers to fill in things 
like those program descriptions, which makes them a creative work that 
can be protected by copyright law.

I won't get into anything specific about mc2xml, but I can assure you 
that MS and TMS don't think too kindly about unauthorized users 
accessing the system.  Some of us at SD don't like it either because it 
propagates the sentiment that people in open source community have no 
respect for intellectual property.  There is an inexpensive and 
completely legitimate alternative to mc2xml, so why not use it and 
support the community behind the software you like so much?

One other thing you may not have considered -- the servers you're 
downloading data from likely have a terms of use attached to them 
(separate from the MCE EULA) that restricts access only to authorized 
programs.  It would very much be within their legal right to go after 
unauthorized users for "hacking".  I'm not saying that it would stick 
(or that they would even bother), but it wouldn't surprise me.

-Chris