[mythtv-users] Frontend - Category Display

Michael T. Dean mtdean at thirdcontact.com
Tue Mar 25 11:00:34 UTC 2014


On 03/24/2014 04:30 PM, Karl Newman wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 24, 2014 at 12:21 PM, wrote:
>>   I recently changed my data source from schedules direct to tvguide (by
>> way of webgrabplus),
> Ugh. Please stop doing this. Schedules Direct is an excellent quality, low
> cost grabber which many of us sincerely appreciate (and doesn't violate any
> terms of service...). Please use and support it so we can all continue to
> benefit from it. I mean really, it's only $25/year!
>
> Okay, rant over.

And, just to be clear, use of WebGrab+Plus (is that "web grab plus 
plus"?) in the US

http://www.webgrabplus.com/epg-channels#stc_36

with zap2it.com /is/ a violation of Tribune Media Service's/zap2it's 
Terms of Service.

http://www.zap2it.com/services/site/zap-termsofservice,0,7891102.story

under "Copyright" (i.e. sections such as, "You may not ... incorporate 
the Content in any database, compilation, archive or cache. ...  You may 
not scrape or otherwise copy our Content without permission. ... You 
agree not to ... use any data mining, data gathering or extraction 
method." among others).

And if enough people steal this data from TMS/zap2it, and too few people 
actually pay for the data they're using, then Schedules Direct may not 
be able to afford to license the TMS data, at which point there would be 
no available, legal source of listings data for US users, other than the 
(sparse, generally-useless) EIT data transmitted by the station within 
the stream.  This could be a very bad thing for the entire MythTV 
community--possibly resulting in MythTV becoming basically unusable in 
the US.

If all you need is Voice of America EPG (from voanews.com), though, it 
may be allowed--but you'll have to read and interpret the ToS yourself:

http://www.voanews.com/info/terms_of_use_privacy_policy/1363.html

I'm not sure whether it violates ToS when used for Canadian channels, 
but based on your e-mail address, I'm guessing you're in the US.

http://www.webgrabplus.com/epg-channels#stc_8

Mike


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