[mythtv] Listings concept idea

[Rob Smith]

On 7/4/07, Nate Carlson <natecars at natecarlson.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 3 Jul 2007, Keith Barrett wrote:
> > If MythTV resorts to screen scraping (again), rather than having
> > thousands of MythTV systems do individual scrapes every nn hours, we
> > should have a central server that does the scrapes. All the MythTV
> > backends could download the resulting databases from there. A central DB
> > also means you could scrape from multiple sources to get more accurate
> > data, and I'm sure the sites you are scraping would appreciate the
> > controlled traffic.
>
> If there are any legal issues with screenscraping, this would put the
> responsibility on whoever owns the server instead of the end users. Not a
> good thing.

Indeed. Most (all?) of the tv listing sites stay up due to ad revenue
and screenscraping removes the ability for them to get that revenue.
Setting up a central server to do it would setup a nice legal target
that can be proven to be removing revenue by breaking their usage
agreements and/or copyright restrictions (
http://www.tvguide.com/services/Terms.aspx for an example, "Except for
that information which is in the public domain or for which you have
been given written permission by TV Guide or the copyright owner, you
may not copy, modify, publish, transmit, distribute, perform, display,
participate in the transfer or sale, create derivative works, or in
any way exploit the content of tvguide.com or any portion thereof." )

~Rob