[mythtv-users] *Why* we'd prefer discussions about questionably legal activities to go somewhere else.

[Dewey Smolka]

>
> Actually I don't think those guys can do any harm because I'm pretty sure
> TMS would have to keep the data stream available no matter what.  If they
> ever shut down SD not only would they lose paying customers, but I'll bet it
> would make it much harder for them to go after the non-paying scrapers who
> could then argue they would have paid for the data but chose scraping
> because TMS shut down SD and so scraping was their only choice.

Actually, TMS doesn't give two figs about the revenue stream from SD.
It's not even a drop in the bucket for the Tribune media empire.

And they could very easily defeat scrapers by embedding the publicly
available listings data in images or in flash, making it all but
impossible to scrape.

SD is a very useful and very reasonable compromise ensuring that US
Myth users can get high quality data easily and reliably, for a
nominal fee that most of us are more than happy to pay.

It's not that scrapers for US data can't or shouldn't exist, but that
this is not the venue to discuss them.