DVDPedia ? Illegal ?

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sikosis
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DVDPedia ? Illegal ?

Post by sikosis »

Hi,

According to the front of your site ... it states
DVDpedia lets you retrieve information about your movies (both VHS
and DVD) from various sites on the Internet. The main info generally
comes from the Amazon sites (US, UK, Germany, Canada, France, Japan)
but DVDpedia also gives you access to the Internet Movie Data Base
(IMDB) as well as an additional Spanish, French, Italian, Australian
and German movie site.
On Delicious Libraries site they state the following:-
A lot of shareware programs illegally make copies of copyrighted data
from IMDB and other sources. This makes you and/or the author of those
programs liable for tens of thousands of dollars per infringement.
I'm curious as to what DVDpedia's take is on this ...


Also, what Australian Movie site are you using ?
DJY
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Post by DJY »

R4 plugin is EzyDVD
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Nora
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Post by Nora »

IMDb is actually the only site of all the plug-ins that DVDpedia uses that has an explicit statement on its website prohibiting the use of the sites' information in 'scraping'. So the Delicious Library statement is partly true. However, we believe DVDpedia's use of the IMDb site could be constituted as 'fair use'.

Fair use is based on four factors: purpose and character, nature, amount and substantiality, and effect. (For a more detailed outline of these, have a look at Wikipedia.)
- the purpose and character of the use is personal, that of our users.
- the nature of the work is facts; those cannot be copyrighted. We do not gather the summary which would clearly be a copyright infringement.
- We only gather a small portion of the information.
- We do not compete with IMDb.

We're also providing links back to the IMDb site, which is beneficial to IMDb.

Of course these factors vary depending on how they are interpreted and applied, and we would certainly remove the IMDb plug-in if asked by IMDb to do so. We do not have the money, ambition or understanding of international law to go to court.

With all that said, we are in the process of an update to DVDpedia. This will bring more flexibility and more information from Amazon along with a Links section where IMDb links can be added without any ambiguity as to copyright. IMDb does not forbid linking to their page, on the contrary, they welcome it. We believe that this new system will actually enhance the program as you will have access to all the IMDb information straight from IMDb with just one click, not just the limited portion of information we gather now.

Thanks for bringing this issue up - I am sure many of our users are aware of all the discussions happening on the Internet and in other media regarding copyright, fair use, linking and scraping. (Google Print being one of the latest major issue.)
Ted
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Post by Ted »

Nora wrote:With all that said, we are in the process of an update to DVDpedia. This will bring more flexibility and more information from Amazon along with a Links section where IMDb links can be added without any ambiguity as to copyright. IMDb does not forbid linking to their page, on the contrary, they welcome it. We believe that this new system will actually enhance the program as you will have access to all the IMDb information straight from IMDb with just one click, not just the limited portion of information we gather now.
While having a link to the IMBD info is certainly a useful thing, I hope you don't disable the old way of doing things, as often I find my *Pedia software the most useful in places without Internet access:

Examples:
I have brought my PowerBook to a friend's house, and am showing off what great software the ***Pedias are, as well as showing off my collection :cool:

I am on a European trip buying CDs/DVDs/Books that aren't available in the US a need a handy guide to what I already have, what is on my wish list, etc.

In any event, this whole issue is both silly and upsetting. Silly, because Amazon owns the IMDB so how can it possibly matter which part of Amazon one gets the data from?

Upsetting, because the IMDB is based on user contributed data, and now we are told that the we can't use the very same data that we worked hard to contribute/correct???

Anyway, unless the big bad lawyers come knocking on your door, I urge you keep the existing functionality.

Ted
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gottadoit
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Post by gottadoit »

I do not know if it is me or DVDpedida 2.3.0 under Tiger or if it is the IMDB or AMAZON but I am getting a great deal of wrong information when I get advanced info from an amazon.com (USA) found title such as "Haunted" with Kate Beckindale (there are two and both fail) even if I add the IMDB number first.

I also have this problem with "Heavy Metal" 1981 animated Superbit.

Is something broken or it is a heuristic?

Thanks.
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