Re: Services_IMDB ??

From: Date: Sat, 19 May 2007 14:47:43 +0000
Subject: Re: Services_IMDB ??
References: 1 2 3 4 5  Groups: php.pear.dev 
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On 5/19/07, Helgi Þormar <helgith@gmail.com> wrote:
On 5/19/07, Philippe Jausions <Philippe.Jausions@11abacus.com> wrote: IMO that'd make it a big NO. Unless IMDB comes up with its own web service API with associated Terms & Conditions (which I haven't look if they do) I don't see that package as a good candidate for PEAR. I've heard it's in the pipeline but well, might just be gossip Anyway, screen scrappers are usually a nightmare to maintain and prone to breaking easily. I don't think PEAR should host "enabler" packages, and obviously using such a package require the user to break the T's & C's. Well they are breaking the T&C if they don't get a written permission, that's all.
Knowing IMDB, I am against that kind of package in PEAR as this is both not ethical and not legal according to the "License and Site Access" part of the http://www.imdb.com/help/show_article?conditions. Making such package into pear yes, could be very useful but I am strongly about making that kind of package available and easy to use for everyone. As anyone that ever did scripts like those know, it is hell to maintain, since it is not API based, it's relying on the HTML pages to do hardcore regular expressions. This because really hard to maintain because as soon as one tag changes and the whole package can become unusuable. It is also against my personal ethics. I believe that if you have a company and want information, then buy it instead of *spidering* through a website, grabbing the information that matters to you. Yes it is easy to do, but as long as IMDB does not have an online API I am strongly against that. Reminder: "Robots and Screen Scraping: You may not use data mining, robots, screen scraping, or similar data gathering and extraction tools on this site, except with our express written consent as noted below." Of course with written consent it's doable, but I am totally against opening this to the public. -- David Coallier, Founder & Software Architect, Agora Production (http://agoraproduction.com) 51.42.06.70.18

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