Frinkiac: Simpsons quote search engine

It is arguably fair use in the U.S. I don't think there is enough case law to be sure. It's hard to predict how it would go in litigation. I think you're right that the defendants wouldn't have a particularly strong case, but they wouldn't have the weakest.

The courts have generally judged significant "transformation" of the source material to be powerful in determining fair use. I think that would be in their benefit. Also it could be argued that this has very little effect on the market for the original copyrighted material, which would be in their favor. Of course, the copyright holder would see and argue it differently if they choose to sue. And the "the amount and substantiality of the portion taken" would not look good for the defendants -- but even though some common belief focuses on this factor almost exclusively -- thinking as long as you copy only 10 pages or whatever you're good, and if you don't you're definitely not -- that's not how it works, it's just one factor, and one that the courts in the past couple decades have somewhat de-emphasized.

But I don't think we can say "no way it is fair use", or "it could hardly be more clear cut." It could go either way. Fair use in the U.S. for novel things, not already well established as fair use or not, almost always looks like this.

Counterpoint: copying every single page of every book and making it searchable can be fair use. It just takes only 10 years of litigation and appeals to determine that. See Authors Guild v. Google. https://www.eff.org/document/ruling-appeals-court

Also, the "TV Eyes" system that recorded television newscasts and made the searchable was fair use, though certain features were found to be infringing. See https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/08/dangerous-decision-fai....

Point is, the law is hardly clear cut and never is with new technologies. Without someone willing to take a risk and develop a potentially infringing technology we would never have had VCRs, MP3 players, YouTube.... I applaud the creators for making an incredibly useful resource and I hope if they do face legal threats they get a zealous pro-bono defense from someone like the EFF or Larry Lessig.

Make sense with the seasons. Certainly helps when you've got issues like season 11 being off like it is. There's other reports of the search functionality being literal with punctuation and other things to work out. It'd be really neat with more polish and possibly adding in more tv shows. I imagine the data needs are pretty substantial, but I wonder if there might be a good way to deal with that by having the server generate the jpgs on the fly from the better compressed video files. That might really be a big win if BPG or other formats actually take off and begin replacing jpg.

.srt files are quite straight forward, but some of the other formats can get quite annoying in my experience.

The spelling in the captions can be hard to predict, and it's not good at fuzzy matching:

https://frinkiac.com/?p=search&q=I+was+saying+buu-urns

They may or may not (be allowed to) have a sense of humor about it. Our 24 Hours of LeMons car's publicity was sent to Matt Groening by a friend, and he passed it around the office. Apparently he asked their publicity folks if they could invite us up to show off the car about the same time that legal asked about sending us a cease and desist.

In the case of the car, it's probably fair use and the only issue was likely that we have non-Fox-approved sponsorship on it, but they probably decided their advertisers wouldn't complain about it because it's not exactly big bucks changing hands here.

So yeah, we got to meet Matt Groening and David X Cohen and Al Jean and a lot of the writers. It was definitely a cool experience.

http://www.thehomercar.com

Or even with just one quote:

https://frinkiac.com/?p=search&q=%22moon

It looks like it uses really naive word breaking, so it considers the punctuation part of the word.

They could definitely use some better text indexing/relevancy ranking implementations. I had mixed success. I'd recommend lucene or something based on lucene (Solr, ElasticSearch).

I think he's making a joke about clicking the "next image" fast enough that it appears to be animated.

"bubbles can burst?" https://frinkiac.com/?p=caption&q=golden+age+&e=S13E18&t=107....