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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

The terms and conditions seem pretty clear that you can't save site content except for page caching: http://www.imdb.com/help/show_article?conditions

>IMDb grants you a limited license to access and make personal use of this site and not to download (other than page caching) or modify it, or any portion of it, except with express written consent of IMDb. This site or any portion of this site may not be reproduced, duplicated, copied, sold, resold, visited, or otherwise exploited for any commercial purpose without express written consent of IMDb. This license does not include any resale or commercial use of this site or its contents or any derivative use of this site or its contents.

(and no, I'm not trying to be a negative nancy. I've wanted to analyze imdb for awhile but have known that it's not possible to do so without breaking TOC)

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There is some data available for personal, non-commercial use. http://www.imdb.com/help/show_leaf?usedatasoftware

However, licensing the database is super expensive: "We offer licensing packages that start at US$15,000 per year." http://www.imdb.com/help/licensing/contact

Right, which brings us to the question: who actually owns the data, i.e. where did IMDb get its data? Is a movie's crew public information? Will the studios give this information to me if I ask them?

I think it would be interesting an very useful to have a db of information of all Hollywood movies (my guess ~50-60K) and make it freely available.

It doesn't matter who owns the information. If you break the Terms of Service, you don't get to use their service to access the information.

I think it matters a lot if your intention goes beyond playing with the data into using it commercially. The question is: Can I download the IMDb data (by any means necessary) and use it for my startup. To me their License rules this out.

My question was: if the data is public, can IMDb enforce this hold on it. Probably not, as there's precedent of courts not siding with Museums who tried to shut off access images to the objects they hold, citing the effort required to take photos, etc.

Well, facts are generally not copyrightable. But the specific representation of the data on the IMDB website or through the API probably is copyrightable. So making an unauthorized copy might be illegal, and redistributing that raw data is definitely a violation of copyright.

But if you get the data from IMDB, and "substantially transform" the actual representation into something else, they can't claim an infringement just because you copied their facts.

But then again, if you break the ToS, they might get you on "unauthorized access of a computer system" with commercial intent, so huge fines etc. even if there is no copyright violation.

Who would be paying for this DB to be hosted? It's always interesting to talk about making things "free", but in the end someone is paying for it.

Well, we're not talking of GB of data here, or are we? Let me, see: I think about 1K movies are produced every year, halve that and multiply by 100, you get about 50K movies total. Let's double that to account for shorts, independents, etc. and we get 100K movies in the db. How much info is for one movie? The crew of Titanic from IMDb as text is around 85K. Let's say less than 256K per movie. So we're looking at about 13GB of data. With lossless compression, e.g. LZW and some austerity, say ~5GB.

That's not tiny, but not huge. And the amount of download bandwidth will not be much, due to long-tail effects. A company like Google or Amazon, who stand to benefit a lot from such a db can easily accommodate this.

Amazon already have a database like that, called imdb. ;)

Yeah, I meant one that wouldn't charge ~$15K for commercial access. One that would charge per db access would be nice.

But it's not exactly the money (after all fifteen grand, although excessive is not prohibitive) but the unreliability factor: if you're building a business on a db API there should be a warranty that the company won't decide to abandon it or cut your access unreasonably.

My point was that, seeing as Amazon own imdb, they probably don't charge themselves ~$15k for access.

anyone know of a good place to get Movie data (and possibly Cast/Crew) info for free or low cost for a commercial project?

freebase.com

themoviedb

There's also a CPAN DIstribution for that: https://metacpan.org/release/TMDB

Wikipedia has loads of movie data. You can use the API to extract it, or use dbpedia.org for a more friendly view.

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