Curtains for Theater Listings

21 Jul

no_popcornThis morning I received a call from a gent with a Boston accent. He indicated that he represents a firm that is displeased with some data I’m using on isnoop.net. According to the caller, my theater listings page is using his client’s intellectual property and I’m not properly licensed to do so. The lawyer seemed nice enough. Perhaps I should have kept him on the phone longer so he could tick up some more billable hours…

Like some other things I’ve developed, theater listings was a simple service I wrote for myself to clean up an otherwise cluttered interface and make the data available in my favorite feed reader. Over the years, many people have written with questions and thanks regarding the page. Thank you to everyone who used the service. I hope you might find some of my other tools just as useful.

As of now, the theater listings page is closed. If you still want this information in your web browser, check out Google’s movie listings service. For you feed reader junkies, Yahoo Pipes is widely known as a useful service for turning any web page into an RSS feed.

I’ll investigate the possibility of re-sourcing the data, but don’t get your hopes up. Also, for those who are already firing up their email clients to ask me for the source code, hold your horses. I’ve been working up a post on ethical screen scraping and now I can finally share it without being hypocritical. I won’t share the source, but look forward to an interesting and useful guide to capturing and reusing data on the web, including some advice that should help prevent you from getting your own C&D.

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14 Responses to “Curtains for Theater Listings”

  1. The Dave July 21, 2009 at 12:31 pm #

    Famous Players in Canada goes out of their way to make sure that it’s as difficult as possible to find out when their movies are playing.

    It’s odd, were I running a theatre I’d welcome the free advertising. As a theatre goes, I still use the same resources to find movies in my area that I did previously, if I’m looking for a specific movie and Famous Players doesn’t show up on the list then it’s not really a big deal, I just see the movie elsewhere.

  2. NotMyself July 22, 2009 at 2:54 pm #

    Sorry to see the feed go down but I totally understand why. Your feed was one of the oldest feeds in my google reader account for my local area theaters. Thanks for having it up as long as you did.

  3. Jimmy Liew August 4, 2009 at 1:49 am #

    Sorry to heard that the feed go down. Your feed was so useful that it has become one of my daily check item for my local area theaters. Thanks for your effort on this. I truly understand your concern. Again, thanks.

  4. Alex August 4, 2009 at 12:44 pm #

    Google should ask you for the code. Sorry to see you call it curtains.

  5. Barry Gordon August 29, 2009 at 11:02 am #

    I do not understand how the “whats playing and starting times” can be considered intellectual property not in the public domain. Even if you were retrieving it from some site, that information content is already published all over in newspapers etc. I am curious, did the lawyer explain why his client feels it is their intellectual property?

  6. Scott September 2, 2009 at 1:33 pm #

    I just noticed the post in my Google reader subscription.

    If you do find another source, do post a new update to the feed, and on this post (though I assume it will just start working again). I won’t expect anything in the mean time.

    Are you allowed to share the source anyway? Surely they can’t nag a million ‘little people’ haha. Oh well. Pipes should be useful too.

    Cheers and thanks again for the 2.5 exceptional years it did work. :)

  7. Rich October 2, 2009 at 11:31 am #

    Using the Fetch Page module in Yahoo! Pipes:

    “Can’t fetch pages that robots.txt disallow”

    Grr! You can’t copyright facts, people!

  8. Bill November 2, 2009 at 6:09 am #

    Is there any chance you would share the code you used?

  9. Jose Arias December 29, 2009 at 4:42 pm #

    Money ….Money …that’s all that matter to them … hasta la vista …
    My love was true
    Still you threw it all away
    Everything has changed. is like the rest
    Unworthy of my best
    Hasta la vista, baby Best…..

  10. Chris January 23, 2010 at 10:41 pm #

    Scraping data -even in the open environment of the Internet is still wrong. We pay for our data (yeah, I know the site design sucks) but our showtimes are always right. http://www.richmondmovies.com –Sorry gang, I believe in open source, but not when it comes at legitamite business owners expense (not mine- but the company that we buy the data from; they go to a lot of trouble and expense to get it right, and it isn’t easy. It’s the industry, not the service providers. Theaters quite often don’t have their act together, and yet will pay to be in the newspaper(a dying media) but won’t support or pay sites like ours that drive more traffic to them than anything. Sucks, but that’s the way the movie trailer biz rolls.

  11. Valentines Day SMS January 26, 2010 at 7:10 am #

    Thanks for the post. i like

  12. Gil December 1, 2010 at 12:00 pm #

    I was looking for an RSS feed to add to my website for local listings. I don’t get the intellectual property thing, unless it was a third party doing it for a fee. Seems that all theaters would want a feed with movie times. I would most likely go to that theater, because the movies and times were more easily available vs. a site that I had to log into, or look for the ‘find my theater’ page, then enter a zip code, etc…. Easier to look at feed reader. Oh, well…

  13. Toronto January 8, 2011 at 10:21 am #

    Interesting, who knew such a simple source if information would be so complicated to post!

  14. David August 23, 2011 at 6:34 pm #

    You folded in Canada with a phone call from an American?

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