

Building a Movie Showtimes API - ivolo
http://blog.rein.pk/2012/05/building-api-where-one-doesnt-exist.html

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nickadams
A little cautionary tale here.

TL;DR: You might get a cease and desist or worse for doing things like this.
It can be a headache. Be careful.

First, I have no idea about all the legal intricacies or accepted uses in this
space, so this obviously may not apply in every case -- especially considering
our implementation of this was in commercial software (but if anyone has any
plans to implement this approach in commercial software, beware).

Backstory: We built a CMS for small weekly newspapers. One of the features of
that CMS was automatically generated real-time Movie Showtimes. This was handy
since previously the newspapers would manually add this info to their websites
and it'd quickly be out of date (showtimes change occasionally). And while
they had this info for their papers, the means to get this data on their sites
was painful. They weren't tech savvy number one, but even if they were, these
API's from TMS (Tribune Media Services -- the big guys), CinemaNow, etc are
all ridiculous. They don't charge based on API call and they are so poorly
designed you end up creating wrappers for their APIs and its all a rats nest.

Anyway, our goal was to make this easier, so we did something very similar to
the poster -- essentially scraping the web content and repurposing it on their
sites. Admittedly its a bit of a grey area, but we figured it wasn't
egregious. Especially since most of them already had the data legitimately for
their printed papers. Like the poster we also left the Fandango link in there
so users could just purchase a ticket online if they wanted. We didn't see the
harm. Fandango still got the purchase whether the user got there from Yahoo,
Google, or sites on our CMS.

What was the result of this? Cease and desists. First from Fandango. They saw
the referrals from our sites, then saw that we were displaying showtimes
without being licensed to do so (how they knew this I'm not sure). They told
us they had to protect _their_ licenses (they apparently licensed the
showtimes from TMS so they felt they needed to act on their behalf or
something) so they sent us a cease and desist. Obviously Fandango also passed
this info along to TMS too, so next up was a cease and desist from them.

The final result was us just paying to use the API's. Which we probably would
have done from the beginning if they made any sense at all. It took many phone
calls and emails to get them to create a "special" package in place for us. We
figured we could just pay X per API call for showtimes at theaters in Y zip
codes. Nope. Their packages seemingly had no concept of modern web services
and instead were structured based on strange market blocks each with a daily
minimum of requests that had to be made and so on. Not to mention the fact
that we needed to do all this for the multiple clients in multiple regions
using our hosted CMS (these concepts of software as a service were foreign to
them).

It was a while ago so maybe I'm embellishing the ridiculousness of their
packages (I'm probably not) and maybe things have changed. But overall, I
think it's safe to say, if you plan on scraping these showtime at least don't
leave in the Fandango link (they'll find you!). And probably more so, just be
careful doing things like this unless you're prepared to read some cease and
desists and reacquaint yourself with a fax machine.

~~~
capsule_toy
I'm curious to hear the actual legal explanation. To me, it seems like
showtimes are facts and my understanding is that it's fine to re-publish
facts. Of course, that doesn't mean you're allowed to scrape and re-publish
the facts directly. Is that the main issue here?

~~~
nickadams
That was our initial justification/rationalization too... They were public
facts. It'd be like repurposing the current temperature. But apparently that's
not the case here. They actually own the rights to these facts and they had
court cases they won to back it up.

So the scraping was an issue too, yes. Thats probably always a legal grey
area. But in this case, it was also just the basic reuse of those facts
through any means, scraping or otherwise.

So much so that we couldn't even link to google movies if the URL had a zip
code passed as a query. Thatd be illegal since google alone licensed the data,
not us. It seems crazy but we didn't have the means to fight it. (Though I'm
assuming a programmatic link like this in a commercial app is different than
someone linking on their blog.)

The closest analogy I could think of is live sports broadcasts where
technically even description or dissemination without consent is illegal.
That's why live blogging for example isn't possible in many situations.

------
dano
I recently built an entire application with licensed theater showtime data.
The data is licensed by two companies in the USA, Tribune Media and Westworld
Media. One or both of these companies will approach you should you scrape data
from their affiliates. Eventful.com, for example, is a subscriber to the
showtime data from Tribune media.

The application and company we built has since shut down for a variety of
reasons, not the least of which was the cost of licensing.

nickadams reply is completely spot on. Either license the data or go home.

nickadams is also spot on regarding the complexity of the interfaces to which
you would need to integrate. The extraction, translation and loading of data
is hugely problematic and time consuming. The providers data comes from
theater owners and is therefore, by definition, inconsistent. Theater owners
like to put marketing information into data fields on an inconsistent basis.
For example, under Amenities will be "50% of on Tuesdays."

If you want to talk in greater depth about dealing with Movie showtime data,
get back to me.

As for the grey area, believe what you want. nickadams and I are in perfect
agreement on this subject. We've both been in the trenches and know the
territory well.

------
rorrr
There's no way this is legal.

~~~
aidenn0
This might be legal, scraping is a gray area. There is no way that reelbox is
going to persist if they get a strongly worded letter though, so the legality
really doesn't matter.

