On Mar 02, Andre Eliatamby <andre.eliata...@gmail.com> wrote:
> What I would like to know is:
> - are my assumptions above correct?
Mostly; see also the other recent (and old) threads in imdbpy-devel.
> - Does imdbpy have a special license from imdb to provide this package?
No. I honestly can't even remember if I ever asked (maybe, maybe not:
I started the project in 2004).
For sure at some point (years ago) I questioned the developers of
other related libraries; many (most) never asked, some had tried.
The results can be summarized in:
- no reply at all.
- no, you can't: buy this (license for X thousands of data, missing
the point of the request).
- yes you can (very few).
As far as I can remember there was a discussion about this kind of
software in debian-devel, and their opinion was that they are
ok for inclusion in Debian (it goes without saying that they
are more interested in the license of the code, so this may not
be conclusive).
The fact is (as usual: I'm not a lawyer) that similar terms
_as far as I know_ aren't clearly enforceable (I'm not sure
about the USA laws, however).
IMDbPY fetches the data the same way your browser (or your cache,
or your crap-filtering proxy) does. After that, _for your own usage_
I'm pretty sure you can do whatever you like ("your how usage" completely
excludes redistribution and making any kind of profit, no matter how
indirect, that's for sure).
Moreover: keep in mind that IMDbPY is not (and never will be)
tailored as a mass-scraper bot: it can handle only single (and
serial) requests, and for the way it's structured using it
on the whole database is impossible.
In fact, it's as nice as it can be with the IMDb server.
> - Do I need to get special permission for imdb to actually use this
> package (or at least the query functions)?
You can use IMDbPY to access the plain text data files (putting
them in a SQL database: see README.sqldb).
If you plan to use 'http'/'mobile', obviously a permission won't
hurt, but as long as you use it for your own personal non-commercial
usage, I can't see any problem.
It goes without saying that if you plan to create a public service
with it (or make money out of it in any other way), you can stop
right now. :-)
Again: as said other times, I'm genuinely convinced that using it
non-commercially is legal, but... I'm not a lawyer.
--
Davide Alberani <davide.alber...@gmail.com> [PGP KeyID: 0x465BFD47]
http://erlug.linux.it/~da/
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