12

I am an independent developer who wanted to write a simple commercial app to display movie showtime information. After doing a whole lot of research, I could not find any good "legal" way of getting this data.

One option I considered was screen-scraping or scraping xml feeds but reading through the Terms And Conditions, I don't think this option is the right way to go.

Another option is to figure something out with a company called Tribune Media Services. Looks like this company supplies showtime API to sites such as google, yahoo, fandango etc. But an individual developer like me cannot probably afford this for a small commercial app.

Then I decided to look for other ideas like building a Finance related app but again data source became a big issue. I don't understand why several sites like Billboards provide API but not for commercial use.

I am all for paying for using API/Data but I could not find an "Amazon-Web-Service-like" scheme where individual or small business folks can pay for what they use ! I think this would encourage a lot of innovation and can also provide the data content owners some money.

Are there such APIs out there in the Entertainment or Finance domain where I can develop commercial apps without doing any screen-scraping ?

Lastly, would linking to a showtimes page be considered legal ? For example, if user wants to see showtimes for a particular theater, can we generate a link to the google showtimes page in the app when clicked takes you to the Google Showtimes page (on the browser) ?

durron597
  • 31,968
  • 17
  • 99
  • 158
ReentrantLock
  • 129
  • 3
  • You should look at open datatables/yql. – pguardiario Jan 27 '12 at 09:28
  • I see no reason why opening to a new page in the browser would be illegal. All you are doing is opening up a website, which the user could do on their own anyway. I don't know anything about APIs for what you're wanting, though. – Reed Jan 27 '12 at 10:24
  • How much is Tribune Media Services charging? – Fraggle Feb 03 '12 at 05:24
  • "Are there such APIs out there in the Entertainment or Finance domain where I can develop commercial apps without doing any screen-scraping ?" Is a pretty broad question, what specifically are you looking for? – Eric Feb 12 '12 at 00:07

2 Answers2

0

Flixster has an API method for current in theater movies:

http://developer.rottentomatoes.com/docs/read/json/v10/In_Theaters_Movies

Terms of service seem to support what you want to do. And it has a bunch of other movie related data for upcoming and older movies!

chunkybrewster
  • 44
  • 5
0

ObDisc: I'm not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.

Can you get legal data feeds? Probably. A Google search for "movie showtimes content licensing" turns up services that appear to want your money.

Can you deep-link? Probably. http://www.chillingeffects.org/linking/faq.cgi

Can you scrape? Probably not. See related articles about the legality of scraping, such as this one: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/396778/legalities-of-screen-scraping

In a purely technical sense, scraping HTML is a pain and highly fragile. Sites can change their layout at will, but your bigger challenge will be working around bugs from sources that emit dodgy HTML code. Can't say I recommend it. If you can get an XML feed, you can probably save yourself a world of hurt.

Community
  • 1
  • 1
Sparky
  • 8,437
  • 1
  • 29
  • 41