Import XMLTV files in TV-Browser

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Matthias

remove bad xmltv-website-grabbers

Beitrag von Matthias »

In fact I (as a user) would be glad if the xmltv-website-grabbers would be removed from the official distribution. They are slow and inefficient, stop to work from time to time because the webmasters change the layout or try to protect their data.

It also pollutes the ideals of free software and open formats. XMLTV is a great project and I bet it would be easier to persuade the copyright holders to open their databases if the main project would have a "free as in freedom" and not "free as in anarchy" image.
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bodo
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Beitrag von bodo »

I followed the discussion on the mailinglist of xmltv, but it seems that they are not interested to change their behavior.

Sorry for that, but i have to continue to advise everyone not to use this illegal piece of software :(.
rseiler

Beitrag von rseiler »

Meanwhile, I expect most people in North America won't consider moving just to use TV-Browser, so I guess we're at an impasse.
Gast

Beitrag von Gast »

Just in case you haven't noticed: The version released after this discussion apparently ended (0.5.46, 2007-07-09) saw the tvtoday grabber removed from the xmltv distribution.
I'm still wondering however, how providing import facilities for an open file format could lead to legal trouble...
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bodo
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Beitrag von bodo »

Here in Germany there is something called "Mitstörerhaftung".

That means if you develop an application to share musik using a p2p-network you can get in trouble, if you know that one of the most used purpose for this software is to share illegal musik, not creative common-music.

Something like that could be happening to tvbrowser aswell. Supporting a free format that is developed by a group of people who have a record of willingly break copyright rules is nothing we are going to do.

The tvtoday grabber was removed, because i told the xmltv-developers that this grabber was illegal. But it was not removed immediatly, they tried to leave it in the distribution, I tried to explain the situtation, but they didn't want to hear what I had to say. After a week they only moved it to another unsupported part, they haven't deleted it.
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bodo
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Beitrag von bodo »

Btw: the last time i checked, the xmltv-guys had this developing style :

"don't ask the webpage, just write a grabber and see what happens. if the site makes the grabber stop working, move to another site and grab their data"

That is not acceptable for us. Even if it is legal to write these grabbers, they have to act in a responsible manner.
Matthias

Beitrag von Matthias »

What if you implent XMLTV without web-scraping support or if that is not possible some kind of whitelist for legal XMLTV sources such as http://www.schedulesdirect.org/ or http://epgdata.com/index.php?&iLang=de
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bodo
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Beitrag von bodo »

We are already doing that with the DataHydra-Plugin. It fetches the Data from Legal XMLTV-Sources like Swedb and mspc.no . See here :

http://tvbrowser.org/downloads-mainmenu ... atasources

At the moment I am writing a SchedulesDirect Plugin that loads the Data using the Webservice API of SchedulesDirect.

We can't use the epgdata.com-Data because it contains Pictures and Text for the German Channels. We would have to pay a fee to the VG Media for using those Files.
dust
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Beitrag von dust »

the point is german law. in other coutries the laws are different and an import of xmltv can be absolute legal. so a xmltv plugin hosted in such a country, maybe at sourceforge.net, would be legal.

the point is, who is able and willing to set up a project called xmltv tvbrowser in a country where it is legal?
vanfruniken

Re: Import XMLTV files in TV-Browser

Beitrag von vanfruniken »

There seems to be a perfectly legal way to obtain xmltv files for Germany, namely trough microsoft mediacenter sites. I suppose if microsoft provides these data at a large scale, it can't be illegal to download them.

Has anyone taken a look at mc2xml?
see http://mc2xml.110mb.com/, http://sadevil.org/blog/2009/01/07/usin ... ith-eyetv/

mc2xml allows every user to produce xmltv xml files periodically, e.g. through a crontab script, or an iCal-triggered script. It avoids epg sources that are hostile to techniques such as screenscraping.
Jo
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Re: Import XMLTV files in TV-Browser

Beitrag von Jo »

It's all illegal, at leat according to German law. We need a permission from the providers. But e.g. TitanTv writes the opposite at their website:
No material from TITANTV.COM or any Web site owned, operated, licensed, or controlled by DECISIONMARK may be copied, reproduced, republished, uploaded, posted, transmitted, or distributed in any way.
Jo
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Re: Import XMLTV files in TV-Browser

Beitrag von Jo »

Since we got recently several suggestions for sources which are not legal, here the rules:
- explicit permission to use the data is necessary from the source where you find the data
- explicit permission to use the data is necessary from the source where this source got the data from
- and so on, until:
- explicit permission to use the data is necessary from the channel itself

So, if you are not sure, just ask the provider first, and ask them where they have got the data from.
CognoLogistico

Re: Import XMLTV files in TV-Browser

Beitrag von CognoLogistico »

I am not clear on what the objection to including a generic xmltv importer would be...The confusion seems to be in differentiating the file format from the file data.

It is my understanding that while xmltv can be used both legally and illegally in both NorthAmerica and Germany, the same could be said about any MP3 player/song, PDF reader/ebook, or Torrent downloader/file. It is not illegal to write a program to play an MP3 file,display a PDF file, or write a Torrent client in either country, so the same must logically be true of the xmltv format.

Speaking for the potential North American user base of TV-Browser, we are asking the developers to ignore the input file's contents and just provide a generic xmltv format importer. Let the end user be responsible for providing the xml file's data, and all legal issues will be the responsibility of the end user and not the software developers.

If I have totally misunderstood the level of freedom available to German programmers, than how about an alternate solution? Provide a "find plugins" option to d/l plugins from an international source such as sourceforge.net and let anybody write add-on plugins that can be d/l from there. That would provide a good legal separation between TV-Browser and the plugin.
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Re: Import XMLTV files in TV-Browser

Beitrag von bodo »

We are not going to offer this. It could be problematic even for US-Citizen. Remember that Napster was sued because of handling MP3s in the US? That's the same story for our project. We don't want to get into that mess. That's why we decide to stay 100% clean. You may not like our decision, but we as a team don't want to put our lives into trouble because of a few users requesting a feature.
Bananeweizen
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Re: Import XMLTV files in TV-Browser

Beitrag von Bananeweizen »

CognoLogistico hat geschrieben:It is not illegal to write a program to play an MP3 file,display a PDF file, or write a Torrent client in either country
.
all legal issues will be the responsibility of the end user and not the software developers.
You are totally wrong with those assumptions. If a piece of software is used mainly for illegal tasks, then the developer can be made responsible for this if he actively supports those illegal use cases during further development of the software. It's the same principle like why the owner of a weapon can be (partially) responsible for a crime where that weapon is used by another person, if he did not take action to safely store that weapon.

And it's the reason why so many companies providing file sharing clients (and not actively preventing the sharing of copyright protectected material in the client) have been sued by some media companies. We don't want to end in the same position.

Ciao, Michael
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