Slashdot Mirror
Odeon Orders Takedown Of Copycat Site
Tuxedo Jack writes "The Register reports that Odeon Cinemas, a British theater chain, has ordered a takedown of a copycat version of its site that was made by a disability activist. The original didn't work outside of IE on Windows and was in violation of the Disability Discrimination Act; the activist-recoded one worked on everything. Odeon has flip-flopped on the issue, too; they liked it when it was first up, and now they don't."
Somerville is well-intentioned but completely in the wrong here. Corporations must act this way to protect themselves and I believe they're well within their rights here.
This is incorrect. Companies do not need to enforce copyrights or patents, only trademarks.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
"People are essentially misled into giving personal info"
Per the developers comments in the emails on the page, my understanding was that the 'copycat' site did not collect any info at all, despite what Odeon was saying. I think the copycat site uses Odeon's own functions to put the data straight into Odeon's databases...
See the video of this story on
NBC News.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
...since it's totally factually inaccurate.
The UK has the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, which is *far* beefier than US legislation, and clearly does cover both web sites and private sector companies.
It hasn't, however, been enforced in court yet. Perhaps the best revenge would be to correct that latter omission.
How do you figure they were misled? Did you even read the emails? As Somerville noted in his email, the information that people submitted to his website was simply passed directly to Odeon's website. So if submitters thought their data was going to Odeon's site, they were correct. I don't see how they were misled.
"We need a fourth law of Robotics: Stop Fingering My Wife"
I contacted them multiple times over the years, and only got rebuffs saying use IE, or even that they were working on a better version which never materialised. http://gorjuss.com/luvly/20030908-somerville.html has a nice interview with me, explaining quite a bit. I was not job hunting. :)
That Odeon site is pretty Odious...even beyond the retardation of requiring www. being prepended to the domain in the URL, it opens up to what looks like a giant banner ad...and NO OTHER CONTENT. Then when you read the instructions "Simply click this page to enter." (buried in some boilerplate looking text) you try clicking on the page. No dice, the text lied. So you click on the "ODEON" logo. Nope, that's not clickable either. You HAVE to click on the "FREE* Activision PC Game Sampler" to get anywhere.
And that takes you to what looks like a circa-1997 splash page w/ a fuzzed out logo. (No further info on the spiderman offer) But that's the site...all the content is hidden in a series of 5 dropdown menus.
And as if that's not bad enough, some of the menu items that "do something" besides open up a submenu have confusing *right* facing triangles, very similar at a glance to the left facing submenu indicators. But on mouse-over, they all get a lit up arrow pointing one way or the other.
What a suck, suck, suck site, from every angle imaginable: usability, information flow, accessibility, content, graphics design...UGH! At the risk of hammering on my lame pun, they really DO put the Odeon back into Odious.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Dear Sir/Madam,
I visited odeon.co.uk with Mozilla Firefox (a popular web browser) this week to book tickets for myself and 7 others to see Spider Man 2. Your site does not seem to work at all and I was thus forced to book tickets with one of your competitors (UGC Cinemas) who have the foresight to make their site work with other browsers and operating systems.
I am a web developer myself and know first hand that it is not hard to produce 100% cross browser sites and respectfully suggest that if your web developers cannot do the same you should terminate their employment, they are patently unable to fulfil their job requirements.
Your website also contravenes the Disability Discrimination Act (1995) which could leave your company open to possible civil action, not to mention bad publicity. I assume you would prefer to avoid this.
Until this problem is resolved I will not be showing my patronage to Odeon cinemas and will recommend that my friends and acquaintances do the same.
If I do not receive a satisfactory answer to this email I will also be passing a complaint to the relevant authorities regarding the DDA (Disability Discrimination Act) infractions.
Yours Sincerely,
Phil John.
Probably won't do any good but hey, if they want to lose customers fark em, UGC cinemas are normally better (bigger, beefier sound, comfier seats) anyway.I am NaN
That's not entirely true: Creating Accessible Flash It takes some extra work to make Flash accessible, and not all of Flash can be made accessible, but it's still possible to make a Section 508 compatible web site using Flash.
Slashdot is a US based site and therefore doesn't have to comply with the UK's accessability laws. That being said, you don't seem to understand that 'looks like sh_t' and 'does not work' are two different things. The Odeon site not only doesn't work in other browsers because it is all written in non-portable Javascript, it doesn't work with screen readers for the blind at all because it is all written in Javascript that the screenreaders can't parse anything useful out of. That is what this guy is complaining about. I don't think he'd be complaining if it just looked like crap in other browsers but screen readers for blind users could read the content. It isn't against the law to have an ugly website, but it is against the law apparently in the UK to have a site that can't be used by blind people. It just so happens that if they make the site so it works with screen readers, it probably will also work just fine in browsers other than IE.
in the UKK, if your trademark falls into common usage, then it's no longer yours.
This is what I sent:
This is the reply I got:
I was in no way "tricking people" - it was clear my site was not the official site, stating such on every single page.
Just in case someone makes an assumption from this post, you could never book tickets, therefore never submit credit card details, on my site.
Do a search for 'odeon' on the mozilla bugzilla and look at the date at which they were given a fixed version of menu.js which would work with mozilla. Now note that they have done sweet fuck all about it. Bastards
But if you read the emails, he did. I know I've done this a couple of times, you can send a html form to any address. If I could get a copy of the old site, I'd be able to verify in about a minute. Heck, the browser won't even send the data to the guy's server, it'll go to odeous's.
I don't read AC A human right
At least in the US a company has to protect its trademark, or they loose it. But an alternative that most companies never use is to license their trademark. Then another company can use their trademark and be officially licensed. We see officially licensed merchandise all the time.
Most likely what happened is Odeon got a new lawyer, or they had an audit. It was pointed out that they cannot have someone else using their trademark so they sent a letter. Even if the president of Odeon uses the site and thinks it is cool the fact is that ignoring infringement of a trademark can cause the trademark to be invalidated. It is unfortunate that their lawyers didn't think to offer him an official license.
Steve Jackson Games is really progressive in this regard. Realizing that their fans would like to create software to add value to their product line they created the GM Aid License Program. They have a page that explains their program and provides a license application form. (It is worth noting that their system way predates the d20 Official Gaming License system by WotC.)
Borland Software takes it a step further providing benefits like free copies of their products you support.
Systems like these are a win for everyone.
I don't know why more companies don't have similar systems in place.
"Anything is possible with enough programmers, time and pizza." (Substitute caffeine for time as needed.)
"This is what the odeon clone site did as well." - No. There is some confusion around here on this matter. When you submitted the registration form on my version (which is not a main bit of the site), the data did go to me; I then passed it straight through to the Odeon's site, not storing it in any way (yes, you only have my word for that; altruism, as someone said). The reason I could not just have a form submitting directly to Odeon's site is that then the user would get whatever inaccessible JS/HTML Odeon sent back on the form results page, which defeated the point; as it is, I parsed the results page and displayed it more accessibly.
The Odeon website is one of the crappiest sites I've ever seen for such a high profile company.
You should have seen the old site (1999 or thereabouts). It's rare to have a site that takes several minutes just to load a page. Usually they time out. This one required about 4 links (at a couple of minuites per click) to try to book a film, after which it would give a screen telling me what server it was using (Apache on win32 if you're interested)..
<info@odeonuk.com>
Dear Sir or Madem:
I attempted to visit the Odeon website at http://www.odeon.co.uk/ today. Unfortunately, I was not able to access your site. The problem that I experience is that I see a blank page with only the word Odeon visible. Upon consulting with other web users, I have found that you have repeatedly asked users to use Microsoft Internet Explorer to view your website. This represents a major problem for many of us.
Some of us use operating systems that do not support Internet Explorer. Most users of non-Windows operating systems do not have access to a modern copy of Internet Explorer. Some of us rely on browsers other than Internet Explorer for web browsing due to accessibility features not present in Internet Explorer. Finally, using other web browsers is often more convenient; to inconvenience such a large user base with a request to change browsers is unlikely to be effective. In addition, the requests to close the accessible portal site Accessible ODEON previously at http://www.dracos.co.uk/odeon/ only increases the probability of overlooking your site completely.
Due to the volume of previous E-mails requesting some level of accessibility from the ODEON website and support of alternative browsers, I believe you are already aware of the problem. However, I am writing as merely one more customer who is deeply concerned with this problem, and is unable to accept the current quality of your website. I trust I will be able to use your website sometime soon.
Thank you in advance for your kind consideration and swift action.
Sincerely,
Copy Andpaste
I forgot my favourite site - royalmail.com. They recently released a new cackier version, which no longer supported people who have visual disabilities, screen readers etc. When challenged on this they claimed the content they provided was too complex for that.
Too complex. They're the bloody post office. They sell stamps, and they deliver things (if you're lucky). Maybe they also sell boxes to put things in.
Anyway, in the US, I wanted to know how much a stamp was to send a card to a friend in Israel. The friends I was staying with just told me to go to the US Postal Service website. I had my wifi iPaq, so I thought I'd try it on that for a laugh. It was cramped, but it worked, and I had the right stamp value in about a minute or so.
Just to amuse myself, I tried the same exercise on the royal mail site. After a lengthy delay, PocketIE put up an error saying it was unable to display a web site with that many frames - it could only display sites with up to 11 frames.
11! And I'm not so sure the limit wasn't actually 19. But having more than 11 frames on your front page is impressively stupid, even for the Royal Mail.
Oh, their latest thing is now you have to register with them to look up a postcode. A postcode! You know, those things they're always moaning that people don't use? Register? Way to raise the barrier! I wonder how many people get to the form, and think "Sod it!" and just chuck the letter/parcel in the postbox with no postcode.
And when I did actually register, what do I find? That they have never heard of anywhere called Wood Green in London. Good job it's not a bloody tube station or anything embarrassingly well known like that, eh?
Ah, I feel better now.
Too many idiots. Not enough comets.
Does having a site only working in IE make it inaccessible to handicapped? Is this saying that Mozilla users are handicapped? IE, and windows, have some good integrated accessibility features, magnifyers and text-to-speech and all that.
There are W3C guidelines that web developers should but almost never follow to make a web site accessible. You can get free tools to check and correct your site. I also wrote the best selling commercial version of this tool, but the company I worked for is a bunch of ass munchers who don't deserve a mention here. It doesn't look like the people who wrote this site knew HTML let alone accessibility.
BTW, if a site is IE only, the chances are about 99.9999% that a person using a screen reader won't be able to navigate it. Not a hard and fast rule, but I've yet to see a counter example. Sites that code HTML to standard have a much better chance of being accessible.
Agree with parent, the intro screen is hideous and not obvious. The site fails in Firefox on Win32 and Linux platforms. Curioulsy, it works in konqueror 3.14, if you're running KDE.
Here's mine:
Dear Sir/Madam,
I would like to complain about the current state of your web site which is, I am afraid to say, poorly designed and incompatible with many different web browsers.
I am a user of Mozilla-Firefox, a popular open-source, standards compliant and secure web browser. Your web site does not render correctly when viewed with Firefox. Your web site is inaccessible through Firefox. Your web site renders poorly in another standard compliant web browser; Opera.
The only browser in which your web site renders well enough to be used is Internet Explorer. Even then, the design of the site is poor. The home page presents the visitor with an intrusive advert which, at the time of writing, is offering a "free Activision PC game sampler."
The text below this advert makes it seem as though the site is accessed by "clicking on the page." This is not true. One has to click on the advert in order to actually enter the main site and get down to the business of doing what the user wanted to do which is to view film listings and, potentially, book a seat.
I would at this point ask you to note that Internet Explorer is a poor choice of browser. It is lacking in features and it is insecure. Recently, CERT and the United States Department of Homeland Security recommended that computer users stop using Internet Explorer.
I was appalled to learn that you have attacked one Mr Matthew Somerville over his efforts to create a site that is easy to use and efficient. While I appreciate that you have a right to protect the use of your trademarks and copyrights, I feel that you could have better spent your time and resources on redesigning your site.
I must advise you that until such time as you see to hiring competent Web Designers that are capable of producing a modern and browser compatible web site, I am unable to continue to frequent Odeon cinemas. I will ensure that my colleagues and friends take the same action. There are simply too many alternatives (Vue and Showcase to name but two) for a cinema company to be able to act with such arrogance and disregard for their customer base.
Yours faithfully,
Nigel Smith.
Suggestion.
Go volunteer your time at a local society for the blind.
You just might be surprised at the number of movies they do go to. And the tv shows they watch. I guess you didn't know that some TV shows use a second channel for the visually impaired
It was really fun when the cable repair people came, and couldn't fix the cable, because there was no tv --- we use the VCR to watch tv, and movies.
Amber
Wind Beneath Thy Wings
info@odeonuk.com if anyone wants to tell them how stupid they are.
http://blog.nexusuk.org