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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...
...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.
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.
"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.
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.
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