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Odeon Orders Takedown Of Copycat Site

Posted by timothy on from the you-will-take-your-chances-in-the-tournament dept.

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."

8 of 478 comments (clear)

  1. MOD PARENT DOWN by handelaar · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...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.

  2. Re:Open and shut, IMO by SpyPlane · · Score: 5, Informative
    "People are essentially misled into giving personal info and, since Somerville is using Odeon's marks, how could they think otherwise?"

    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"
  3. Re:Wrong priorities here... by MatthewSomerville · · Score: 5, Informative

    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. :)

  4. Re:Wrong priorities here... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative
    A few days ago I actually sent the Odeon an e-mail voicing my disgust at how difficult it is to use their web site on anything other than a specific version of Internet Explorer.

    This is what I sent:

    To whomever it may concern,

    I am writing this e-mail to Odeon Cinemas to bring to your attention my severe annoyance and incompatibilities with your website. As you indicate in your Behind the Scenes/About us page, the Odeon is the biggest cinema retailer in the UK.

    Why is it then, you have the poorest web site, not just in the entertainment arena but probably compared to most small businesses. It is unreliable, unfriendly and incompatible with any non Microsoft Internet Explorer browser. What about the rest of us who use Apple, Linux or any other non-microsoft browser?

    Your web site is appalling. It discriminates against a large number of users who do not use Internet Explorer. These people are ALSO your customers, because they are not using a Microsoft product shouldn't make any difference whatsoever. Would you only sell tickets to visually-able people at the desk if they couldn't see which films where on that evening? Would you refuse to deal with them because they were not part of the majority or the main stream? Your site discriminates against people with visual difficulties, which you may find more information about on the governments web sites concerning accessibility laws.

    What makes your failure even more spectacular is that you list British Telecom and Lateral as being your online partners. This certainly doesn't reflect well, as two companies who are supposed to be the market leaders are have collectively failed to provide you with a system which works for all people. This is a situation which is 100% attainable, yet you choose not to for whatever reason.

    I seriously suggest you get these issues fixed, as I am sure that the majority of the people who have frustrations with your web site will not be as vocal as I am.


    This is the reply I got:
    Thank you for your e-mail.

    Please accept my apologies for any lack of functionality you have encountered whilst
    using the ODEON Website. I can appreciate your frustration as an Internet user that
    you would like to use your browser of choice. However I'm sure you can appreciate from
    our point of view that we want to make our website as readily available to the general
    public as possible.

    As a result it made sense to invest heavily into our web site to ensure immediate functionality with the world's most popular and well used Web Browser "Microsoft Internet Explorer". A significant majority of the world's internet users
    have IE installed on their machine even if it is not their first choice of browser so the option to access the ODEON Website through this medium is always on offer to the customer.

    However I am happy to inform you that ODEON is investing time and
    effort into ensuring functionality across the many Web Browsers available to Internet Users, hopefully including Netscape Navigator and other Gecko based Web Browsers such as Opera and MoZilla.

    Best Wishes

    Nick
  5. Re:So What...? by MatthewSomerville · · Score: 5, Informative

    I was in no way "tricking people" - it was clear my site was not the official site, stating such on every single page.

  6. Re:Odeon has a good point as far as customer conce by MatthewSomerville · · Score: 5, Informative

    Just in case someone makes an assumption from this post, you could never book tickets, therefore never submit credit card details, on my site.

  7. Re:So What...? by MatthewSomerville · · Score: 5, Informative

    "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.

  8. Re:Yes, but... by MatthewSomerville · · Score: 5, Informative
    "Does having a site only working in IE make it inaccessible to handicapped?"
    I wouldn't like to commit myself to saying always, but certainly in this case.
    "But since when was it a matter of law to have a shit website?"
    For websites providing a service to the public in the UK, since late 1999; for educational websites in the UK, since late 2002. DDA information