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."
Seems like they'd be better off using this energy to make sure their site works on all browsers instead of coming down on someone who is doing a legitimate service...
Why is this a big deal? I read the 2 emails from Odeon and the one sent to them, and I don't see why Odeon is being outragous in asking them to take down the site.
Sure, their site should work in other browsers, but that is not the issue.
The issue is that some guy is tricking people into submitting info to his site instead of the Odeon site like they think that they are. Maybe he collects the data before he sends it to Odeon, maybe he doesn't like he says. I don't know him, and thats not even the issue.
I can very well understand why a company does not want someone they don't know collecting their customers information in their name. What if they guy ends up getting caught selling all these names to spammers one day? Then Odeon would really look stupid for not taking action against the guy.
IANAL, but 'letting people browse a website easier' doesn't trump 'copyright law' where I live. He (Somerville) is using their (Odeon) IP without their permission (now).
So, why is this a bad thing? Yes their site may suck, but violating Copyright is violating Copyright no matter how you slice it.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
By getting an order to take down the original site of Odeon Cinemas until it is accessible as required by law. And get really picky about missing ALT tags. This will teach them how not to be litigious and nasty. Although I am not sure how blind people are going to watch movies anyway :-)
Odeon might get less of a grilling for us if they had ever actually bothered to do something to make their site work correctly.
.. I can't think what they're smoking.
Apparently it doesn't even work correctly in MSIE most of the time, and I found the copycat site particularly useful in finding out times of films. I'd normally then book via phone.
A message to Odeon: Fix the site, and maybe then you might have some reason to complain. But so far, since the copycat site:
* Allows more people to look up film times.
* Makes it easier for people to do the above.
* Does not detract potential revenue away from Odeon itself.
Probably a bigwig who has no clue of the situation made this decision..
Why couldn't they parse the info pages (via an HTML ripper or something), pull out the information they want, and post that on their own site? No cloned pages, but the data's the same. And of course, the new pages would work in all browsers.
That's the problem with these well-intentioned laws. When someone wants to flout them, the effort to correct the problem seems to be insurmountable. I'm sure there will be lawsuits and court orders and a whole bunch of people's productivity being sucked down a black hole (willingly or not), before this is said and done.
The problem stems from the fact that in our society (modern Western democracies anyway), we are so buried in an avalanche of regulations that there is no way you can even be aware of them all, and when one that is particularly useful... such as a law requiring handicapped access, enforcement becomes infeasible because so much effort is being wasted to meet the utter explosion of bureaucratic requirements.
We already work about half the year just to pay taxes, and when we can work for ourselves how big does the proportion of time we spend dealing with red tape have to be before people get fed up. We are being nickel-and-dimed into losing productivity. Meanwhile this Web site apparently ignores the law and it will probably be months or years before anything can be done about it because the people who could do something about it are too busy making sure that all government contractors are using 7/64" bevelled grommets instead of 3/32" bevelled grommets.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
The original site only allowed access to people using Internet Explorer and Windows and was in breach of the Disability Discrimination Act.
Despite predictions when his site first went up that the lawyers' letters would arrive immediately Odeon Cinema initially welcomed the site - as did many disabled people who could access the site for the first time.
But this all changed with the arrival of an email from Luke Vetere, marketing director at Odeon
Brilliant marketing. Piss off and lock out a demographic. And there's nothing better to improve a company's image than screwing over disabled people and breaking the law. Odeon is really getting its money's worth hiring this moron.
Ahem, I think you're missinterpreting the poster, it is most surely a joke since it's been a long fight on the side of dissabled (specially blind) people to make sites created wholly in flash to provide other formats that are readable by screen readers (be they braile or text to speech) which flash, last time I checked, was not.
When will /. be getting a well needed HTML upgrade to XHTML 1.0 or 1.1? And have it fully validate?! I mean for crying out loud someone on alistapart.com did an article and rewrote slashdot as a completely standard website.. see the article and read more about it here
Look at the savings in bandwidth he calculated out.
"Most Slashdot visitors would have the CSS file cached, so we could ballpark the daily savings at ~10 GB bandwidth. A high volume of bandwidth from an ISP could be anywhere from $1 - $5 cost per GB of transfer, but let's calculate it at $1 per GB for an entire year. For this example, the total savings for Slashdot would be: $3650! All of that for just a couple of KB."
stupid people will be stupid. doing illegal things to try to change that situation is stupid. and illegal. thus you will make a futile (stupid) effort to make things better and get your ass sued by the people who are smarter than you but, nonetheless, stupid.
-ninjaneer
Ok, so whats your point? That is another non-issue. Yes, they are braking the law. I hope that the UK govenment cracks down on them. Anyways... back to the topic of discussion... This guy with the copycat website is not some kind of vigilante of the internet. His job is not to take the law into his own hands, especially if it involves stepping on some company's rights and some people's rights (the people being those who submit data unknowingly to his site). I bet the guy is very well intentioned, but he needs to get real. If he is worried about this that much, he should find a legitimite solution to the problem.
...then I'd book by phone.
I emailed the odeon webmaster several times, politely asking them to support other browsers. I never got a reply.....
Fire them and hire this guy !
Furthermore, the e-mail to Somerville says,
So there is a trademark issue here after all.How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Not to go too offtopic here, but as the owner of a hosting company that pushes a lot of bandwidth, our cost per GB is about 34 cents. Slashdot probably pays less than that.
While I agree that they should redo their site, the cost savings would be minimal. I do, however, feel that having a fully-complaint website should be about more than just cost savings. The reason Slashdot doesn't switch over probably has more to do with "it works now, so why bother with changing it" than anything else.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
The only correct answer is to get a court order for the original site be taken down until it upholds the disabilities law!
Because the "law" that Odeon's breaking is one of those grey area type of things that may or may not exist. The correct course of action would have been a civil suit to resolve this, which would no doubt go to arbitration and end up worked out. Odeon would have no problem tweaking their site to save themselves the bad press.
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.
The guy keeps saying they break this accessability law because it doesnt work on some browsers or systems. I don't see the connection. Mario Sunshine doesn't run on my linux-hacked XBox, is Nintendo violating this law?
If thats the fact, then I should point out that I've had many problems with slashdot on Mozilla and Firebird/fox/ant/fly, and it looks like positive shit under lynx. Apparently slashdot is breaking this "law" too.
I wont argue that this is good web design habits. Your sites should be viewable under any old HTML 1.1+ browser, IMO. But since when was it a matter of law to have a shit website? Since never, and thats really whats going on here.
It's one of those subjective things. Like the "fair use" thing. Slashbots on the free mp3z side of the argument would have you believe it's in the bill of rights, next to freedom of speech and religion. It's not.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
What he should do is instead change the site with nothing but an explanation telling people to complain to whatever authority controls the disabilities act. If Odeon is in violation, then what would a thousand phone calls to the "Disabilities Department" (or whatever it's called) do? Maybe get a big fine levied and a court order to make their site compatible within X weeks.
Odeon wants to use the law? Fine. Use it right back.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Lots of people are spouting lots of FUD here. Of course the site should be assessable. But the Disabilities Act does not require anyone except government agencies and a few other select public service entities to have assessable web sites.
And by the way, Slashdot and OSDN does not comply with the act either, so if there is going to be some mud slinging, by all means be fair about it!
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
> I appreciate Somerville's (apparently) noble motivations and Odeon's non-compatibility is certainly a problem, but how can you argue with their logic?
No. I can't. That's why they own trademarks, so they can control content. Now if Odeon was smart, they would simply fire off an RSS feed and let the guy fucking well spider it. Am I right or what?
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Odeon would have no problem tweaking their site to save themselves the bad press
You are demonstrably incorrect. They did NOT tweak their site to save themselves bad press. I'm used to people not reading the article, but have you read ANYTHING in this thread?
Seems unfair for the parent to be modded Offtopic.
Plus he/she brings up a good point: For all the nitpicking that we all do about non-compliant websites, it seems reasonable that the premier website for nerdly matters should set the example and lead the way.
Your statement smacks of sardonicism. The visually disabled can also hear a movie through a superlative spatial sound system available only in the cinema. Not to mention we can "see" the movie with our sighted friends, who can describe the action in diminished tones. I'm not blind, but nearly so, and I enjoy attending the cinema. I've gone so often that I know my local manager by name and he has made accomodations for my assistant animal.
/. with a bit of difficulty. Slashdot is not ADA compliant. Mind you manners, kit.
We can also post on
I've put in Flash in sites and dramatically increased the sales made by those sites- from one or two contacts a year to a few contatcs a week.
If it's made with usability in mind, Flash can be a good way to build value and rapport, which is important to many people on the net.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
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.
Because they thought they were interacting directly with the Odeon site but they weren't. It doesn't matter if he just transparently passes the data, he's still misrepresenting his site.
The problem is that Odeon has no control over what he does. If there is a problem with his site or he screws up the customer's data, then they will think it was Odeon's fault. Even if his intentions are good, and everything seems to work find right now, it is still a dangerous liability for the company. Absolutly they have to shut him down. Or force him to make it absolutly clear to his visitors that his site is not affiliated with Odeon.
Aw crap, ninjas!
I mailed info@odeonuk.com with the following:
Hello,
I'd like to voice my complaints at your handling of the "Accessible Odeon Website", formerly hosted at
http://www.dracos.co.uk/odeon/. I used it regularly as a replacement for your badly designed and completely dysfunctional website, to find film showing times and other useful information that I needed
as a customer to spend money watching films in your cinemas.
Since you appear to be unable to provide this sort of information yourself in a suitably open manner to
users of Internet browsers other than Internet Explorer, I really fail to see the necessity in shutting
down a free site providing your customers with information beneficial to your business.
Until I can access this sort of information again with my choice of browser from the comfort of my own home, I'll be visiting some other cinemas who are able to provide such things.
Yours,
Tom Feist
----
and I intend to stick by it. It doesn't help that the Odeon (fairly) recently closed their nearest cinema to me, and the nearest non Odeon is a fair distance away, but if it'll make them realise, good luck for them.
And since Matthew appears to be reading/posting here, thanks for the great site while it lasted.
The US Law is Section 508 of The Rehabilitation Act of 1973 as amended by The Workforce Investment Act of 1998.
Whilst that law only applies to government entities, court rulings indicate that Intranets have to comply with ADA. One pissed off resident of the Ninth Judicial District of the US, and a lawyer is all it takes to flip Section 508 into the ADA.
Why not design an accessible website? It isn't much more difficult to do, and the people that are the most thankful are the normal, non-disabled population.
Amber
Wind Beneath Thy Wings
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.
I think the fact that the website only worked in IE is independent of the accusation that it violates some discrimination law. They're two separate things which just happened to be mentioned together. You're reading too much into it.
For example, the way most people described the site, it sounds like there's no text to turn into speech, just lots of flash animations and menus. That's a discrimination law issue. Flash graphics should work in other browsers, so that's probably not related to the site not working in IE. More likely the IE thing is related to some weird scripting issue.