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.
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.
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.
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."
I agree that you can't just use someone elses work because you want to, but there is another issue I am concerned with, this Disability Discrimination Act and how it is a violation to have a web site that isn't accessible to everyone.
I see the logic in making your site as accessible to everyone, and much logic in forcing certain buildings to be accessible to those with disabilities, particularly Government buildings. But this "Act" would seem to make it illegal to make a site that is all flash, or accessible to Opera only, etc. It seems that it is in the webmaster's best interest to allow the widest audience to use the site, but I don't see how it is any government business how a private company codes its website. Frankly, its no one's business if I want to code my own site to be inaccessible to anyone I want. Even Microsoft won't let you update Windows automatically without IE, which is their right.
This is a theatre chain, they should have the right to design their website as they see fit. Going online to view movie listings falls far short of the what any government should regulate. Should we pass a law that requires all websites (blogs, family home pages, theatres, slashdot, etc) to have every bit of text, including the html source, as audio, to make the site accessible to blind people?
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
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?
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
Most pages are accessible to the blind, or mostly so. Screenreaders do text-to-speech quite well - but they are browsers themselves, and thus, since this site was only accessible with IE, blocked from Odeon's site.
Furthermore, while I'm not familiar with UK law, I am quite familiar with US disabled rights laws (IANAL; I am disabled). "Reasonable accomodations" is the test in the US, and I assume something similar is the test in the UK; a site like Odeon's could easily (reasonably) been written in a more cross-browser fashion that would have allowed screenreaders to access it. A flash-only site might be flash-only for a reason, thus making HTML-only not a reasonable accomodation, and thus not legally required.