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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."
I appreciate Somerville's (apparently) noble motivations and Odeon's non-compatibility is certainly a problem, but how can you argue with their logic?
People are essentially misled into giving personal info and, since Somerville is using Odeon's marks, how could they think otherwise?
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.
Couldn't Somerville have found another way to provide the listings without the "cloning" approach? Maybe even a protest site that would drive Odeon to comply?
And, instead of looking mean-spirited to those (most people) who not understand corporate liabilities, etc., couldn't Odeon have just gotten the damn thing done right on their own?
Sheesh, what a lot of wasted angst on all sides.
In some ways, this is similar those situations where unbidden third parties submit ideas or scripts or spec ads to large companies and get sore because the company won't even read them. But the company is just protecting itself from future lawsuits when, even though they come up with an idea themselves, a bunch of knuckle-heads pipe up with "hey. I gave them that idea!"
"...all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness..." yada yada
It seems like the negative press could be more costly than just buying the fixed layout off of him, or even hiring him to replace their (incompetent) web design staff...
Dear God... What is wrong with creating a site with valid html? The web is slowly turning into a real cesspool. If a site is in Flash, I don't even bother.
Flash is completely inaccessible to the visually disabled (who do go to movies, believe it or not). That is not a good solution.
Complexity is Easy. Simplicity is Hard.
He should take the site down in compliance with their notice. Then he should report their site as a violation of that disability act, and offer to sell his compliant site layout to them at a "discount". That way they can pay out a small sum, have their rights, and a compliant site.
Or they can just be bastards about the whole thing. IE on Windows only? Why the hell? Ohhh... I see... their shitty DHTML menus! OK. So, an experienced person can duplicate that in Flash in probably 10 minutes. Or, somebody experienced in cross-browser DHTML can make it work with Mozilla or Opera, or even the Mac IE. Whatever.
Laziness at it's best. Why fix the site when we can pay lawyers more then it would cost fix it?
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
Seems like if he were out to help, he should have responded with a tutorial detailing what is wrong with their site, and how to fix it.
That would certainly have been easier for him, but not necessarily more effective. Tutorials don't produce the needed changes; code does.
I had something similar happen with emusic.com.
Emusic.com allows subscribers to view every track they've downloaded throughout out their subscription, but at one time the interface was flawed and slow. Tracks were arranged by Album, and Albums by artist, so to see the tracks, one had to "expand" a hierarchical tree. First the Artist would be expanded (an HTML POST) and then the Album (another POST), and there was no way, via the interface, to expand more than one Album or Artist at a time.
Invariably, a user session would time out after ten or so expansions were made, and then one had to start over. And with each expansion, more data was displayed, so GETting and loading took longer and longer, even though most data on each GET was a repeat of the data in the last GET, except for whatever had just been expended.
So I wrote a Perl program to fetch all tracks for all albums for all artists, and I even wrote it so that it expanded several artists and albums on each POST, so it did more while making fewer requests and fewer repetitive GETs for a smaller total number of bytes downloaded. Them the program spit out all the artist and albums and tracks as a HTML page on the user's local hard drive.
Since emusic requires a login (recall that each users "collection" accrued throughout the subscription is different), my program has to get the login and password and pas it along to emusic's site, just as site that "piggy-backed" on Odeon's site. (If you read the article, you saw that one of Odeon's principle complaints was about user information passing through the third-party site -- not that you read the article, being Slashdotters.)
While I wanted to have my program "phone home" to the distribution website so that I could track its use, I decided not to -- since users were trusting my program with their logins and passwords, I wanted to avoid doing anything that might look like I could be intercepting that information, even if all that would be phoned home was innocuous usage data.
I also took great care to make my program not strain emusics.com's website, both by aggregating "expansions" into single POSTs and GETs, and by forcing it to pause between requests. I even made the pause time random, to prevent any deadlocks if several users were using my program simultaneously. My program also had to deal with session time outs and know to re-login after each. In order to ensure the pauses were preserved, and to prevent anyone from producing trojan'd copies of my program that might steal login information from users, I did not release source code to my program.
And I made sure to mention on each page of the distribution web site, in each of the program help files, on stdout at runtime, and in the produced files, that my program was in no way affiliated with emusic.com and that all trademarks were the property of their owners.
My program was enthusiastically received by emusic subscribers, some of whom even said that having my program kept them from ending their subscriptions. emusic.com never contacted me, but emusic also didn't stop other people from recommending my program on emusic's message boards.
But about a month after I released my program, emusic rolled out an upgrade to their site. Among other things, the upgrade eliminated the clunky "expansion" style collection list. Unfortunately, the new version wasn't compatible with my code, either in layout or in the data ex
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