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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."

35 of 478 comments (clear)

  1. Wrong priorities here... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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...

    1. Re:Wrong priorities here... by josh3736 · · Score: 5, Insightful
      I wish they would use their energy to produce a site that is actually navigable.

      I spent no less than 60 seconds staring at the intro screen trying to figgure out how to get in to the damn site.

      I hate intro screens.

      When I finally realized that clicking the ad wasn't actually clicking an ad, I was presented with a just-as-mysterious layout on the homepage.

    2. 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. :)

    3. Re:Wrong priorities here... by mriker · · Score: 5, Insightful
      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.
      You're kidding, right?
      And if he were job hunting, the protocol is to create a copycat site in a password protected directory and email company bigwigs the site/password, while saying "look what your site could be!".
      Like he says on his site, Odeon has refused to do anything about it for 2 years, when they very easily could have. I get the distinct impression that they couldn't give a flying fuck. That they're more interested in hunting after someone trying to provide a positive service that Odeon is unwilling to provide is unfathomable.
    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:Wrong priorities here... by Tim+Browse · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The Odeon site has annoyed me for years. I literally used to not go to Odeon cinemas because I couldn't find out what was on. Doesn't work outside IE? Doesn't work that well inside IE, if you want the truth.

      The Odeon website is one of the crappiest sites I've ever seen for such a high profile company. It's annoying, arrogant and just plain stupid.

      The Dracos version was bloody great - I could bookmark my local cinema (imagine that!) and easily see what films were on. It had scrollbars that (brace yourself!) acted like normal scrollbars! Can you bear it? Not like the Odeon site where they have the usual 'hover to scroll' Flash nonsense. (What is it with bloody Flash designers who feel they have to code a new slightly different scrollbar control on every freaking site?!)

      Now the accessible site is gone, I'm back to the braindead Odeon site.

      Bottom line? I'll go to their cinemas way less. It's too much hassle.

      Great business sense.

    6. Re:Wrong priorities here... by orthogonal · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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

      --
      Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
  2. And since Odeon couldn't take down the site... by Tezkah · · Score: 5, Funny

    ... a slashdotting will. :\

  3. Open and shut, IMO by SYFer · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:Open and shut, IMO by aardvarkjoe · · Score: 4, Insightful
      This is incorrect. Companies do not need to enforce copyrights or patents, only trademarks.
      He didn't say that they were in danger of losing their copyrighted material, which is presumably what you're referring to. He said "Corporations must act this way to protect themselves," which is a more general statement, and can be true for copyright infringement as well.

      Furthermore, the e-mail to Somerville says,

      "Also, by using the registered trade marks "ODEON" and "ODEON Fanatical About Film" on your website, our customers have mistakenly thought that your website was either associated with or endorsed by Odeon."
      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?
    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"
  4. Should've hired him by mroch · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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...

  5. So What...? by dan_sdot · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:So What...? by tonyr60 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "The issue is that some guy is tricking people into submitting info to his site instead of the Odeon site"

      How did he trick them? The url for his accessable site clearly was part of his own site. If someone was using his Odeon page it was because they had deliberately gone there because they wanted an accessable site. Likely some disabled (or enabled if they used Mozilla) wanted to book a movie seat, but could not until their friend or what ever said "try Matthew Somerville's site, it has an accessable copy of the Odeon site".

      If he had spoofed the address, or used a Microsoft "feature" to silently link to his site that would have been trickery.

    2. 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.

    3. 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.

  6. Bastards by Mr+Smidge · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Odeon might get less of a grilling for us if they had ever actually bothered to do something to make their site work correctly.

    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. .. I can't think what they're smoking.

    Probably a bigwig who has no clue of the situation made this decision..

  7. Outraged? So am I! by goldspider · · Score: 4, Funny

    Let me save you the effort of expressing your angst! Just fill in the blanks!

    I am ___________ over this article!
    a. saddened
    b. outraged
    c. bleeding from my ass

    ___________ is once again treading on my rights, and I'm fed up with it!
    a. Microsoft
    b. SCO
    c. The RIAA
    d. The MPAA
    e. George W. Bush

    I am entitled to ___________
    a. free software,
    b. free music,
    c. free movies,
    d. other people's money,

    and should not have to risk being ___________
    a. thrown in jail!!
    b. held responsible for my actions!!
    c. called a terrorist, socialist or communist!!

    In this FREE (as in beer, er I mean SPEECH) country, I should be able to take comfort in knowing that ___________
    a. society will pay for my personal shortcomings.
    b. industry exists to provide me with stuff regardless of whether or not I can't afford it.
    c. the law doesn't apply to me.
    d. the United States answers to an organization comprised 2/3 of dictatorships.

    When will this tyranny end? We need to stand up and fight for a world where our children can ___________
    a. treat their parents and teachers as equals.
    b. learn that Christianity, and all who practice it are better off dead.
    c. watch clown porn from the comfort of the elementary school library.
    d. revel in the freedom of moral relativism.

    I for one am going to do my part TODAY by ___________
    a. writing an angry letter to my congressmen... yeah right!
    b. doing another J.
    c. living in my parents' basement in protest!
    d. post to inconsequential blogs like Slashdot.

    --
    "Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
  8. Re:The website... by mr.capaneus · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  9. Pull out the data! by Eeeeegon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  10. Depends on the disability by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 5, Funny

    The original didn't work outside of IE on Windows and was in violation of the Disability Discrimination Act

    Well, I for one liked the original. I suffer from mental retardation you see, and as a result I only use and swear by Microsoft products. As a disabled person, I can testify that the original website worked perfectly.

    The new page on the other hand, which was aimed at open-minded people who used other, non-Microsoft browsers, was constantly reminding me of my disability and as such was totally discriminatory. And not just to me, but to all the disabled IT guys at Odeon also! I am so glad it's not accessible anymore, so I can go back to my comforting illusions.

    --
    "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
  11. Marketing? by Anonymous+Writer · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  12. Re:The website... by BdosError · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  13. Slashdot by bdigit · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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."

  14. That's fine... by Alizarin+Erythrosin · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  15. Let's see the spelling NAZIs jump on this! by Thud457 · · Score: 5, Funny

    How Odeous!

    --

    the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

  16. Re:Welll by Pharmboy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!
  17. 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.

  18. Plenty of mud for everyone! by Saeed+al-Sahaf · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

    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
  19. Re:Welll by magefile · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  20. Odious! by kisrael · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  21. My email to odeon... by Phil+John · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  22. 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.

  23. 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
  24. The relevant authorities regarding the DDA by ed_g2s · · Score: 4, Informative
    ...would be the Disability Rights Commission, email: enquiry@drc-gb.org
    The Disability Rights Commission is a national body, which may be able to help you take a case under the Disability Discrimination Act. It may also be able to give advice on the Act to disabled people, employers and service providers.