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IMDb Turns 15
An anonymous reader writes "15 years ago today, Col Needham posted some shell scripts to rec.arts.movies which allowed anyone to search lists of actors, actresses, directors, and biographies. From this humble beginning -- which predates Yahoo, Google, and even the web itself -- the IMDb has wrangled the collective wisdom of millions of submitters to become not only a top 100 website but also a standard Hollywood tool for filmmaking. IMDb is celebrating with a retrospective of the last 15 years of IMDb and movies. Congratulations to IMDb and the internet community that built it."
Leaves me with the feeling that bigness + age != niceness.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
ITS A MOVIE SITE. When the hell were movies NON-BLOODY-COMMERCIAL?!
The site has a huge database, it's very easy and trustworthy to use.... it has some crap. So what? So does every site that needs to make money.
Shut it.
I love IMDB, but I really think they ought to change their name by now. They have info on movies, television, video games, you name it.
I think it is the fact they have a four-letter domain that is the stopper. Finding a short domain name is tough, or in the case of four letters, impossible.
Click here or here.
# Agent information and other data has been moved off of the free IMDb site and onto IMDbPRO, which I refuse to use.
There's little real need for the non-industry to know agent information.
# To insert data into this database, such as photographs of my favourite actors, costs money. This was
supposed to be a free site.
It's absolutely free to use. A site of that size can't live off of goodwill, sunshine, and gumdrops. I'll take a bit of annoyance to have it retain the useful information.
# Flagrant product placement. Virtually every "article" on IMDb's front page is a paid advertisement. Most "articles" are just used to link to Ama$on items.
They are a resource, not a content provider. There are thousands of useful review sites What else do you want? If you really want to complain about sucking the corporate teat, at least bitch about AICN, IMDB makes no pretenses of objectivity.
# IMDb has given nothing back to the community; rather it takes from the community (the poor) and gives to a large e-tailer (the rich).
It provides a huge service to the community. They don't owe *you* specifically a damn thing.
If by "wrangled" you mean "took contributions that users gave to the community for free, and used them to make money" then yes. Wrangled. Our friends at GraceCDDBNote are great wranglers too.
Movies are shared culture, and despite how the MPAA likes to assert property rights to every dimension of commercial film, movies are more than simply business. The stories they borrow from and the stories they tell are all public knowledge and are not owned by anyone.
Er... how very... communist(?) of you.
The fact of the matter is movies have been a business since they were invented. This is not like the music industry, where music existed prior to the music industry - movies did not exist prior to the movie industry. Movies were an industry ever since Thomas Edison invented the kinetograph, which he developed specifically looking for new ways to make money. Movies themselves have been copyrighted for as long as it occured to anyone to do so. That includes the stories, which sure as hell are owned by those that write them, at least until they sell those stories to a studio or producer (at which point they are then owned by the studio or producer). Movie plots don't write themselves, despite the wishes of most Hollywood producers.
Sure, movies are a part of our culture, but just because something's a part of our culture doesn't mean it's not also copyrighted (and copyrightable) as well as a commercial enterprise.