The Feist Decision held that one can't get a proprietary interest in the unorigianl assembalage of facts (like a phone book listing in alphabetical order, which was the precise question in that case). However, it leaves open protection for an original arrangement which IMDB could arguably present a case for.
Nevertheless, there are many causes of actions that iumbd could have outside the scope of copyright law. If you are accessing their site in a way they have expressly forbidden (screenscraping), they could press a tresspass to chattels cause of action. Other companies such as eBay and Verio (I believe, whoever maintains the Whois database) has been succesful on this theory. Feist gives small comfort to someone who is screenscraping a site like imdb against their express wishes. _______________________________________________ mythtv-users mailing list [email protected] http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
