Odeon Orders Takedown Of Copycat Site 478
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."
Open and shut, IMO (Score:5, Interesting)
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!"
Should've hired him (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The website... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, but... (Score:1, Interesting)
Now it's on the record that they a) haven't bothered producing a compliant site and b) they've shut sites that *are* compliant down.
Isn't that going to cause them liability problems?
Re:Open and shut, IMO (Score:3, Interesting)
If people aren't capable of reading the actual page, they really shouldn't be complaining that they're stupid enough to submit personal details to a site that quite clearly isn't official.
I'm quite annoyed by the closure of this site, because I used it fairly regularly to check showing times and release dates since I refuse to use IE, which is the only thing their horrible javascript mess will actually function in.
Re:The website... (Score:5, Interesting)
It is in their right... (Score:4, Interesting)
It is also the right of ALL disable people (or is that 'differently-abled' - whatever is not offensive) to sue Odeon for their violation.
Sadly, it would be best if Odeon would just pay for the updated content that fixes their works, reference the creator, and everyone join in for a hootenanny!!!!
site not working (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm writing this email, because I wanted to check odeon's cinema program. And I find out that I cannot access the website! It is obviously broken, the only thing I can see is a picture http://www.odeon.co.uk/Odeon/img/home.jpg and nothing more.
I hope that you will fix the site as fast as possible. Remember that by such a way you lose big number of customers.
PS: I really would like to send to you this complaint (so you can be aware of this problem), but I can't. I cannot find your email address, because the site is not working.
That's fine... (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:Open and shut, IMO (Score:2, Interesting)
I would also point out that you only need to protect your trademark if it is being used in commerce which is not the case here. That is, of course, in the US. Not sure how things differ in the UK.
Re:Whats your point? (Score:3, Interesting)
I think that the "vigilante" got what he was looking for. Recognition that their site was not compliant. Maybe now the UK government will crack down on them instead of ignoring the problem.
Re:Open and shut, IMO (Score:2, Interesting)
I think every company would agree that it is in their best interest to protect their customers from people (potentially, in this case) posing as them. The issue is not with the reproduction of the information, but with the possible (though not probable, if we give Somerville the benefit of the doubt) effects of such reproduction--even if he doesn't ask for it, an Odeon customer might give personal information to Somerville, mistaking him for the company. Additionally, the issue about booking information is a real hindrance to Odeon customers.
Somerville's idea is good; maybe he should try to get them to hire him for a redesign.
Equitable Estoppel? (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.legal-definitions.com/equitable-esto
They'll probably lose my business (Score:2, Interesting)
I live within 15 minutes drive of 3 large cinema chains, including an Odeon, and browse exclusively with Firefox - my link to IE is hidden in the depths of the Start menu. Before, I would browse the copycat site and the other two's official sites, and if there was a film I wanted to see at the Odeon at a convenient time, I would fire up IE and book online on the official Odeon site. I doubt I'll open IE just to check listing times.
The questions this raises (Score:4, Interesting)
On the other hand, I would be furious if someone chose to replicate my website, for any reason, be it good or bad. Now, I know, corporations usually have their heads buried deep in the sand over handling issues like accessability which are seen as obscure and unimportant, much less accepting free help from the outside world, or "getting right on it" when someone notifies them of a problem. Moreover, it wouldn't at all surprise me that this guy actually needed an accessable version of the site; most people don't do things like this unless it matters to them personally, and a movie chain isn't the biggest PR getter if it's a question of getting the issue into the papers. Still, really, who does this guy think he is, choosing to take the corporation's name into his hands and do what he will with it, even if he's doing the right thing, doing a very good job of it, and from many perspectives should be being thanked right now?
There was, once, a corporate tendency to Do The Right Thing. Back in the day, when a corporate problem or vulnerability was exposed, ignored, and fixed by an outsider, generally the corporation would turn around, fix it properly, and thank the watchdog, then find out the manager which had ignored the watchdog's pleas and put their job in jeopardy, and finally admonish the watchdog to speak with this other manager instead, who will listen instead of being a wall.
Will Odeon do this? Well, that remains to be seen. Someone somewhere probably believes that this was a huge risk and brand dilution, probably hasn't even looked at the site and is ignoring that a good job was done of a task which needed to happen. Corporations no longer attempt to behave civilly; now they defend every red cent like it's the last one that would ever be made, and if there's a hair of a chance that maybe somehow this could have been bad if he had been swearing, then we'd better god damned well make an example out of the guy trying to do the right thing, so that nobody else tries to do the right thing.
It would be appropriate for slashdotters in Britain, the US or Canada to call or write to Cineplex (depending on your nation, you may have to look for Lowe's Cineplex or Sony Theaters; they're all the same company.) It is spectactuarly difficult to track down a way to reach them, but the investor relations tab (as usual) has information that nobody else has.
Cineplex executives [corporate-ir.net] and contact information [enjoytheshow.com].
If you feel strongly about web accessability or about corporations not lashing out for people trying to do the Right Thing for them by proxy, please consider placing a five minute phone call in this man's support.
re: wrong priorities here... (Score:2, Interesting)
also, i'd just like to point out that according to WHOIS, a relevant domain is free: http://reports.internic.net/cgi/whois?whois_nic=o
ed
Class action suit (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Plenty of mud for everyone! (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/eco_gdp_gro_1
According to this, the largest GDP growth in the WORLD in this period (1998-2002) was Ireland. 10 points for whoever can name which continent Ireland is in? Anyone?
Other interesting (European) countries in the top 10:
Luxembourg
Greece
Hungary
Finland
(note this is continental Europe I'm talking, not just EU, but the poster didn't specify).
Where's the USA? 14. Just under Slovakia, Poland and Mexico.
The meaning of ODEON (Score:4, Interesting)
Lets remember what ODEON stands for...
Oscar
Deutche
Entertains
Our
Nation
(Of course, I may have spelt his name wrong but this is SlashDot, who cares!)
Re:Wrong priorities here... (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [diffenbach.org] 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 [diffenbach.org] 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 [diffenbach.org], 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 [diffenbach.org], 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
Possibly a repeat (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:So What...? (Score:2, Interesting)
But thats the thing... I don't know you. And neither does that company. What they should really do is hire you to create a good website under their supervision, to make sure that you are not stealing customer information.
But thats their decision (even if it is poorly made).
The problem is that there are dumb people out there (the majority) who don't look at the address and struggle so much with the web that they don't take the time to look at "details" like "this is not the official site". To put it this way, there have definitely been people who used your site thinking it was run by Odeon. And to be doing something like collecting customer information in their name (even if its not intentional on your part) is something that they need to worry about.
The company does not know what your intentions are or what you are doing with the data. You seem honest, but the sad truth is that there are alot of scumbags out there who would love a couple million email addresses to sell to porno sites.
Their website is a treat.... (Score:3, Interesting)
On the rare occasions where I am forced to use an Odeon these days, I tend to book my tickets by physically visting the cinema, talking to the nice students behind the counter (who have access to a decent and feature-filled UI, and can thus answer questions like "How busy is the 4:30 showing of Spiderman 2?"), and departing with my tickets physically in my hand.
I will never again book an Odeon ticket over the net, because their system is broken. I will never again book Odeon tickets over their telephone system, because their system is broken.
It pains me to say this, because ODEON is a big name in the history of British cinema & Art Deco architecture.
Re: wrong priorities here... (Score:3, Interesting)
Though the fact that thier real website is so screwed up and apparently in violation of a law as it is shure doesn't help thier image.
Mycroft
Re:Does anyone a recoded version of Slashdot? (Score:4, Interesting)
these guys had a go at it here [alistapart.com].
Re:Wrong priorities here... (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a problem because postcode mapping data is valuable, and a dataset normally costs several thousand pounds to purchase. (No, it's not free to the public, even though it's the ONS that comes up with it)
At FaxYourMP.com, an e-democracy site for which I volunteer, a big chunk of our money goes to paying for that data so that we can tell people who their MP is just from them giving us their postcode.
Re:Wrong priorities here... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Wrong priorities here... (Score:2, Interesting)
I had the same issue with the uk jobcenter site, they provide a text version, but there's no job search.. bloody stupid really!
I sent them an e-mail, even indicating which JS script was to blame, and how to fix, got an email telling me to visit a different site.
Why not pass on my info to someone who could edit 1 file and make the thing work again!?
Re:Wrong priorities here... (Score:1, Interesting)
If you want anything more complex than title, menu, content and you want it to work in all browsers then the sad truth is you can forget CSS2 for at least 2-3 more years until IE5.5 and IE6 have dissapeared from the market along with their crap support for standards.
Before I get flamed, I love XHTML/CSS and write all my web-applications in it where I can specify that clients must use mozilla for security and feature-set reasons. When I'm making websites however I just can't avoid using tables for any slightly complex layouts (e.g. any business site).
If anyone can show me one professional looking business website that uses divs instead of tables and works in IE and moz I'd be very interested to see it. Apart from a few hackish CSS tricks I've yet to see any pure CSS site that looks even slightly advanced compared to a properly designed page.