[WikiEN-l] imdb

Sun Aug 1 14:01:15 UTC 2004

Your statements about IMDB show a complete misunderstanding of the
researching, editing and writing of reliable film data, or any other data
for that matter. IMDB is nothing more than a vacuous depository of
misinformation, plagiarized credits and unreliable commentary from amateur
observers, which, for useful searchers, is gobbledygook. The creators of
this site began with the wholesale filching of all of the credits
laboriously and painstakingly assembled by my firm, CineBooks, in the early
1980s, which produced the definitive work on film, The Motion Picture Guide
(MPG), 25 vols. offering more than 65,000 in-depth, reliable entries on
feature films, from the silent era to the present. These IMDB plagiarists
were smart enough not to steal any of the "creative" synopses in MPG,
knowing that would be a clear-cut violation of copyright. (And that is why
they show so few synopses in their database, having on in-staff films
experts.) They did not attempt to rewrite my synopses because, simply, they
had never seen most of the films (as I and my staff of experts did), nor did
they have the research to show any background on the films (as we did-from
more than 50,000 published works, and 200,000 files, including production
reports). Even in taking all of our credits, these thieves were clever
enough to know that the credits in and of themselves were "facts" that were
copyrightable under the "organization of the facts" (the legal term employed
in suits to prove plagiarism for non-fiction works). To avoid litigation,
they re-arranged the assembly of the credits, cutely positioning them in
"alphabetical order," but in so doing, misrepresented and wrongly positioned
the credits as they appeared for on-screen productions which properly show
appearance in order of importance of players and crew.

What these moronic thieves did not know and still do not know (until the
time of this message to you and the New York Times) is that in their
wholesale theft of MPG research, they mindlessly (and here only a film
expert would know) picked up and posted all of the many seeded
"plants"-fictional creations of my own, films never made-and blithely,
stupidly incorporated these non-existing films into their useless database.
In organizing the Motion Picture Guide (which took ten years in the making)
I anticipated an attempt by those technocrats busying themselves only with
the impending Internet to steal our content, particularly the credits,
knowing full well that they had no analytical ability or discriminatory
knowledge in selecting or evaluating data, and would simply take whatever
they thought they could use without being sued. Of course, IMDB is nothing
more than a job market now, for anyone trying to get a paid position on any
new movie or TV production, and, to that end, IMDB posts claimed credits by
job seekers. As a reliable reference site on the movies, however, it is
utterly unreliable.

The reason why Jeff Bezos at amazon,com bought IMDB is clear to me. Bezos
and his crew, like IMDB, do not have any true experts capable of discerning
genuine data on film, or, for that matter, books. Bezos is typical of the
Internet tycoons who believe that it is not necessary to employ human
analysis to the data he peddles and that programming will do all that is
necessary. Actually, he and too many like him, will not pay to have experts
address his own data, content that requires only expert (human) evaluation
to be worthwhile to anyone. Thus, he and his kind continue to perpetuate and
make millions from useless or misleading data. When it comes to IMDB, the
uninformed Bezos bought a "pig in a poke."  

The tradition of "seeding" data to protect content is maintained by standard
reference firms, including Marquis Who's Who, where I once worked as an
editor. My application of that traditional protective measure for MPG was
therefore not exceptional, but routine. 

Jay Robert Nash, Author, MOTION PICTURE GUIDE

Phone: 847-256-2468

Fax: 847-256-2473

Email: via fshields at iservices.com 

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