Petter Reinholdtsen: Legal to share more than 3000 movies listed on IMDB?

Legal to share more than 3000 movies listed on IMDB?

18th November 2017

A month ago, I blogged about my work to automatically check the +copyright status of IMDB entries, and try to count the number of +movies listed in IMDB that is legal to distribute on the Internet. I +have continued to look for good data sources, and identified a few +more. The code used to extract information from various data sources +is available in +a +git repository, currently available from github.

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So far I have identified 3186 unique IMDB title IDs. To gain +better understanding of the structure of the data set, I created a +histogram of the year associated with each movie (typically release +year). It is interesting to notice where the peaks and dips in the +graph are located. I wonder why they are placed there. I suspect +World Word II caused the dip around 1940, but what caused the peak +around 2010?

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I've so far identified ten sources for IMDB title IDs for movies in +the public domain or with a free license. This is the statistics +reported when running 'make stats' in the git repository:

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+  249 entries (    6 unique) with and   288 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-archive-org-butter.json
+ 2301 entries (  540 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-archive-org-wikidata.json
+  830 entries (   29 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-icheckmovies-archive-mochard.json
+ 2109 entries (  377 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-imdb-pd.json
+  291 entries (  122 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-letterboxd-pd.json
+  144 entries (  135 unique) with and     0 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-manual.json
+  350 entries (    1 unique) with and   801 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainmovies.json
+    4 entries (    0 unique) with and   124 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomainreview.json
+  698 entries (  119 unique) with and   118 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-publicdomaintorrents.json
+    8 entries (    8 unique) with and   196 without IMDB title ID in free-movies-vodo.json
+ 3186 unique IMDB title IDs in total
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The entries without IMDB title ID are candidates to increase the +data set, but might equally well be duplicates of entries already +listed with IMDB title ID in one of the other sources, or represent +movies that lack a IMDB title ID. I've seen examples of all these +situations when peeking at the entries without IMDB title ID. Based +on these data sources, the lower bound for movies listed in IMDB that +are legal to distribute on the Internet is between 3186 and 4713. + +

It would be great for improving the accuracy of this measurement, +if the various sources added IMDB title ID to their metadata. I have +tried to reach the people behind the various sources to ask if they +are interested in doing this, without any positive replies so far. +Perhaps you can help me get in touch with the people behind VODO, +Public Domain Torrents, Public Domain Movies and Public Domain Review +to try to convince them to add more metadata to their movie entries?

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Another way you could help is by adding pages to Wikipedia about +movies that are legal to distribute on the Internet. If such page +exist and include a link to both IMDB and The Internet Archive, the +script used to generate free-movies-archive-org-wikidata.json should +pick up the mapping as soon as wikidata is updates.

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Tags: english, opphavsrett.

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+ Petter Reinholdtsen + +

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