Scraping is an interesting issue. I wouldn't have been surprised if they had objected to nostra's script. He accepts donations, so that might have been construed as an indirect commercial exploitation of their property. They had no basis for objecting to my script, however. It's just a modification of nostra's, but it's for my personal use. If they have some objection to how end users use their site, they can probably block those patterns of use, but they can't object to how users choose to access publicly available web pages.
End users are not Rovi customers. It seems small operations (like J. River) aren't either. Their customers are larger enterprises capable of generating enough revenue from the data to pay them well. They've also proven themselves rather inept in dealing with end users. While most appreciate the Allmovie and Allmusic sites for the richness of data, they were/are technological dinosaurs compared to other similar sites. The new AllRovi site isn't any better. It seems they don't have the expertise to do even basic things like build a search function that works, or the imagination to find creative ways to engage users. It makes me wonder if their real agenda is to create the demand that will attract a new customer—someone who knows how to create and run an effective website they can license the data to.
