This reminds me of the Tragedy of IMDB, once again. Many people may not know or remember, but IMDB (and CDDB which had a similar fate) were some of the great e

This reminds me of the Tragedy of IMDB, once again. Many people may not know or remember, but IMDB (and CDDB which had a similar fate) were some of the great early "open source" works of the internet-- millions of movie (and music) buffs painstakingly compiled information to create these massive databases. They gave the sites the data for free as part of an agreement that the sites would make that data available for free to everyone. They grew like crazy and became really useful-- for instance in the early days of playing CDs on computers the CD programs (this is before MP3 rippers) would connect to CDDB to look up the tracks to display while playing the CD (since this info wasn't on the CD in digital form.) Later MP3 rippers used this data to automagically put the right metadata into MP3 files. But eventually the dotcom mania happened and everything with a dotcom suddenly was valuable. So it isn't a surprise that these guys who created these volunteer sites sold them out. IMDB, which uses data created voluntarily by members of the internet, sold to Amazon which now charges a massive premium price for access to the data (they keep a subset of it free on restrictive terms, possibly as terms of the sale, but they really try to limit the utility to maximize their profits among those who want to know about in production movies, etc.) It used to be that IMDB was a great place to find out info about in-production movies, etc, but that data is now stripped (Though the titles remains so people think there just is no data.) When I was an employee of Amazon, I had a free imdb-pro account. There's a whole lot of data IMDB is not showing you unless you pay. And of course, IMDB is still crowd sourcing most of its content! This has extended to the data you can download. Back in the 1990s you could download the entire IMDB database. No more. The page about their "offline dataset" calls it a "Subset", but they never say what it is a subset of (%1 of the movies? Could be it seems pretty small.) The "movie-database-faq" we are to use as guide to the data is the rtfm faq (even with links to rtfm.mit.edu) from back in the day when IMDB was a free database, and apparently hasn't been updated in 15 years. Their offline dataset does not include Ratings. In fact the data seems really almost deliberately useless (but I just started looking at it.) For instance, Movies.list is just a list of movie titles. Complete-cast.list just indicates whether they have verified the complete cast - by title. Either they are using the movie title + supplementary information and year as the foreign key (which seems fraught with peril) or there isn't a good way to reconstruct a relational database from this data. Sorry, excuse me for that rant. It just seems fraudulent in a way to crowd source a database from the community with the promise of making it available to the community and then sell out and have that data taken away and used for profitable purposes. This cuts off a lot of useful apps (like the one this topic is about originally) that would otherwise be built easily using this data. (I think imdapi may be scraping, haven't' figured that out yet.)