Legal Question in Intellectual Property in California

I am interested to collect the public street and city addresses listed on IMDB.com to use for a commercial project. According to IMDB's terms, all content on their website is copyrighted, which I assume includes street and city addresses.

http://www.imdb.com/help/show_article?conditions

However, is it likely or even possible that IMDB copyrighted public addresses?? I am interested in scraping the movie titles and address information for this commercial project except IMDB explicitly says this is not permitted without a license:

http://www.imdb.com/help/show_leaf?usedatasoftware

According to the following link, it's possible this content is covered under "Movie and Television Titles" but does not explicitly list street and city addresses:

http://www.imdb.com/licensing/index

Because I am not interested in paying the license fee at this time (and might consider it in the future if it's a good investment), will it become a legal issue to use the public addresses listed on their site? The data we can use is found here for free (but they state it's only free for personal use):

http://www.imdb.com/interfaces

So could you please clear this up for me so I can get a better understanding about what move I can make for my potential commercial project?


Asked on 10/24/10, 8:21 pm

1 Answer from Attorneys
George Shers Law Offices of Georges H. Shers

Since we are all answering these questions for free, I do not think any of us is willing to do all the work you propose so that your business might make more money for you. We generally answer personal questions and the site is not intended to help business people save money, especially when their questions cover a topic no one else is interested in.

Having said that and not being familiar wilth copyright laws, I do know that you can only copyright or gain government protection for items not aleady in the public domain, that are unique, or tha use a special process to gather or provide information. A list of street names is in the public domain; even if it were not, the white pages of Pac Bell already lists that information. The company you do not want to deal with is probably trying to protect its process of using the information and not the information itself

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Answered on 10/29/10, 9:04 pm


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