Who Owns Your Movie Rating & Reviews Data?

Dave Winer thinks we should own our data, including movie ratings:

This is a long-told tale here on Scripting News. The classic example are the movie rating data held in silos by sites like Netflix and Yahoo Movies.

But whose data is it??

Seems it belongs to the users and they should be able to take it where they want. Sure Yahoo is providing a recommendation engine, that's nice (and thanks), but they also get to use my data for their own purposes. Seems like a fair trade. And I'm a paying customer of Netflix. They just lowered the price but I'd much rather have gotten a dividend in the form of being able to use my own data.

Think of the mashups that would be possible.

Wouldn't it be great to link up Match.com with movie ratings to find dates that like the same movies?

Some of my Netflix Friends have rated thousands of movies, written scores of reviews, and have hundreds of movies in their queue. This data has a lot of value to these people, and there should be a way for customers to backup or transfer this information into other services. While it doesn't make sense for Netflix or Blockbuster to do this, it's a good opportunity for a third-party developer.

I'm also surprised Blockbuster hasn't figured out how to import a Netflix queue yet.

Comments

[BulletproofHeeb]

According to the terms of use on the Netflix site, you own it but by submitting you give them a "perpetual, non-exclusive, royalty-free irrevocable license and right to display, use, reproduce or modify the Content submitted in any media, software or technology of any kind now existing or developed in the future." That would mean you own it, but they can use it any way they'd like once you send it to them.

As for developing 3rd party applications to use the data, they could take that to mean You own it, but if you want to use it somewhere else then you need to submit it to them, not pick it off the Netflix site.

[Pollardito]

it's all scrapable with browser plugins, but it seems like it'd be a legal gray area for Blockbuster to scrape it on behalf of the user for the purpose of importing it into their own database.

[CJ]

As long as I remain anonymous, I could care less who "owns" or "uses" my Netflix 3,000+ ratings and 500+ reviews.

[Old Timer Too]

You've created it - you own the copyright, unless someone does something to obtain those rights. Basically, NF did their homework in their T&C. If they were claiming Exclusive rights, then they would have to enter into a contract for those rights. You posting a review to their site does not automatically (regardless of their T&C) grant them exclusive rights.

That doesn't prevent them from copyrighting the material that appears on their site, meaning that no one can go in and "mine" (or "scrape") the material for their own purposes, especially if it would be used in conducting commerce (i.e., commercial use of your material).

By the way, the same copyright rules apply to any post you make, including posts on this and other blogs. Letters "to the editor" that are published in periodicals are the same.

[Toffer Peak]

Not sure why you linked to just a blurb about the real article (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/towards_the_attention_economy_opening_silos.php). But the article is not about copyright ownership as the previous commenters are thinking about. It is about portability of your data. If you use de.licio.us you can easily export your data to another online or browser bookmark service, you can also export your RSS feeds using OPML. However despite the fact that you created movie reviews and ratings on Netflix you can't export them. If you want to move to Blockbuster or simply add them to your IMDB account can you? No. That's the point of the article, websites need to give users more control over and access to their own data.

[Maarten]

I wrote a Greasemonkey script a while back to allow you to export your ratings. It only runs in Firefox and is a bit slow, but does the job with one single click.

It exports the data as tab-separated columns, so you can paste it directly in Excel or save it until you find a script that takes Netflix or IMDB movie IDs and ratings and applies them to another database.

Here's the NetFlix Movie Extractor (with IMDB Lookup) download page, which contains the installation and usage instructions as well as known issues: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/32964

[Alan]

At SaveMyRatings.com we also created scripts to export your ratings and transfer them to other sites like Amazon. But you can also take your Amazon ratings and add them to your Netflix account so it'll improve your Netflix recommendations.

Check it out.

Alan

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