Your statements about IMDB show a complete misunderstanding
of the researching, editing and writing of reliable film data, or any other
data for that matter. IMDB is nothing more than a vacuous depository of
misinformation, plagiarized credits and unreliable commentary from amateur
observers, which, for useful searchers, is gobbledygook. The creators of this
site began with the wholesale filching of all of the credits laboriously and
painstakingly assembled by my firm, CineBooks, in the early 1980s, which
produced the definitive work on film, The Motion Picture Guide (MPG), 25 vols.
offering more than 65,000 in-depth, reliable entries on feature films, from the
silent era to the present. These IMDB plagiarists were smart enough not to
steal any of the “creative” synopses in MPG, knowing that would be
a clear-cut violation of copyright. (And that is why they show so few synopses
in their database, having on in-staff films experts.) They did not attempt to
rewrite my synopses because, simply, they had never seen most of the films (as
I and my staff of experts did), nor did they have the research to show any
background on the films (as we did—from more than 50,000 published works,
and 200,000 files, including production reports). Even in taking all of our
credits, these thieves were clever enough to know that the credits in and of
themselves were “facts” that were copyrightable under the “organization
of the facts” (the legal term employed in suits to prove plagiarism for
non-fiction works). To avoid litigation, they re-arranged the assembly of the
credits, cutely positioning them in “alphabetical order,” but in so
doing, misrepresented and wrongly positioned the credits as they appeared for
on-screen productions which properly show appearance in order of importance of
players and crew.
What these moronic thieves did not know and still do not
know (until the time of this message to you and the New York Times) is that in
their wholesale theft of MPG research, they mindlessly (and here only a film
expert would know) picked up and posted all of the many seeded “plants”—fictional
creations of my own, films never made—and blithely, stupidly incorporated
these non-existing films into their useless database. In organizing the Motion
Picture Guide (which took ten years in the making) I anticipated an attempt by
those technocrats busying themselves only with the impending Internet to steal our
content, particularly the credits, knowing full well that they had no analytical
ability or discriminatory knowledge in selecting or evaluating data, and would
simply take whatever they thought they could use without being sued. Of course,
IMDB is nothing more than a job market now, for anyone trying to get a paid
position on any new movie or TV production, and, to that end, IMDB posts
claimed credits by job seekers. As a reliable reference site on the movies, however,
it is utterly unreliable.
The reason why Jeff Bezos at amazon,com bought IMDB is clear
to me. Bezos and his crew, like IMDB, do not have any true experts capable of
discerning genuine data on film, or, for that matter, books. Bezos is typical
of the Internet tycoons who believe that it is not necessary to employ human
analysis to the data he peddles and that programming will do all that is
necessary. Actually, he and too many like him, will not pay to have experts
address his own data, content that requires only expert (human) evaluation to
be worthwhile to anyone. Thus, he and his kind continue to perpetuate and make millions
from useless or misleading data. When it comes to IMDB, the uninformed Bezos
bought a “pig in a poke.”
The tradition of “seeding” data to protect
content is maintained by standard reference firms, including Marquis Who’s
Who, where I once worked as an editor. My application of that traditional
protective measure for MPG was therefore not exceptional, but routine.
Jay Robert Nash, Author, MOTION PICTURE GUIDE
Phone: 847-256-2468
Fax: 847-256-2473
Email: via fshields@iservices.com