Any volunteers for a huge poster link adding job ?

[STSH]

Here's the first page of links to dddhouse's Shaw Brothers listings.

http://www.dddhouse.com/dddhouse/en/ind ... egoryID=25

There are hundreds of pages. Any volunteers to add this data to hkmdb ? Many of these films have no image data here yet.

Probably best (and quickest, also the most considerate) to add the individual pages as links, rather than upload them as poster images.

[bkasten]

No links to movie vendor websites in the DB.

If you get dddhouse's permission to upload their images as posters here, without any strings attached (like posting links), then feel free.

[MrBooth]

The images are very small and low quality - I wouldn't add them myself.

I've got a pretty high percentage of the Shaws releases, which will get scanned + uploaded eventually

Muldoon at AsianDVDGuide used to regularly post the promo galleries that IVL/Celestial sent out for each Shaw Brothers release - usually about 20 high resolution images from each film, including the poster... really nice! I archived a lot of them, but they're watermarked... I did send him a message asking for a contact where I could request the galleries myself, for upload here, but never got a reply

Would be a great scoop if somebody can get Celestial to send them to us - they're even better resolution + quality than DVD captures!

[Mike Thomason]

No links to movie vendor websites in the DB.

If you get dddhouse's permission to upload their images as posters here, without any strings attached (like posting links), then feel free.

I had posted a lengthy reponse to this, detailing the legalities and likelihood of doing so...but the damn forum timed out and I lost the whole thing!

In short -- I don't see Johnny agreeing to this without some sort of kickback to his retail business (ie: direct links to purchasing pages). I've had a good business relationship with him and his business since '02 (to the tune of thousands upon thousands of dollars; and he has assisted me with a number of favours outside the normal policy of his business), and when I asked if he'd be interested in being the sole linking retailer on my own (in-development) site, he was happy to agree -- but he set rules: no borrowing or usage of any images or information provided on the site without express permission, no mirroring of any images from his site (as he considered such bandwidth theft), and any links had to skip back to direct purchasing pages. Likelihood of this coming to pass: slim to none.

Per Celestial: I've already posed this question via their distributor in HK (Intercontinetal Video Limited). The response I got? Unless I was a retailer, or provided a business association in their vested interest (eg: promotion and support of their product), then the image request was similarly a no-go zone. I can't see them providing materials for usage in a limited access database, with no direct outside purchasing links, in a hurry based upon their answers to my own request (there was also the suggestion of monitoring of said materials to gauge the viability of further involvement). Likelihood of this coming to pass: virtually zero.

Hope this helps as well as clarifies some issues,
Michael

PS: I have emailed Johnny, at DDDHouse, for his input over this suggestion and will post his response as soon as it comes back. However, I am pretty confident what the answer is going to be...

[Mike Thomason]

This response just back in from Johnny at DDDHouse:

"Thanks for your notice. I appreciated that you are looking into this matter, if somebody copy the images from our site, it is actually reacting the bandwidth lower, I appreciate if you can post a kindly advice to all browser.

On the other hand, we will add our logo dddhouse.com on the images."

Johnny's a man of few words, and that's his way of saying "NO". Nice that he has decided to add the business logo (in a watermark capacity) as a preventative measure against image "theft" out of my enquiry...

I know Johnny quite well out of longtime dealings with him, and his primary concern is a reduction of bandwidth from linking to his images -- additionally, the fact that he is now implementing logos on all images implies that he considers their usage outside of his site "theft". Therefore, I think this suggestion, and discussion thereof, has now run its course.

Regards,
Michael

NB: If anyone harbours any concerns that I may have misrepresented the DB's best intentions -- I simply cut and pasted STSH's comments into an email and asked Johnny how he felt about this and if he would mind, and that was all.

[bkasten]

Thanks for that Mike!

I would point out that Johnny gets a fair amount of advertising here in the forum...but that of course in no way obligates him to do anything.

And in any case we are going to officially stay vendor neutral and maintain no links to retailers.

In fact, last night, I did audit the sites 2700+ links to other sites. A lot of them go to Bruce's excellent cast sites and the various review sites...but there were a very small handful linked to retail sites (<20). Let's keep it that way.

[MrBooth]

I understand Johnny's position entirely - as a matter of principle we should not take images from anybody's site, commercial or not, without their permission.