Many programs have some form of Electronic Programme Guide, or EPG. They need to get the data for the guide from somewhere, and because the data comes from different sources in different geographical locations, people have separated the uses of the data from the gathering of the data. XMLTV is a format for transferring EPG data. This page lists programs that gather EPG data for Australian TV channels.
Programs that use XMLTV (see description below) need to get their data from somewhere. Some companies will sell you a direct XMLTV data feed. Other people use a program known as a grabber or scraper to gather data from the web and convert it into the XMLTV format.
In the standard XMLTV naming format, the script that returns Australian data would be called tv_grab_au.
Users of these sources should be aware of the legal issues surrounding their use.
Here are the sources that I know of for Australian XMLTV guide data (if you know of any more, please let me know):
http://tvguide.org.au/, and is now http://www.oztivo.net/.JavaXMLTV which grabs both XMLTV and topfield guide data. It seems to use the NineMSN data.XMLTV is an XML specification for television guide data. It is used by a number of open source projects and Personal Video Recorders (PVRs). I use it with MythTV and I have a list of other PVR systems that I know use it in Australia.
While it is generally only open source projects that use XMLTV directly, many commercial PVRs in Australia need a source of guide data. People have written programs that convert XMLTV data into the native formats for these PVRs:
xmltv2tivo program that converts between XMLTV and tivo formats.Firstly, I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV. This is not legal advice - I'm just trying to point out the issues I see. If you need or want to understand this in more detail, get thee to a lawyer. This discussion of the issues is incomplete, and almost certainly at least partially incorrect.
I know of two companies that gather TV guide data in Australia for use in web-based TV guides. All free public web-browser viewable guides I know of in Australia use one of these services. The services are:
At time of writing, both licenses include the following:
Specifically, each TV schedule is not to be, in any way, downloaded or used in conjunction with any software or device, such as any end-user equipment or a set top box, which permits manipulation of the program listings, or which permits scheduled program recording.
While in the past EBroadcast allowed pretty much any home use of the data, both licenses now claim to restrict use. While I respect that these companies have put effort into gathering the data, it is also true that raw facts cannot be copyrighted in Australia. For collections of facts, the arrangement of the facts as a collection may be protected even if the individual facts are not, and it is under this legal theory that these companies claim to be able restrict use of the data. On the other hand, copyright is supposed to protect against distribution of the data, not against *use* of the data in a certain way. That legal theory would imply that grabbers are OK for home use, but you can't re-distribute the data to others (and here I stress again that I am not a lawyer). It also seems to me that while the start time of a particular program is a fact, there may be copyright in the particular set of words used in a program description.
Some aspects of this are being tested in court at the moment (early 2008 - I don't update this often); see the IceTV vs. Nine section below. Note that Australia follows UK precedent rather than US, and the two are quite different.
There are a number of people who were re-distributing HWW and EBroadcast data, who were threatened with legal action, and who then stopped distributing that data. That seems fair to me (The TV channels might be stupid to not distribute guides, but HWW and EBroadcast have the rights to their collections). There are also some people who have written grabbers for specific web sites who have also been threatened with legal action to remove said grabbers. This seems to me to be bogus, but the people concerned complied rather than fight it in court.
In an interesting piece of history, some people appear to have been threatened with legal action for even mentioning that they removed a grabber because of a threat of legal action. To my mind that is manifestly unjust.
The D1.com.au data is an interesting case. Under copyright law, you have no rights to reproduce something unless explicitly granted them (in general). Aside from the problem with orphan works, this means that the fact that I can't find a license for the D1 data doesn't, by itself, mean I am free to use it. Balanced against that is the implied license to use the data based upon the fact that it is being made freely available on the Internet. Looks very grey to me. Update: Someone pointed me to this mailing list post which suggests the data is ok.
Having given the bad news, there are legal ways to get guide data. IceTV, listed above, will sell it to you. And the Community based TV guide will give it to you for free under a creative commons license.
It appears that Channel Nine really wants to kill computer use of guide data. They have filed suit against IceTV charging them with copyright infringement - IceTV (mostly) re-create the guide data themselves by watching TV, but Nine is claiming copyright over the schedule regardless of the form or if you re-create it. IceTV won the first round. This opinion makes a sensible decision on the facts of the case. Nine appealed to the Federal Court of Australia, and won the appeal. I have read the appeal decision and can see the legal reasons for it -- they are following the UK precedent. Having said that, I think the UK precedent is bad policy and should be overturned. IceTV is seeking leave to appeal to the High Court of Australia which could overturn the UK precedent in Australia. I wish IceTV all the best. N.B. I don't update this often, so it may get out of date.