Re:I already boycott the IMDB (Score 1)

...any minerbot could be reconfigured to say it was IE without much difficulty.

True, but in practice, most aren't -- and so we have to ban them. We realize that some people such as yourself object to this, but the vast majority of HTTP requests without User-Agents that we recieve are from robots or prefetchers. For further information, see http://us.imdb.com/irony -- without the User-Agent restriction, the site would be unusable for nearly everyone. It's a tough decision we didn't take lightly!

It's especially frustrating for us that this is even necessary -- we make the raw data available to anyone who wants it, with only a few restrictions on how it can be used.

It's also worth pointing out that it's the "Internet" Movie Database, not the "WWW" Movie Database. If you don't like the web interface, we welcome your use through a different interface:

http://us.imdb.com/interfaces

Cheers,
Murray