The Internet Movie Database (IMDb)[2] is an online database of information related to films, television series, podcasts, home videos, video games, and streaming content online – including cast, production crew and personal biographies, plot summaries, trivia, ratings, and fan and critical reviews.

Registered users with a proven track record are able to add and make corrections to cast lists, credits, and some other data points.

Users are also invited to rate titles on a scale of one to ten, and the totals are converted into a weighted mean-rating, with filters in place to mitigate ballot-stuffing.

It states that filters are used to deter ballot stuffing; the methodology and details for how its ratings are calculated are confidential and not accessible to the public.

IMDb has stated that to maintain the effectiveness of the Top 250 list they "deliberately do not disclose the criteria used for a person to be counted as a regular voter".

[10] This label arises because a statistic is taken to be more credible the greater the number of individual pieces of information; in this case from eligible users who submit ratings.

[citation needed] The IMDb also has a Bottom 100 feature which is assembled through a similar process although only 10,000 votes must be received to qualify for the list.

To post on the message boards a user needed to "authenticate" their account via cell phone, credit card, or by having been a recent customer of the parent company Amazon.com.

According to the website, the decision was made because the boards were "no longer providing a positive, useful experience for the vast majority of our more than 250 million monthly users worldwide".

[16][17][18] Needham also mentioned in a post some months earlier that the boards received less income from ads, and that their members only made up a very small part of the website's visitors.

[19] The decision to remove the message boards was met with outspoken backlash from some of its users, and sparked an online petition garnering over 8,000 signatures.

[23] Actors, crew, and industry executives can post their own resume and upload photos of themselves for a yearly membership fee to IMDbPro.

Membership enables a user to access the rank order of each industry personality, as well as agent contact information for any actor, producer, director etc.

The database had been expanded to include additional categories of filmmakers and other demographic material as well as trivia, biographies, and plot summaries.

The movie ratings had been properly integrated with the list data, and a centralized email interface for querying the database had been created by Alan Jay.

It provides a variety of services including film production and box office details, a company directory, and the ability of subscribers to add personal information pages.

From 1996 onwards, an annual newsletter email (archived on the website) has been sent from Col Needham to contributors on the first day of each calendar year.

Conversely, a credited text entry, such as a plot summary, may be corrected for content, grammar, sentence structure, perceived omission or error, by other contributors without having to add their names as co-authors.

[54] IMDb has been subject to deliberate additions of false information; in 2012 a spokesperson said: "We make it easy for users and professionals to update much of our content, which is why we have an 'edit page'.

Since 2007, IMDb has been experimenting with wiki-programmed sections for complete film synopses, parental guides, and FAQs about titles as determined by (and answered by) individual contributors.

However, most of the data can be downloaded as compressed plain text files and the information can be extracted using the command-line interface tools provided.

[58] There is also a Java-based graphical user interface (GUI) application available that is able to process the compressed plain text files, which allows a search and a display of the information.

A Python package called IMDbPY (since renamed cinemagoer) can also be used to process the compressed plain text files into a number of different SQL databases, enabling easier access to the entire dataset for searching or data mining.

[59][60][61] The IMDb has sites in English as well as versions translated completely or in part into other languages (Danish, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish and Romanian).

"IMDb determines its definitive top 10 lists using data from IMDbPro STARmeter rankings, which are based on the actual page views of the more than 200 million monthly visitors to the site.

[64] Celebrating 20th anniversary of IMDbPro, it launched IMDb Icon STARmeter Award, which is given to prominent artists of the industry who have appeared in the top 10 positions throughout the year.

[65] In 2011, in the case of Hoang v. Amazon.com, Inc., IMDb was sued by an anonymous actress for at least US$1,075,000 because the movie website publicly disclosed her age (40, at the time) without her consent.

[70] Also in 2011, in the case of United Video Properties Inc., et al. v. Amazon.Com Inc. et al.,[71] IMDb and Amazon were sued by Rovi Corporation and others for patent infringement over their various program listing offerings.

[72] The patent claims were ultimately construed in a way favorable to IMDb, and Rovi / United Video Properties lost the case.

[76] On February 23, 2017, Judge Vince Girdhari Chhabria issued a stay on the bill pending a further trial, on the ground that it possibly violated the First Amendment because it inhibited the public consumption of information.