Development Policy

Before beginning any development please be aware of the following policy for any code included in either the Emby core components or plug-ins presented in our plug-in catalog.

We hope to provide a free and open environment for contributing valuable functionality to the Emby universe and encourage all contributions as long as they follow one simple rule:

No code contribution or plug-in shall directly violate or otherwise circumvent or cause the Emby product as a whole to violate or circumvent any laws as governed by the United States of America.

This includes but is not limited to:

• Directly violating the Terms of Use or Terms of Service of any source of data
• Using 'web scraping' techniques to obtain data that would otherwise be only available via subscription or other pay-for means
• Including or otherwise distributing code or libraries in a manner that violates the license terms of those particular libraries or the license terms of Emby (GPL 2.1).

Any code contribution or plug-in that violates this rule will be removed from the product or plug-in catalog without notice. We appreciate your cooperation and, as a software developer, you should fully embrace this policy as it also protects you against others freely distributing the results of your hard work.

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##Examples of prohibited content:

The following are some examples of practices that we know would violate this policy.

• Scraping data from a site such as IMDb.com. This data is considered a valuable asset to IMDb and they charge handsomely for it. It is against the law to obtain and re-distribute it without their consent.

• Downloading videos directly from YouTube. YouTube does have a public API that will allow 3rd parties to present their data. However, it is expressly against their Terms of Service for you to directly download and store their videos or play them via any means other than a sanctioned YouTube player.

Thank you for adhering to this policy and thank you for your contribution to Emby!