[michael_dorfman]

The answers to all of these questions are in the linked article.

But, just to save you the bother:

a) one guy started it, but it is not a one-man show, nor has it ever really been b) the data was sourced (Wikipedia-style, you might say) on Usenet, back in the pre-WWW days. Since then, the number of sources has multiplied. c) it goes to Amazon, who bought the IMDB back in '98. d) Of course not. He's a VP at Amazon. There is a staff (of unspecified size) working on IMDB.

[pyre]

You're forgetting the outcry there was for taking the USENET posts into a closed system. Similar to what happened with CDDB:

1. get users to submit a bunch of content to you in an open system for free

2. close the system and claim ownership of the database that your users helped create

3. profit!

[tungwaiyip]

I fondly remember those days when the entire database is distributed on Usenet. I have written a editor macro to "join" the tables to generate the full detail data of every movie. Of course when the IMDb website has launched, I have switched to their query web page.

[StavrosK]

Thanks, I skimmed it towards the end after it rambled a bit. Also, thank God for Readability.