As the Plex agent has problems to provide movie posters for some old but famous movies like “Once upon a Time in the West” because of legal reasons, couldn’t there be an option to automatically fallback to IMDb or TMDB posters? Or why can’t we at least change the agent in that case to find posters with a different agent without having to download posters manually?
That’s how Plex used to do it actually. When there was a legal issue with an image from any sources - dmca request to Plex typically - they’d pull\block that specific image but wouldn’t remove all the artwork. In the past, it would either be blank and you’d have to manually pick a new one outta the artwork picker screen or it’d switch to the new “default” image automatically. Now Plex blocks all artwork for the title instead - all posters and all backgrounds - if there’s any legal\dmca\etc flags.
When this came up for a few titles a year ago reps in those bug reports about missing artwork just said go to get our own art as the only solution and that it wasn’t a bug. They wouldn’t admit that they changed their policy\process from how they used to do it, just kept stating “we always removed legal requests” - yes, but not all the art, so it was a bit annoying response. It was surmised that Plex does it this way now because it’s easier to block the title from getting any art and tell people to go get their own artwork manually than to manage policing individual artwork. Even if that means their own content on their Watch services get no artwork.
I can see the reason as a business efficiency\resources decision but it’s pretty annoying for us as customers since “we’ll provide all your artwork” is an advertised feature of Plex and now there are exceptions that didn’t exist before.
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The copyrighted posters were most likely fetched from there in the first place.
So that would make zero difference.
Plex is trying to fetch non-copyrighted posters from alternative sources. Unfortunately, those are sometimes not as pleasing to the eye as the originals.
I don’t understand why Plex cannot display posters for these movies when TMDb can.
For instance:
https://watch.plex.tv/fr/movie/once-upon-a-time-in-the-west
https://watch.plex.tv/fr/movie/bicycle-thieves
https://watch.plex.tv/fr/movie/the-leopard
https://watch.plex.tv/fr/movie/spellbound-1945
https://watch.plex.tv/fr/movie/two-women-1960
https://watch.plex.tv/fr/movie/guys-and-dolls
https://watch.plex.tv/fr/movie/some-came-running
https://watch.plex.tv/fr/movie/the-dirty-dozen
And there are many more movies with the same issue.
Because Plex is a company and copyright owners are able to tell them to drop copyrighted artwork from their backend. They can (and usually) do the same with other platforms, e.g. TMDb – though with a business they might be more thorough.
Just because something is “floating around the internet”, doesn’t mean it’s free to use (or free to use in a commercial context).
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