Gamewise.co importing assets from GiantBomb

I am logged into Moby games and there is no forum post attached to his link.

@funkydupe: I really hope it's not like this man. I LOVE this site, and when I found out what was happening I outraged so much that I stopped caring about TNT. You can say me replying and commenting into HuffPost's article as Pasquale Paletta, my very name, just because I always considered GB clean. If GB did the same thing at the beginning well, I might just decide to remain silent from now on. Seems like @the_laughing_manis clearing my doubts, although I'd like to hear something from the mods/admins.

@Porkellain: there's nothing attached to that link. What are you trying to pull here, dude?

@porkellain: I'm logged in and I don't see anything on that page.

Giant Bomb definitely did start with data from MobyGames though. Remember when a bunch of images disappeared? Those images came from MobyGames. Other than the data (uncopyrightable) and the images (copyright owned by someone else), nothing else was imported. There was no copying of their text descriptions.

And I don't think Giant Bomb ever completed its MobyGames import. While filling out game credits I've found people to frequently be missing from the database.

...by "this site" I meant Gamewise.

The guy got some screen shots and someone did bring it up. But some research shows that moby is known for taking images off the internet and just slapping their watermarks onto it.

The guy still can not give proof it was taken without permission.

@mariachimacabre: absolutely nothing man, and I'm so happy that you@the_laughing_man and @lordandrew are clearing that out :)

I read almost all the comments on the reddit article (instead of finishing preparing my exam -_-) and then saw this lamplightmistake dude saying that GB did the same thing, linking that "thread" that I told about before. In all honesty I didn't have the guts to verify the thing myself, that would have been a complete bummer. I can't remember about the images matter that lordandrew talks about because I wasn't there, I joined the site after I saw the QL for SOTC/ICO HD Collection, so I'm quite a young member compared to you guys. Glad to hear that I've been proven wrong :)

GB did take stuff from moby. However much of it was scrubbed and removed replaced with better content*From what I understand*

@snide The dude is accusing GB of doing DDOS attacks on Moby games to scrape their info.

Edit

This dude wants me to email the admins of moby games to get a copy of the emails between them and Whiskey Media claiming that they stole from moby.

From one of Sciere's posts in the imgur gallery: "Rob will talk to Brian about protecting our content as soon as possible." You can find the names Rob and Brian here. Sciere is also a reputable MobyGames member who would probably not lie about that.

I've never seen proof it was taken with permission. The fact that all the original MobyGames images were removed from this site years ago is also evidence that they were taken without permission.

What is even happening

@lordandrew: I don't ever remember a massive amount of MobyGames watermarked images appearing on the site in the early days, and any that were had been user uploaded. I was under the impression that only person pages and game titles were imported.

Oh, this is getting fun.

That makes sense. However I think its more now that Gamewise ripped entire pages of used made content stealing peoples hard work.

They were imported without watermarks. Apparently there was a secret way of doing this that was not known to most people. I would assume that loophole has been closed by now.

Not just the titles of games. Also each game's platforms, genres (re-mapped to Giant Bomb's own selection of genres), developer, publisher, and data like that.

This is the second company created on the site. That's not a page a person would think to create right away.

None of the data is copyrighted. That's why I consider it an acceptable outcome if Gamewise just gets rid of all the plagiarized text and starts that part from scratch like we did.

Plus a lot of that is objective facts that are hard to call plagiarized.

Hi, first of all since other people have looked into this more detail than I. I'm assuming some of the details mentioned here are correct like you're based in the UK etc.

Okay, that out of the way I see you base your site off rackspace which have both a US and UK presence. (this is relevant for legal reasons)

If as you say this content was copied by some users and you haven't kept any logging information. Let me just say right here, you are kind of screwed. Whilst you yourselves say you haven't kept any logging information rackspace has. (they use Linux+Apache. I have no doubt they'll have the apache access.log files showing all POST & GET requests as well as possible logs from caching proxies and firewalls)

Now, I want you to think long and hard about all these replies you've been saying because you are putting both yourself and your employer in serious legal doo-doo if ANY of them have been false or deceptive.

In other words, if as you say some users created this content then you have nothing to worry about.

If however it turns out you have lied, CBSi can use these posts of yours in court (in the UK/US depending on where they decide to take action) and cause both yourself and the company you work for serious problems.

I am not a lawyer, but if you are being asked to lie for your employer in possible matters where legal action may be forthcoming I would either say no or leave said employment.

I think I found why we can't view that thread.

@lordandrew: Yeah, I assumed that stuff was imported as well, and I agree with you. Any idea what the legality is on non-watermarked screenshots? Because we have a lot of those here on the site, uploaded by hundreds of users.

From Wikipedia:

Copyright issues

Some companies believe the use of screenshots is an infringement of copyright on their program, as it is a derivative work of the widgets and other art created for the software.^[10][11] Regardless of copyright, screenshots may still be legally used under the principle of fair use in the U.S. or fair dealing and similar laws in other countries.^[12][13]

Preventing copying is one of the issues that Trusted Computing seeks to address. Under Trusted Computing, the user would be prevented from taking screenshots when certain programs are running.

10. "Screen Shots (Excluding Xbox)". Use of Microsoft Copyrighted Content. Retrieved 2007-08-22.

11. "Question: What are screenshots, and is using them copyright infringement?". FAQ about Copyright -- Chilling Effects Clearinghouse. Retrieved 2007-08-22.

12. "Copyright in screenshots? Who owns it?". MetaFilter. Retrieved 2007-08-22.

13. "Ask the Law Geek: Is publishing screenshots Fair Use?". Lifehacker. Retrieved 2007-08-22.

Basically, Giant Bomb does not hold the copyright to the screenshots, nor do MobyGames or Gamewise.

Still, I believe there's a big difference between images/basic data and stuff that you guys wrote with your very hands (I never submitted any wiki voice). It's totally ok if a new site comes out and tries to do better than this one, it might start a healthy competition that normally brings to nice improvements, so if they start back from scratch and get REAL user-submitted content then why not? GB isn't the first VG site that came up with the wiki idea and it's not realistic to think it should be the only one. Would be really nice if the guides submission tab was active by the way, got a couple of games of which I'd like to write some.

What really hurts my eyes is the HuffPost article, to be honest, and how Hendricks came to this thread and blatantly lied to us. "24 hours moderation" my ass.

God damnit, I clicked a Huffington Post article.

@lordandrew: That's what I figured. I had someone messaging me a couple months ago asking me to remove all MobyGames images, and I assumed they were fair use so I was confused how he thought he was in a position to make demands like that. Let the mods know and moved on.

@the_laughing_man: please reply to lamplight mistake and explain him that screenshots and COMPLETE WIKI PAGES are two different things. Explain that to our friend @cow_downtoo, meanwhile.

I'm not sure that cow_down actually wants any explanation.

It is like history repeating http://imgur.com/a/QzMkk

Check this out: http://t.co/Yf2nKMvMn9

Geekosystem wrote an article.

It's like you're not reading the posts in the thread where we discuss that.

my screenshots were used. awesome.

@winternet: How come? I'm sure that @cow_downis a totally legit GB user and not an account made up just to troll :O

@cow_down: maybe you should take a look at what @LordAndrew posted concerning art/game assets, as that is all your screenshot talks about.

edit: in other news; the Gamewise facebook page has blocked me and deleted my comments on their post about the Huffpost article.

@starfoxa: As a courtesy, I would consider it appropriate to post a comment on the image attributing and linking to the source when someone makes such a request. But there's no legal basis for removing it unless the demand actually comes from a copyright owner.

@lordandrew: Well, what are your thoughts on this? lamplightmistake brought up that scraping MobyGames for data would be against their Terms of Use. Would that be infringing on anything?

Websites have terms of service just like APIs. This is the MobyGames ToS for instance:

Licensor grants to Licensee the right to use the MobyGames web site for Licensees personal, non-commercial use. Licensee agrees not to modify, publish, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale, create derivative works, or in any way commercially exploit the MobyGames web site unless authorized to do so in writing by Licensor.

Giant Bomb is a commercial, for-profit site, so they violated the ToS. Also, through the DDOS they broke:

You agree not to interrupt or attempt to interrupt the operation of MobyGames in any way.

I think that everyone else needs to calm down on this witch hunt, though. We have yet to hear from someone official from Gamewise, just a volunteer admin. I like to hear both sides of a story before going crazy, and we have yet to hear from an official source over there.

I hope we can also hear some official word from the staff here, and maybe over at MobyGames. It seems like that issue was never actually resolved, but I don't want to pass any judgments on anyone before hearing from an official source, not just speculation.

It's the same principle just different shades of grey. Had Moby had full written overviews I'm sure GB would have scraped them too. In fact, if you click a character there is a small 2-line summary at the top which does appear to be taken straight from Moby. Stealing is stealing.

I'm pretty sure that if there was something wrong done by Giant Bomb to MobyGames they would have reacted. I glanced through their news posts in 2008 and 2009 and saw not even one reference to anything remotely linked to this. Also saying that GB DDOS Moby is as uninformed and speculative as shit.

@winternet: That guy was saying that when Giant Bomb scraped MobyGames' database, it caused outages, which he compared to a DDOS.

I don't know to what extent terms of use are legally binding. It's a confusing issue. But seeing as the incident occurred four and a half years ago, I doubt anything further is going to come out of it. I also don't expect legal action to be taken against Gamewise.

@cow_down: How is it the same thing? Did any of those users take the time and energy to write out wiki pages with info on it? No, they uploaded images that then had a watermark put on them. Sure I can see that the "DDOS" thing was shitty, but comparing taking images and someones writing as the same thing is in my opinion silly.

Either way, the fact that Moby does not respond to this leads me to believe that all of these allegations are not true.

Which pages on Giant Bomb are stealing content from other sources? The moderators need to be notified. MobyGames doesn't have character pages, but if something on Giant Bomb is indeed infringing on something else it needs to be dealt with.

@lordandrew: I agree. I'm gonna go play video games and stop reading everything that's posted about this.

@monkeyman04: the dude is a troll.

@porkellain: I know, I just needed to say something.

@monkeyman04: fair enough.

Sue the fuck out of these assholes. Seriously. And fuck huff post, whoever wrote that article clearly doesnt know shit.

@SexyToad my previous post got deleted, probably because it had some swearing in it my screenshot, but you had a conversation with this guy on the Huffington Post article, who actually turns out to be @MasterVG71782, the ADMIN of Gamewise pretending that he is just some user.

Dammit @MasterVG71782! "From the looks of it, Gamewise is also user added content." Why were you pretending to be unfamiliar with the site if you're in fact an administrator for the site? Why do you say "it seems that the site is removing the copyright infringed material" if you're in fact removing it yourself?