Gamewise.co importing assets from GiantBomb

I saw this new site in a Huffington Post article: Gamewise Is the IMDb of Video Games.

I wanted to see if the site had more extensive credit information than Giantbomb and found assets from the site on it: http://gamewise.co/games/17461/Grim-Fandango/Credits.

Notice the GiantBomb Logo where certain pictures of of the developers are absent. This that the credits pages are probably just pulling data straight from giantbomb respective pages. Which is shady considering the site is more or less a direct competitor.

I'm only okay with it if they're Russian.

Well that's shitty of them. What to do now? Call them out on Twitter? On their forums?

Pretty funny seeing GB logos all over that page you linked. Well now that Giant Bomb isn't the independent startup anymore they should be able to get some legal action going.

When Giant Bomb first started a lot of the hard data (i.e. game titles, person names) was pulled from MobyGames, with their permission. I think this is fine as long as they asked permission and they're not straight up pulling wiki articles or things like that.

edit: looks like they didn't ask permission

they deleted those images, it looks like.

Anyone have any screenshots of this?

I hope so. I sent a tweet to the author of that article and after I linked back to the Grim Fandango page, the images had been removed. I dont recall the other two names that had the GB logo as an image, but "Lleslle Aclaro" for sure was one of them.

Well it looks like they may be covering their tracks a bit.

identical info, word for word.

http://gamewise.co/people/5571/Peter-McConnell

http://www.giantbomb.com/peter-mcconnell/3040-2278/

@snide:

http://gamewise.co/people/24045/David-Vallone

http://gamewise.co/games/15706/Full-Throttle/Credits

@snide

Save the pages with firefox if you see it live.

There is still proof of the giantbomb images in google's cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-NKdPKv8LYwJ:gamewise.co/games/17461/Grim-Fandango/Credits+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca

Here's the link to the giantbomb image: http://main-im-peop-3.gamewise.co/Ralph-M-Gerth-IV-128015-medium.jpeg

Looks like they're straight up pulling pages too. I'm looking at some more obscure pages now. Check out the Famicom Tantei Club Part II page (i.e. the characters) and compare it to the page we have on the site. Identical images and names, even for the unnamed protagonist (I created a page for "Tantei Club Member").

Same deck on those two:

"A member of the titular Tantei Club in the Famicom Tantei Club franchise, as well as the main protagonist of the first two games."

@snide

guess they are watching this thread, as both of those are now gone as well!!! SHADY FUCKERS!!!

i just went to a random character page on Gamewise, http://gamewise.co/characters/12611/Angstrom-Darkwater

It has word for word the exact same summery as Giant Bomb's respective page: http://www.giantbomb.com/angstrom-darkwater/3005-14621/

Hey, you pieces of shit. Stop stealing from other people and learn a little of something called work. It helps in the long run.

@drbroel: Yeah, I'm finding that character pages have the descriptive text straight up ripped. I haven't come across any plagiarized game pages yet, maybe they scrub them before importing, because I'm seeing a lot of similar images.

Yeah every character page i check has GiantBomb's word for word wiki info.

Looks like company pages are ripped too:

this is so fucked up

I would suggest directing the author of the article to this Topic. I already have. https://twitter.com/DrewAHendricks

This is a lot less funny than gamebomb.ru.

I'm absolutely disgusted by this, ripping off GB is like stabbing a family member then taking their wallet, then that moron calls them the "IMDB of video games" what a tool, didn't do enough research I see.

I say we should try and bring down the site, this pisses me off

EDIT: Even if the community are the ones ripping the info, doesn't matter, shouldn't have gotten away with this for over 2 months basically

EDIT 2: These people fucked with the wrong community, most wouldn't care but probably messed with one of the most passionate VG communities, people (YOU GUYS) have spent hours and days of your time writing this up for GB and they are just ripping it and taking credit for it, mother fuckers

As busy as @snide Dave is I think best course is if you find any more evidence, PM him?

Those guys are dicks, be sure to spread the word on twitter where possible and keep taking those screenshots.

Also I suspect that the websites claims about how many members it has are highly inflated, considering the site only launched last month. The site has over 4000 ratings for Skyrim. Just doesn't seem possible for those rating to be all real people and not just some made up number to makes it seem authoritative.

@optix12: keeping info for something like this in a singular location is probably alot easier to manage than him getting a ton of PMs and images.

Wow... can someone contact the editor from HuffPo and correct them by saying Giant Bomb is the IMDB of video games.

We should all tweet to the writer and get his attention to this, it is disgusting

@istealdreams: True just saying im sure if his computer collects the screenshots etc. if there is possibly legal recourse it may hold up better. And if they are following this thread (which seems like it might be the case) he can get a jump that way. Im no legal master so not sure if they want legal action those screens could hold. (then again google cache could work right?

Just thought I'd dump a few more here for posterity's sake. What are the legal ramifications of this? Does the information in the GB wiki count as CBSi properties, or what?

Some good sleuthing, fellas.

commented on the article in question:

author responded to my tweet:

meanwhile on gamewise facebook:

@istealdreams said:

author responded to my tweet:

Good on you, saw on twitter, was going to write him myself but you took care of it, cheers duder

Wow, their Nintendo 3DS page is almost word for word from Wikipedia too. Seems like their users enjoy plagiarism.

Thieving-ass scumbuckets. Drop a bomb on 'em.

EDIT: This is appropriate:

The author is adjusting the story now. Mission complete.

Jeff and crew should go there and trash their office NWO style.

The interesting thing about this is that, while a few pages do list "contributors," several pages have zero contributors. I'm assuming this means that data was in fact lifted by site administrators.

Gamewise respondend on Facebook:

Gamewise We have full contribution guidelines here -http://gamewise.co/contributions/guide/7/Contribution-Guidelines - "By submitting content, you are agreeing to the Gamewise Terms of Use which clearly states that it is the responsibility of the user to ensure that they own the intellectual property rights of any content they submit." We will be looking over the content highlighted and removing if it is seen to have been in breach of copyright.

Guess they don't want to mess with a potential action of CBSi legal team.

https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=426771994067272&id=183356741764123&comment_id=2958346&notif_t=share_reply

they may need to just remove their site from the internet to comply with those, lol.

Exactly

Notice the zero contributors to their page above, yet it has content... exactly the same content as the details put into the wiki here ages ago.

EDIT: And all of a sudden a user called "Smithy" edits the above page. Nice that old companies from the 80s can get some interest just out of the blue like that.

This was not the result of some rogue users uploading stuff they shouldn't. You don't get 19000 character pages and 90,000 person pages in a month, without some sort of systemic method involving importing GiantBomb's Data.

Man that is fucked up. Good work by everybody to find this out and take action.

I hope Giant Bomb is on the phone with lawyers and getting ready to put these guys in their place promptly.

Someone replied to @istealdreamson HuffPost's article.

i replied back. its waiting moderation