The Legality and Difficulties in Harvesting Compendium Data (Hypothetical)

[UngainlyTitan]

Well under the original compendium it was pretty easy though I would not call it trivial, Not sure now, they amy have changed the way the Compendium works. The old one passed in parameters via the url there were some details published by a developer at one point.
As for legal, probalby not and most certainly in voilation of user agreements.

 

[UHF]

This is what Hero Labs does. Although its only character related materials. They are using some sort of open source software to do the download.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

When I first downloaded masterplan, and tried this button, my immediate thought was:

C&D letter will be on its way... It opened every page of the compendium and copied it... wven if not illegal, if every D&D player did that, the server would be quite busy handling those requests i guess...

 

[Siran Dunmorgan]

Well—under the original Compendium—it was pretty easy, though I would not call it trivial. Not sure now: they may have changed the way the Compendium works. The old one passed in parameters via the URL: there were some details published by a developer at one point.

As for legal, probably not, and most certainly in violation of user agreements.

I just checked the new version of the Compendium (which is mostly pretty nice, by the way).

It does not appear especially amenable to minimal-client programmatic extraction of data, i.e., it's harder now to write a program that connects to the Compendium and extracts data from it using libraries such as Python's urllib; this minimizes its access from server-based or completely automated extraction processes.

On the other hand, it appears just as vulnerable to data extraction based on browser scripting as ever. That is, it's pretty easy—not trivial, but, I estimate, rather less than an hour's work—to write a program that calls the COM interface of Internet Explorer to perform extraction of data from the Compendium to a user's personal machine.

Note that I don't recommend that anyone actually do this.

Besides being a violation of the DDi terms, the Wizards development team has indicated that they'd like to hear from third-party and hobby software developers about the direction to take things like data extraction, export/import and related tools, which means that access to this information may soon be available by more legitimate means.

—Siran Dunmorgan

 

[Anathos]

That would probably not be a copyright violation (if only used for personal use - it would likely fall into the category of "fair use")

Wrong. Fair Use covers stuff like including quotes in works of criticism and the like, not copying everything. In fact, making a complete copy of someone else's works is exactly what copyrights were created to prevent, regardless of absence of profit motive.

 

[RLBURNSIDE]

"And discussion of illegal activies is well, illegal."

Hahahah, I read something funny on them internets every day.

Many court rulings have provided reverse engineering clauses for the purposes of interoperability. So if you pay for access, you might be in violation of an Eula but not committing a crime per se, because it IS legal to reverse engineer closed apps to gain access to data that you paid for (definitely at least the raw data for your own character sheet...which is your intellectual property), in order, to, say, have it work with some other tool. Say, an offline character builder, for example.

 

[Anathos]

the raw data for your own character sheet...which is your intellectual property

US law does not recognize the term "Intellectual Property". You cannot own ideas. Please stop using that term.

 

[malraux]

Wrong. Fair Use covers stuff like including quotes in works of criticism and the like, not copying everything. In fact, making a complete copy of someone else's works is exactly what copyrights were created to prevent, regardless of absence of profit motive.

Well, copyrights were created to prevent the selling of someone else's work.

 

[RLBURNSIDE]

Well, semantics aside

I dislike owning ideas as well, but there's ample precedent for this, as disturbing as it is. Software patents are especially despicable. Intellectual property is a term that companies use to whack us over the head with, I don't know why we can't or shouldn't use it to whack back at them.

If I write a "crunch extractor", to translate all powers into generic Power X, Attack W + str type parser, and add in some generic fluff, that would be OK wouldn't it? I mean, you can't own ideas such as a weapon attack does does so and so effect on a hit or a miss, for instance. I think highly codified texts could apply to this standard. Power text can be parsed, maybe with a little help here and there.

 

[Anathos]

Well, copyrights were created to prevent the selling of someone else's work.

No, they were created to force people to go through the creator of the work in order to obtain it, permitting creators to profit from their works for a short time and creating an incentive to produce works. Preventing others from profiting from the creator's efforts was just the method, and the long-term goal was actually the opposite (i.e. all of society profiting was the justification given for needing to make incentives for creating). You can't photocopy a book so that you have a backup version in case the original copy is destroyed, so you can't make a program that scrapes the Compendium database and stores all the retrieved information, even for the purpose of backup.