Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5369581" data-attributes="member: 82106">Meh, technically ripping data out of the Compendium is trivial. It requires a small amount of basic perl and a decent understanding of web authentication/authorization schemes. I wrote a perfectly good set of library modules that will pluck any given item out and let you drop it into a file or just use it in some fashion.The thing is, A) using said script you're not providing the data to anyone else, and B) you're not scanning through the entire Compendium automatically. A would certainly be a copyright violation in the vast majority of likely use cases. B is just a matter of hammering on someone's servers in a way that they weren't designed to be used. The EULA doesn't in any way prevent you from making a program that interactively utilizes the Compendium through your personal account. That's what a web browser does after all and WotC has no business telling you which web browser to use. Hypothetically if I were to make a UI for my script that displayed the data (maybe in the context of a character sheet etc) it is really nothing more than a specialized web browser. Even if I cache all that data for use offline this is still not stepping on anything. I have the fair use right to do that. The EULA probably prevents me from scraping the whole Compendium, but if I happen to look up a specific item and cache a copy of that data then AGAIN I'm not doing anything that web browsers don't already normally do. Where MP got into trouble was in scraping the ENTIRE Compendium. Obviously there are some great advantages for a program to do that, but equally obviously it hits the Compendium servers pretty hard and has obvious implications for easy sharing with non-subscribers. I seriously doubt WotC could really find grounds to object to an MP that just did what I do and looked each thing up as it was needed and possibly caching those results for a time. Again, it would be doing nothing that IE, FireFox, etc don't normally do and if using THOSE is an EULA violation then I'd say the EULA is pretty pointless.Moral of the story is use other people's data with consideration and a bit of common sense and you're fine. If you're disruptive or you cheat them of the benefits of their work, then expect to be on the wrong side of either the law, the EULA, or both.</blockquote>

Verification