kateland Posted January 5, 2007 Share Posted January 5, 2007 More of a discussion question, please feel free to move if I've got this in the wrong topic...I have a small gaming clan for which I'm building a 360 area, where we can add games to our local database, review them, tips and tricks, rate, discuss etc. I've already built a game inventory and I want to expand it into being able to view a gamepage, see the publisher, trailers, demos, screenshots etc. Of course the mother teat is XBOX.com. Microsoft. So I want to make sure I'm not doing anyone harm by what I'm proposing.The idea is for me to automate everything; there's hundreds of games out there and I don't relish adding all these details manually, hence why I became a programmer of sorts ;)I have many areas I need help with, but this one issue that brought up the question of "SHOULD I do this" versus "HOW do I do this" is getting the game image onto my server.XBOX has buried the game image in a CSS file that is hard but not impossible to extract. So far as I can tell, I need to scrape the main game detail page, get the second stylesheet reference, open the css and find the background image, copy it to my server. (I don't bandwidth steal).Given that M$ has buried it is kind of obvious that they are discouraging "borrowing"...and I know there's ways to code around everything. But I'm not doing this for money, nobody's making a dime in our clan, I just enjoy the challenge of trying to code stuff like this and make it a good experience for my clannies. but hundreds of games...to download and manually store everything..it would take months. And in the end I'd still have the content.My current script that checks all the games in the database to see if a 404 page exists for things like gamerpics, themes, demos etc currently does a lot of HTTP requests. Would I be tagged for attempted hacking by my ISP or by XBOX.com? I'm just not sure how far I can go.So my question is...at what point is it considered content stealing? Am I doing something wrong? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hypnos Posted January 5, 2007 Share Posted January 5, 2007 It will be copyright infringement. There's no maybes about it.The lesser evil approach that's less likely to make anyone mad would be to do a gamerankings.com style of game summary, small box shot, and link to the xbox.com article on that game. Make sure you have references (ie: "From xbox.com").Write a function to scrape the stuff you want for a single game page, then feed it the URLs of the games you want on your site. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
taith Posted January 5, 2007 Share Posted January 5, 2007 yes.most pages(microsoft, google, etc) copyright their images/information so it is illegal to even save them onto your computer. writing a biography, may help cool tempers, but it doesnt make it any less illegal.other pages copyright their images for private use, as in you can save them, but cannot put them online anywhere else.and other pages dont copyright their images atall, in which they are free to save, and use again anywhere you likes. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kateland Posted January 6, 2007 Author Share Posted January 6, 2007 Hypnos - the scrape is what I ended up doing. All the links point to xbox.com, I don't serve up content to download, it's more of a discussion area, so I suppose the worst I'm doing is having the one picture of the game up.But copyright infringement...cripes. I need to redo my theme, too, it's ripped entirely from xbox.com - but we're a 360 fan community so I didn't think anything of it at the time. Definitely needs to be changed. Thanks for the advice guys. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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