In case anybody's not clear on a few things, even though I keep posting this on Facebook and Reddit, etc...
ark42.com is run by me, and just me, some random L2 judge from Grand Rapids, MI
SCG emailed me and asked nicely to remove a few specific features about showing price changes. I agreed, because they were polite about it, and didn't ask for the whole thing taken down. I didn't have to, but I felt it was the proper thing to do, because I don't want to create the impression that my site is specifically used to harm SCGs sales by helping SCGs competitors. My site is for MTG players benefit only.
There is nothing close to illegal about scraping facts from websites. There have been numerous precedents set regarding similar things. The best one I can think of is Black Friday ads -- you can get in trouble for scanning the whole ad and posting it online (copyright violation, the layout, art and graphics are protected). The stores can do nothing about people who just post the sale prices and items going on sale, even if the ad isn't supposed to be in people's mailboxes yet. Prices are facts, and not copyrightable.
There could very well be other people doing similar things as my site. It's not an easy thing to do now, because of the random CSS tags and having to OCR the images for the prices, but if I can do it, others can do. My site is not for sale, and nobody else will be using my exact code to scrape SCG though.
IP blocks are meaningless to me, because I have plenty of experience as a Linux and C++ programmer, and I'd just write a custom proxy network and/or P2P system to fetch bits and pieces of their webpage and feed it back to my site. The cat & mouse game is something that I'm pretty sure the person doing the scraping will always win, given proper dedication.
Any further questions, I'd be happy to answer here. I'd rather tell people what's going on straight up than let wild speculation run rampant.
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ark42.com is run by me, and just me, some random L2 judge from Grand Rapids, MI
SCG emailed me and asked nicely to remove a few specific features about showing price changes. I agreed, because they were polite about it, and didn't ask for the whole thing taken down. I didn't have to, but I felt it was the proper thing to do, because I don't want to create the impression that my site is specifically used to harm SCGs sales by helping SCGs competitors. My site is for MTG players benefit only.
There is nothing close to illegal about scraping facts from websites. There have been numerous precedents set regarding similar things. The best one I can think of is Black Friday ads -- you can get in trouble for scanning the whole ad and posting it online (copyright violation, the layout, art and graphics are protected). The stores can do nothing about people who just post the sale prices and items going on sale, even if the ad isn't supposed to be in people's mailboxes yet. Prices are facts, and not copyrightable.
There could very well be other people doing similar things as my site. It's not an easy thing to do now, because of the random CSS tags and having to OCR the images for the prices, but if I can do it, others can do. My site is not for sale, and nobody else will be using my exact code to scrape SCG though.
IP blocks are meaningless to me, because I have plenty of experience as a Linux and C++ programmer, and I'd just write a custom proxy network and/or P2P system to fetch bits and pieces of their webpage and feed it back to my site. The cat & mouse game is something that I'm pretty sure the person doing the scraping will always win, given proper dedication.
Any further questions, I'd be happy to answer here. I'd rather tell people what's going on straight up than let wild speculation run rampant.