Hi there,
I’m developing training material for full-text search engines and am in the process of evaluating data sets to use; specifically data sets with plenty of text data.
I am a long retired WoW player and thought about using WoW quest text as a data set. There’s plenty of scope for full-text queries that would be really useful and fun to work with.
I’m aware that this would certainly be a violation of the API Terms of use (ToU) so wanted to check if there’s any scope for allowing edge-case uses like the one I’m proposing.
What I would like to do is to pull data from the APIs (e.g. a sample of quests), prepare the data for ingestion, then redistribute it for students to load into their cluster so they can follow along with lab exercises.
A toned-down approach would be me loading the data into my own lab and using it as sample data to demonstrate search queries in an online class, without redistributing the data.
Both of these approaches undermine the thrust of using the APIs, which is to benefit players. Redistributing the data is obviously a violation of the ToU, likely among others.
There are obviously a lot of other data sets I could use without needing to worry about licensing. I just figured there is some real gold in the quest text and it’d be a fun data set to use.
Any input would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Please note I’m sharing here my own opinion into this matter, so don’t consider this as a definitive answer in any way.
I’m not so sure you would fall into a ToS issue here. You can’t SELL API data and distribute USER data without their consent that is for sure, but since the API exposed data is already available to anyone who creates an API key my guess is you could use that as long as you comply to the ToS rule of always providing information about the source of the data (Blizzard APIs).
My own application (https://wow-query.dev) does a similar thing. You can play around, test, and download API data to use into your own apps. I never got into any trouble for doing so.
Just remember you can’t share your client credentials, if your code will require them you should instruct your students to get their own credentials.
It is very unlikely you’ll get an official reply on legal questions over the forums, as a last resource the only known way to ask legal questions is legal@blizzard.com.
Hope it helps.
1 Like
Thanks for the response.
The clause in the ToU that raised my attention was 2.I:
The Data is for Your use to enhance the experience of the players of Blizzard’s games and You are not allowed to sell, license or otherwise transfer the Data to any third party.
While, as you say, anyone can create an API key and access the data, they would have been bound by the same ToU and become a licensee directly.
I wouldn’t be disclosing my keys or selling the data, so no worries there. I’d be distributing the data via a dump file. “Run this command to load this pre-formatted data file into your cluster”. It wouldn’t touch the API endpoints.
If I were to monetise my educational content that uses, for example, the quest texts, I could provide that data set to anyone for free. That would draw a clear line that I’m not monetising the WoW data.
Another data set I’ve messed around with myself, and would be great for teaching how data ingestion works at scale in a distributed document store, is the AH data. There are too many PID issues with that but I have considered anonymising two weeks worth of AH data for all realms. It’s too easy to miss something and end up on the wrong side of a legal team though.
I may be over-analysing this and Blizzard may turn a blind eye if they considered me to be in violation of the ToU. I’ve seen issues in the past where clauses have only been enforced when they’re really required.
Your app is really useful! It’s great to be able to easily query the data and play around with it.
This would not enhance the experience of the players would it? Then I am pretty sure it is not allowed.
They made this API not to be used in random applications as placeholder, you have other API’s for that. They made it so the information could be used in applications like raidbots/wowhead (which has the quest texts as well) / raiderio etc. They are even allowed to monetize it because they do not sell the information, they sell the shell around it that makes the information worth something (like raidbots).
However if you never mention it to anyone, doubt it will be an issue. Blizzard has bigger things to worry about.