I’m sure that a lot of you have heard about Video Game Rebirth lately. Well, I decided to check it out recently and couldn’t help but recognize a lot of the scans on their website. Some of the scans were definitely mine, so I decided to compare them with scans from the RFGeneration database, as that is the only place where I submitted my scans to be used exclusively for their online game database. Out of all of the gamepages that I have checked on vgrebirth, the majority of the scans were ripped from rfgeneration.com. I even crosschecked with other websites, and a bunch of scans seem to match with some of theirs as well, but I haven’t had the time to fully look into those yet. I don’t even want to know how many, if any, of their scans are actually their own work! I’m pretty mad that the staff at vgrebirth ripped those scans from rfgen as they have absolutely no permission to use them, whatsoever – they never even asked nor have they given any credit!

Their scan ripping deeds are clearly premeditated, but to top it off, I posted on their forums asking whether they accept scans that “I have saved on my computer from other websites,” and received the following response from a staff member there:

”Sure do, as long as the image isn't watermarked or otherwise marked as being property of a given site or person.”

It is also stated in their Submissions FAQ for Images: “If you provide us images from other sources on the web make sure they do not contain any watermarks or logos in them. We cannot use such images for our database.”

Now, I’m sure that anyone who has ever started up their scanner knows just how time consuming it is to scan any material. The fact that I, as well as quite a few others, spent an insane amount of hours scanning our game collections for the rfgeneration database (and I’m sure other websites, too), only to be stolen and used by vgrebirth, makes me pretty pissed. The fact that they don’t seem to care makes it even worse.

For those that wish to see some proof, here are some very obvious examples:

Original RFGen Myriad back-box scan

VGRebirth Myriad page

Original RFGen Flintstones: Surprise at Dinosaur Peak box-back scan (notice wear top right corner)

VGRebirth Flintstones: Surprise at Dinosaur Peak (same wear top right corner)

Original RFGen Maxi-15 AVE front-case scan

VGRebirth Maxi-15 page

I'll leave it at those three examples for now...If anybody wants more proof, I’ve unfortunately got too much of it :S

I don’t even want to start guessing how many scans they have ripped from rfgeneration.com. The fact that the majority of the games that I checked had scans from RFGen says enough.

I’m posting this here to pass the word around so that webmasters from other sites with video game images can check up on this and possibly look into finding a solution to keep sites like VGRebirth from stealing scans in the future (i.e. watermarking all images, as sad as that may be). If there is one thing that I'm sure nobody wants, it’s websites trying to make it big by stealing other people’s hard work. The fact that RFGen will likely have to watermark all of their images now thanks to VGRebirth, is unfortunate enough.