Slashdot Mirror
Stop! Website Thief!
Rick Zeman writes "We've all heard of people grabbing an image from this web site, ideas from that web site, or some content from yet another web site. But what do you do when someone takes your entire web site and hosts it in a foreign country? Silicon.com has an article that tells the tale of two such web sites."
http://www.carorcar.com
solo
another page
and another page
Or maybe just a thousand of us firing off wget -r in their direction. Redirect it to /dev/null...
Will this get me a "-1 Instigator" mod? ;)
Mom says my
1) Submit story to silicon.com /.ing.
2) Submit story to slashdot.org
3) Imagine what Car or Car's server looks like as it catches fire do to the
4) ....then, get back to work.
Left 4 Dead Gaming Group - http://www.l4dgg.com
I remember when I had my own website, and a young Cowboyneal asked to 'mirror' it for me...
I KISS YOU !!!!!
I wrote a biography of a famous historic figure, and I placed it in my web site, devoted to this figure. I put a copyright on the site. Since then, I've seen it all over the place, including online encyclopedias. Don't know whether to be flattered or angry.
Unless the foreign country shares IP laws with where you are there is nothing you can do.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Post the URL here, and then Slashdot the buggers into oblivion! Make their bandwidth bill so high that they'll beg you to take it back!
Would copyright law give you legal action to have the domain name turned off, since the content it points to is infringing so horribly obviously?
Excuse my speling.
Making The Bar Project
The prince of Denmark's homepage was a rip i think.
They were almost sued by a swedish webdesigner, but they reached an "agreement"
The system had the verbosity of HTML combined with all the readability of compiled assembly viewed as bitmap images
But what do you do when someone takes your entire web site and hosts it in a foreign country?
You post it on slashdot so we can overwhelm it with traffic and take it down immediately.
Their oh-so original narconon website
Kinda ironic when you consider how much they scream about the Fishman affadavit
Worried you might not keep your virginity forever? Try new Linux(TM), guaranteed twice as effective as LARPing
Typical /. hypocrisy. When you misappropriate IP in the form of music, movies, and software, you say it's not "theft" -- but when someone does the same to your website, you call them thieves, and get all up at arms about it...
I had a successful website running for several years. Then someone registered a domain name that was two letters different than ours (think something along the lines of the difference between carsandtrucks.com and carandtruck.com). Then they set up a site that does exactly what we do, for exactly the same audience.
Nothing i could do, because registering a trademark, finding a lawyer, suing these people.. all too much time, effor and money for a non-profit hobby site.
We're probably giving the rip-off site a lot of traffic, thus advertising revenues. :( On the other hand, perhaps we'll give a little offensive /. effect! :)
Run some version of Linux that will upset SCO, spoof the IP of the offending server, then host a boatload of mp3's and video files that will get the RIAA on their butts.
...or something like that.
Good ol' fashion American lawsuits, without any cost to you!
Could someone post a mirror please?
Hey, my dad is in that club!
The poor Finger Lakes Region SCCA Webserver. I hope it doesn't get too badly slashdotted...
What a totally weird thing to rip off, a regional SCCA website, not even the national one. Perhaps the thieves are merely practicing?
On one of the forums I frequent, when someone steals our content we proceed to archive their website to preserve it for future generations by using programs such as teleport pro or wget. It's very effective and the offending site is taken down quickly.
Vancouver Island? Click here!
As long as they are not altering the content and then spoofing you domain.. (i.e in america typing www.website.com has the legit website where is country x typing www.website.com being a porn site)
However, even if they are not being a true mirror, then what really can you do? not much. One could attempt to send them a please stop, and maybe even some scary lawyer letter, but if they are not in your same country what will it matter to them. Yes there are International laws, but how well has America for instance followed them as of late. DISCLAIMER: I am an American, and I am not bashing the USA without merrit.
Good: Could be great as sites now have natural mirrors to help with Slashdot effect.
Bad: If someone were to dupe Slashdot, would Slashdot still have dupes?
Isn't that called a "mirror?"
I haven't posted in so long, my sig is out of date.
this happened to a website i had, but the idiots that ripped the site forgot to copy the stylesheet and left it linked to ours, so the next day their site was pink and purple, and a home for gay pride
Flash is not as crap as it used to be, and I like it because it is (sort of :) the equivalent of a PDF.
If I do a word doc and send it to someone else with a different version of word, it generally loses most of the formatting. If I print it to PDF, its safe and harder for others to alter.
Flash is a little like that, it is the same in all browsers, and its hard to steal.
...but I really wonder about the newsworthy nature of this. 1. This is a surprise? 2. No one ever thought this would happen (or that it would happen only now)? This seems to be a common issue from way back when. It's silly and annoying but....
There are very few people in this world who would maliciously copy the Web site for the purpose of mirroring it out of their own pocket. More often than not, it's the pageviews and ad rotation that they're after.
Proliferation of Google Ads, and similar offerings from FindWhat and MarketBanker allowed a bunch of content-driven Web sites to exist and make money at the same time. At one of the sites I run the click-through ratio on Google Ads (the site's only means of survival) are at about 0.1-0.2% and thus more traffic and more content means more targetted visitors, more pageviews, and with 0.1-0.2% ratio being (you hope) constant, more money.
So hit them where it hurts. If they earn money through Google, Findwhat or MarketBanker, contact the ad engines. Most of the time it's abuse of the service agreement and abuse of their advertising system. They send the paychecks, and if they tell the guy to shape up or have the account suspended, actions will be taken.
Contact their ISP or hoster, regardless of the country. Unless both the hoster and site copier are the same people, you can find reasonable understanding there, with hoster giving then the warning to the copier about possible implications.
Contact his advertisers. If you see lots of Amazon referral links, contact Amazon Associates support with the problem description. I never heard Amazon actually doing something about it, but the pressure from several points on the copier might enhance your chances of him giving up.
avast pirated sites me shipmates
There's a word for that: Macromediocrity
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
You can't stop people from copying your design, especially where there is no appropriate laws to protect you. Even if there was, it wouldn't worth your time to sue those copycats. Only big companies can afford that, then again no one will be stupid enough to copycat a big company's website, except for scams and parodies.
Anyway, if your site's content-based, ie the attractiveness of your website is not about the look, but the content, then you may stand a chance.
For example, anyone can screen-scrap Slashdot to the fullest, but who is going to look at those copycat sites?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
...so if that's pay per impression rather than pay per click, you just did them a very big favour.
I had this happen to me -- kinda. I have a resume online that I spent a lot of time on while unemployed (so it's quite pretty :) ). One day I was surfing along and stumbled across a rather blatant ripoff of it. What what was odd was that not only did this person take the style of the resume, he also took phrases from the content itself! What was even more strange is that the guy had the same name as me!
You can imagine my surprise when I viewed this resume that had my name on it, looked like my resume, and even read like my resume, but had different work experience. I mean come on! If you're going to rip off somebody's resume, don't do it from somebody with the same name as you! :)
>But what do you do when someone takes your entire
>web site and hosts it in a foreign country?
I thank him profusely for hosting a mirror on his own dime and effort. I am especially grateful to know that this makes the material immune to the opressive laws in my own country.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
First, it is not misappropriation.
Second, the situations are very different. When someone copies web content and then claims that they created it, they are engaging in a form of identity theft/fraud.
Now, who downloads a Rolling Stones track and says "I did this, not the Stones". No one.
I just saw this article on www.slashdot.ex
Slashdot Japan
Check this out. Go to Yardcare.com. If you read the text under how to restore your lawn you'll notice refrences to pictures and charts but you don't see any.
Now go to This Popular Mechanics Article and notice the text is verbatim, only this time with the proper pictures and charts.
Which one is the origional site? Hmm...not to hard too figure out. I wasn't sure if I should have emailed PM or not, either way I think its rather rude and unbecoming of the web.
Apple free since 1990!
I've got this new enthusiast site that specializes in religious warfare, iPod group hugs, consistent duplication, and massive misspellings. I'm thinking of calling it blashdot.
what happened to flashturbation?
There isn't a lot you can do to protect yourself when people operate from these safe havens. That's what's most frustrating. The spammers have been doing this for years and have got away with it. And now content stealers.
Will the bandits be able to steal a site like the newspaper here?. This site has only one page, and every other page is rendered dynamically. Maybe this is the solution.
Nothing to see here
will mirror your web site abroad for faster access with the local ISP's.
Guaranteed revenue increase of 1k%
Apply now!
In the article: "We emailed them via the contact page, which was the same as our own, and heard nothing back," he said.
I was half expecting he said: "We emailed them via the contact page, which was the same as our own, and received our own message immediately in the mailbox."
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
I am constantly hit at my own personal webserver. This is an issue that really needs to be addressed server-side.
The best thing I can think of is limiting access to folders based on the previous access. You must go to the index and stay there 20 seconds at least to go to any links on it. Then you must load the items from top down.
It slows the whole website, but it would work... That or feed dummy images if the site triggers a spider alert.
I suppose you could write them a short note of appreciation for providing a free mirror and saving you a bit of money on your bandwidth?
This is a special excite
This
How can it be theft if the owner is not losing something. It is not, it is copyright infringment, not theft!
www.srashdot.org
These people rip these sites, pass them off as their own - even put them on their CV, and get the jobs the true talent deserve. They need stringing up.
:-
For instance
www.nevermindus.com vs
www.digitalabstracts.com
There is a great selection of these on Pirated Sites
Umm... That post actually isn't off topic.
s ite.ht ml
Anyone still remember Mahirs 15 minutes of fame because of his crazy website? If I remember correctly someone pretty much stole all his content and hosted it for laughs...SO not offtopic, just not very well explained.
The original can be found here
http://www.ikissyou.org/famous_site/famous_
~Z
...We emailed them via the contact page, which was the same as our own, and heard nothing back," he said. "We then contacted the authority that controls the domain and heard nothing.
Well, duh, of course. They also copied your cgi scripts....
This happens all the time with porn sites.
... step).
1. Steal someone's porn content.
2. Set up another web site
3. Profit.
(note the lack of a
My other first post is car post.
My site Physics 2000 started showing up in foreign countries, fully translated. It's a non-profit site, and of course we love the idea of having it available in other countries, but kind of unsettling to have it ripped off without a word.
Actually, I was trying to be Insightful, not Funny.
Dynamic content from an active community. If a couple of static pages is all you're bringing to the table, it's easy to steal. I'd like to see someone steal Slashdot.
This is just the natural risk of running a business on the Internet. The Internet was never supposed to be a medium for making money, but if you're going to use it as such, don't get angry when you're burned. Perhaps if people weren't so concerned about making money, they could take the cue from the Free Software Foundation and provide the information for free, like it is supposed to be. Dump the ads and quit bitching, pal, this isn't your business playground.
All your websites are belong to us!
Please don't kill me--it was just too perfect.
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
...how the rest of the world must feel about google caching their websites.
--
Here's a bit of advice for you: 1
Ryan Kennedy opposes comm
This seems to have happened to fark.com, unless there's another explaination for this.
Slashdot comments can be accurate, highly modded, or posted quickly. Pick two.
I noticed, that my whole web page was copied to goole.com without my permission!
"Plus loss of intellectual property."
It is very difficult to lose intellectual property. It does not work that way.
Someone did this to /.!
I hope Rob and Co. sue their pants off! Sheesh, what audacity!
I mean, how often do we slashdotters blatantly-rip^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmirror sites which are on poor overloaded servers?
I agree. If the internet is truly the last 'wild frontier' I suggest an old west shootem up to resolve who the correct owner of the site is. We will put em to the slashdot test. Whichever site is still standing afterwords is the righfull owner.
The government cloned the entire Finger Lakes Region SCCA and set them loose in eastern europe...maybe they did the first thing that made sense to them...they made a web page.
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
HCareers.com just changed their website, but footwarecareers.com stole their entire look and feel (and I'm guessing some posted jobs) last year. Not sure if anyone did anything about it, or legal action will happen though.
How much of the site needs to be copied or "quoted" before this represents an offense. Clearly at slashdot we benefit from "quoting" parts of sites and then we provide a link, but is this steeling the thunder from the orignal sites we link to? Probably not. Take my site for example slashrank.org it takes some content from slashdot and links to it. Is this OK? I'd say that like slashdot it doesn't "steal the thunder" so to speak from the original and is therfore acceptable.
Point taken on "theft". However, the term "fraud" is not so remote if someone presents another's material as their own, and even puts their own copyright on it.
...A piece of trickery; a trick.".
See first two definitions of fraud: "A deception deliberately practiced in order to secure unfair or unlawful gain.
Those would seem to apply.
People copy and paste small and very large parts of my website constantly, and there was one guy who took my daily updates. It bothered me, but since I don't make any money off my site, www.freestufftimes.com it doesnt really matter, nothing I was gonna do about it..
I am all too aware of the problems faced here.
We accept article submissions to our site and have had another webmaster copy these articles. We are unable to do anything about it (not our copyright) and the authors seem unconcerned that their work appears on a site designed specifically to generate advertising revenue.
It's a slap in the face to all the hard work I've done contacting people and seeking permission to use their work, for someone to come along and copy it on a daily basis to make a quick buck.
Fortunately, most of our content is original and written in house so we can protect our own copyright, so the other site is far from a carbon copy of our own.
In situations where our own work has been copied, the offenders have removed the material either on request or when we contacted their hosts.
There should be more legislation in place to protect copyright interests. As it is, information is a free for all and simply removing the evidence when asked to removes all responsibility.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
That completely depends on the site and the ad program. Google AdWords for example are pay per click, but many (most?) banner ads are pay per impression, with CPM (cost/thousand impressions) being a key metric. We have banner ads on our site and they are *all* pay per impression.
I used to love seeing people do this with images on Ebay. One guy was selling some computer equipment and linked to a picture on another guy's site. When the site owner found out, he replaced the picture with one showing the equip all smashed and ruined. It was funny as hell.
Whatever happened to the time honored ways of skinning and salting? Or at least a nice cheerful severing of a hand.
Web 'copycats' ripping off small businesses
March 09 2004
by Will Sturgeon
UK company first, followed by US company...
A serial website thief is ripping off content and other intellectual property wholesale - much to the annoyance of the companies and individuals whose businesses depend on the sites affected.
To date, silicon.com is aware of two companies that have suffered similar fates but the pattern and the ease with which these criminals can move on has raised concerns that many more companies could have fallen victim to this ploy - and that many others may do so in the future.
silicon.com was contacted by Shane O'Donoghue, who has been running a website called Car Enthusiast - dedicated to all things automotive - since 1999. It gets about four million impressions per month and O'Donoghue sells advertising on the site in order to pay the bills.
However, he recently noticed another site, called 'Car or Car', that had cropped up in the previous month or so and was ripping off his site design, content and even his copyright notice. It was then using his hard work to sell advertising of its own. The complete 'cut and paste' nature of the theft meant that O'Donoghue was even listed as Car or Car's editor - next to a picture of himself.
Understandably O'Donoghue was upset and tried to get in touch with the site's owners.
"We emailed them via the contact page, which was the same as our own, and heard nothing back," he said. "We then contacted the authority that controls the domain and heard nothing."
Part of the problem was that the site was being hosted outside EU jurisdiction, in Taiwan. This isn't altogether surprising - such a choice of location suggests that the site's owners were attempting to safeguard themselves from legal action.
While China, Taiwan and the Far East in general are not the lawless internet havens they once represented for the likes of spammers and fraudsters, they still present barriers when seeking legal recourse.
O'Donoghue said: "We're not a big company and we don't have the lawyers or the money to pursue legal action."
However, a twist in the tale came when silicon.com contacted Car or Car and informed them that their illegal business model had been rumbled. Although we received no reply the site vanished overnight, to reappear the next day in a new guise - this time a complete mirror image of another car enthusiast site - and this time one being run out of Rochester, New York, in the US.
Until its owners move on to their next victim, compare the genuine Sports Car Club of America website with the not-so-genuine Car or Car site. The only difference is the banner ad at the top left for a company called refinance-now.org, registered in Pennsylvania by an organisation called Webclients.
At the time of writing, Webclients had failed to respond to an email requesting it clarify its relationship with carorcar.com - which it may be sponsoring unaware of any crime being committed.
Michael Cover, a partner and intellectual property expert at law firm Faegre Benson Hobson Audley who also sits on WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) dispute panels, told silicon.com: "If you have this kind of problem in the UK, it is reasonably easy to resolve. But this can sometimes present very difficult problems, especially where a site is registered outside the EU."
But companies that think distance and national borders protect them may be disappointed to hear China is becoming increasingly open and Cover said: "Taiwan is a very developed jurisdiction and there should be no problems now pursuing cases such as this."
The copycat site certainly appears to be in breach of "copyright - such as design and literary content", he added and rectifying the situation may not be as problematic as first feared.
Lawyers agree that in the first instance the aggrieved companies should try "putting the frighteners" on the individuals behind these crimes, who doubtless know they are in breac
This guy is way out there
If the repeatedly pull the site, getting updates, then you are in luck. Find the IP, or some other identifying pattern. Then put some logic around it and send them different text.
I knew a guy back in 1997 that did this. When his competitors looked at his web site, he brought up an old version of it. Kind of clever, given the era he'd put it together.
I work for www.cloudspace.com and every once in a while we notice something odd in our server logs and find that some has ripped off our navigation and left some of our graphics in it, or used our stylesheet. We've messed a few people's site look up a little by changing our stylesheet and had fun with it. Recently we found this site from a french company: http://www.studio-lol.com/ It comes up as the 8th result in a google search of our company name "cloudspace". They left the word "cloudspace" as the alt tag to their logo when they ripped off our navigation. We don't really mind too much when people copy our designs around here. Too bad they choose our own website with a lot of outdated code. It is coded in tables, but with being so busy lately we havent had time to update it much in the last couple years. We do everything we can in divs with css now. We just kind take it as a compliment when someone copies our designs.
steal this sig
Hey, some people *pay* to have another copy in another country, and some people (in Orem) can't even keep their domestic version going very well.
...
OK, that was offside
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Like the rest who claim slashdot hypocrisy.
The whole concept of intellectual property is just so much bullshit anyway. Somebody copied a website, well good for them.
The problem would be collecting on the judgment. Since the site has advertising, you might want to contact the advertisers.
Talk with a good IP/Internet lawsuit. If they don't know Rio v. Rio, then try another.
Fight Spammers!
There are a bunch of sites who are linking to images on my server. Normally it's not a big deal since they were low traffic sites. However, one link was generating hundreds of hits per hour. I ended up substituting an, um, indiscreet image and changing my pages to a valid picture.
I used to have a little band, I was getting maybe 500 hits a month on my website. Half of the hits were me fixing tiny flaws in the HTML. anyway the band went their separate ways, and every once in a while i do a search for the old band just to see what happens. the strange thing is that the site is still out there, in several different forms. i've seen bits and pieces of the site, usually in large chunks, floating around on the net. the weirdest part is that usually they don't pop in their own info or text - they almost always preserve my original info, or at least a large chunk thereof. i have no idea why anyone would want to do this, but it happens...
"We've all heard of people grabbing an image from this web site"
/. logo really that useful for anyone else?
Is the
It's amazing how many bottom feeders there are out there: http://www.pirated-sites.com/
I was the "[Timeout locking counter file]" visitor on their site. I feel special
Lots more here.
...the second incarnation of the carorcar site, this time copying the Finger Lakes Region Sports Car Club of America's web page is much faster than the actual legit site... for now anyway.
"Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion." - Democritus
I am going to ask my friend at AIT Times to try it out.
Nothing to see here
on WebmasterWorld's Content, Writing and Copyright as it seems to happen at the time.
this happened with gametribe.net, except they used the actual site's databases to allow non english sites to be created on the real gametribe site.. it was a pain in the ass.
I have a links page and i add them to it.
i've had a few people ask to copy my stuff, and my condition is that they send me the link when they get their site up. although i prefer to be asked, i don't go balistic when they don't. from time to time i do a google search for the image names from my page just to see if there are any new ones. it's kind of fun seeing your work translated into russian, Japanesse, or some other language.
I think that I'd be distraught if someone ripped off my Tabby Cat/Justin Timberlake fan site. I worked really hard on making that giant text blinkable.
Normally I don't care when my site-layout is copied. If I had a problem with that, I wouldn't had put it on the internet. And I'm even a fan of "mirroring", because sometimes websites dissapear, but the content has to stay. You can mirror my page too, its under the OPL.
It's a bit different if the other only wants to get page-hits, though.
--
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
I'm reposting this cause I want to make shure ppl read it:
To all of you thinking of a DDOS attack (slashdotting) to those thieves:
EVER heard of "not guilty until proven otherwise"!?!?!?
If we start slashdotting evry site that is not correct to... us... it's kinda ovbious to me that we'll be doing not only something that is plain wrong but also that is plain illegal.
--krahd
mod me up scottie!
Something like this is happening to me right now. I got caught up in one of those "Buy our hosting and we'll give you a free domain name" (basically what the setup fee covers) things. After 8 months of hosting, the host failed to return my emails on the SQL system (that's besides the point... I was trying to contact him for 2 months and he didn't get back to me). So I decide to change my website to a new host, only to find that this guy is now avoiding me (after originally speaking with me about how I voilated something and he is suspending my account [good... I just want my domain right?]). I even submitted him to the BBB of Canada, and still nothing. Since he's not a real business, they can't do anything. It's really something that has been pissing me off for the last month and a half of attempting to get my domain back. Emails, phone calls, nothing works. The registrant can't give me access either because it's under his name. Is there anything I can do besides a lawsuit? I really don't have the funds to sue this guy.
I'm f#$king magic!
...looks like someone already got www.smashdot.org. And here I was thinking of stealing slashdot's website content only to keep everything as it is and replacing the top banner ad with an enlarge your p3nis ad.
You somehow get your story posted on Slashdot. Consequently, the brave souls of Slashdot Volunteer Army will attack with a vengeance and lay waste to the theif's site.
Of course with this being Slashdot, the story will get reposted again next week and the attack will start again. You can get quite a few attacks in that way.
This reminds me of one of my favorite sites:
http://www.pirated-sites.com
This really burns me.
As a geek who is into manufacturing, I was listening to some of the international trade speechifying on CSPAN the other day, and heard the following particularly relevant tale from Rep DeFazio of Oregon. (Quote courtesy of a quick search of the congressional record)
For the full transcript, go here
- Dave
...is that the original site was loading slower than carorcar.com.
Hell. I'm hoping I get popular enough to be hosted on a fat pipe in taiwan.
Should be installed under your apache bin directory as 'ab'. I recommend the following if you have a decent pipe:
> The important thing is that all of these arguments can be applied to the case of this Taiwanese site.
Not correct. None of the arguments apply to plagiarism, which is the claiming of someone else's ideas as your own. Duplicating an MP3 and claiming that you made it yourself would be a good comparison to this case. The problem is not that the Taiwanese site simply copied the data, but they are misrepresenting it on an ongoing basis as their own work. That dances dangerously close to identity theft, especially if the Taiwanese site is using the fraud to capture ad revenue or using your reputation to garner faith (like convincing someone to give them a credit card number because they think it's you). In the case of a stolen Metallica MP3, it's rather unlikely that someone stealing the MP3 will try to present themselves as Metallica.
Virg
Mirror site
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Maybe being called constanly by people who think you are the author of the site (and you are, really) would be annoying and a waste of your valuable time, but you could turn those calls into an opportunity to convert a customer.
A republic cannot succeed till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honour.
Just like that "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" movie. errrr wait, that was Pat Benatar...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Hmmmmm.... They emailed themselves to complain about the copy, eh? And heard nothing back? Well now, that makes sense.
I run a website, http://www.system7.org/. The entire page and all of the content got stolen by someone who makes a CD called Hackers Tookit 2.0. I saw one of these Hackers Toolkits at a computer show and looked for any information, but of course there wasn't any. All of the leads I got to try and contact this mysterious theif were dead ends. Someone stole the entire System7 database of files and the HTML pages themselves and put it on a CD and sold it. bastards.
I get your point -- you'd think Toro would at least have a department full of lawyers to prevent wholesale plagiarism. (Maybe all their lawyers deal with dismemberment cases, not IP law?)
But as far as the "nickel-and-dime webscraper" label, well, er, sure looks like one. Text copied without bothering to get the relative-links graphics in place? Doesn't look so big and reputable to me.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
> It is very difficult to lose intellectual property. It does not work that way.
If someone takes your intellectual property, and presents it as their own, and people believe they're the original creator, then yeah, you do lose intellectual property. Copying and plagiarism are not the same thing. Plagiarism is actually stealing, since when you're done the original creator has actually lost something.
Virg
Set my pack of zobie hosts packeting the asshole, derrr.
1) Set up slick website. /.'ers check your site out for the first time (many of which may like what you have and come back again in the future).
2) Set up a mirror of it in Taiwan.
3) Submit story to silicon.com and slashdot about how your website was "ripped off".
4) Watch the enormous number of hits rise as "outraged"
5) ????
6) Profit!!
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
In a twist I find somewhat ironic, the rip-off sit they mention at carorcar.com loads faster than the original site. Not only are they ripping off the content wholesale, they're doing it faster than the original guy can. With peoples patience for loading websites at an all-time low, it doesn't fair well...
Over on Everything2, we recently had someone lift a lot of content and use it to populate a portal site intended to collect revenue by ads and amazon click-throughs.
When the E2 user population realised what had happened, there began a general forming of lynch mods and baying for blood, and the perpetrator ('Marty')'s personal site was flooded with incredibly nasty messages.
Marty claimed he'd assumed that the content was intended to be more or less freeware, and lifted it wholesale (without any attributions to original authors, of course). When he realised his mistake (at it was a very stupid mistake to make, but at least it seems to have been an honest mistake), Marty withdrew the content and started trying to apologise.
Many of the E2 noders wouldn't hear the apologies, however, and in the end neither camp could claim any sort of moral high ground over their behaviour. Important lessons learned:
Yeah, I learned that last one myself...
-- call
My site Physics 2000 started showing up in foreign countries
I hope they had the sense to remove the annoying Java banner at the top. Really, is it necessary to invoke my JVM just to display some spinning electrons?
I can't find any references linking the SCCA Finger Lakes Region to carorcar. I would guess its trying to steal traffic, but I don't see how people would find it. The real site has a small target audience anyway. FYI: if you can find an SCCA event in your area, check it out. Its Amateur club racing, usually road racing (ie: not an oval). My dad's friend races at these things. I am by no means a motorsports fan, but I enjoy them.
Add -D carorcar.com to keep hits to the ad page from getting through.
I hate forcing javascript down the user's throat, but there might be an answer in either javascript, or compiled java.
/. crowd, it would make other targets much more viable. (this door is locked, try the next house.)
It's probably possible to code javascript that's complex (obfuscated) enough to be very difficult to decode. Have your javascript update itself periodically, so that any old copies of the site will expire and cease to function, possible even giving a message to mail you if it stops.
If you discover a site pirate, code your new javascript so that it won't work on the new site so that subsequent theft won't help without significant programming expertise.
Although it won't stop the
pirated-sites
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
This is pretty typical for the web, although it's not always so blatent. Think of how many sites have stolen Amazon's folder tab navigation or Yahoo's portal link design. The web full of plagerized sites. The bad just out and out steal while everyone else steals it and changes the colors.
Is that the real site is slashdot'd and the carorcar guys site is running just fine.
I do some freelance web design, and had built a nice site for the SCTA-BNI (Southern California Timing Association/Bonneville Nationals Inc... you know, the salt flat and dry lakes racers?). I offered it to them free of charge, provided I was able do the full gamut (at the time I was looking for some more items for my portfolio, and their site needed work BAD).
Their site: scta-bni.org
My design: idiotusers.com
About a month after they stopped responding, their site had a very familiar design, albeit rendered in Frontpage!! I contacted them and asked that they remove/discard/change it, they refused. What's a guy to do?
It disgusts me.
"If voting could really change things, it would be illegal. " - Revolution Books, NY
So why is everyone getting so mad that this guy got his website "stolen"? I've heard many times on Slashdot that you can't steal information. After all, the original owner was never deprived of his copy of the information. This is the logic used to claim that music cannot be "stolen" from record companies, right? And besides, there's no such thing as "Intellectual Property".
Oh wait, I forgot. If you're stealing from a record company, that's OK, because it's not really stealing. When a little guy gets his information stolen, then it's stealing.
Most people are quite good about it and take the copy of the page down or respect my mirroring conditions. Others however, ignore all my requests.
For example, here my most popular page, which I use Google AdSense to pay for (cover bandwidth costs etc.)
Here is a ripoff of my page, with the email address changed, I'm not sure why. Maybe to claim a set of skills? I wish he would take the copy of my page down.
I don't mean to make fun of the victim here, but this quote is pretty funny:
"We emailed them via the contact page, which was the same as our own, and heard nothing back,"
-- Brian
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
This is outrageous. The nerve of these people blatantly hosting this out on the open web instead of using an accepted piracy medium like Kazaa.
Outrageous!
But what do you do when someone takes your entire web site and hosts it in a foreign country?
You mean like when I create a website on my server in germany and google cache mirrors it on their system? Yeah, that would be bad.
To be honest, I think it is the best thing that can happen. I get said, whatever I want to say, they pay for the traffic. Fair enough for me.
Nils
But as I was parsing out the logs, I noticed quite a few other curious things, which led me to poke through the referer logs and start tracing some interesting hits.
..which led me to these two sites:
Both of these domains are registered in completely different states, by two completely different people, and yet... other than page color, they are identical, even down to the "testimonials" page. Whomever ripped this off from whom, can't possibly be that stupid... or can they?
I'm glad--nay, flattered--that I was able to inspire you. That'll be 500 bucks, and you don't know me once they catch you.
Mom says my
The worst website theives I've known are over at about.com. They stole entire databases such as the linuxgametome (happypenguin.org) freshmeat.net, and dozens and dozens of sites on completely different subjects. They commonly steal entire paragraphs and even pages from various sites and claim it as their own. I'm surprised there haven't been lawsuits against those bastards yet. They also are well known for buying search result positions, locking you in their frames when you go to other sites, and having obnoxious pop ups.
Arrggh!!
> Thanks to the [Timeout locking counter file]
> visitors who have stopped by our site.
Congrats guys. You just slashdotted a webcounter.
Hope they aren't getting revenue per hit.
Matt
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
is splashdot.org registered?
hmmmmm...
e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
If it's done for profit, adding ads or otherwise trying to make money off it, then it's so wrong it's not even funny.
But if it's done just as a straight, 100% mirror, then I'm okay with it.
The entire site had been copied and then some text added claiming that someone else was the author. I did some more Googling and found that the theif was a 15 year old in England and got his email address and the name of his school.
I emailed him and offered to tell the school's head master what was going on. The site was down in hours and he replied saying how sorry he was.
I explained that I didn't mind him offering a download of the game, but that I did mind him claiming credit for it.
Lasers Controlled Games!
They were serving at 85-333ms when I started, they are now at 1510-9925ms. Ouch.
(I am, of course, merely testing ab and my own pipe, not doing anything to their site in protest).
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
their copy, then send them links to tub-girl instead.
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
So what? If ones makes the impression and click-through numbers ridiculous enough, the advertiser won't believe the numbers, and won't pay, and/or will stop running ads on that site. Either way there's a nice bandwidth bill.
It's f***ing outrageous that somebody rips off another's intellectual property like this. ... could a slashbot help me out here?
Unless they're the MPAA, because it's ok to steal from them, because erm.. erm
I did nothing... S/He left the pages as is and wasn't trying to sell them or anything.. I was surprised it happened. I was kinda flattered actually. I had forgetten about it till this article
Original
http://www.plocp.com/user/Test/wtc/index.htm
Copy..
;-P
Well I post the offending link on
...but on a much smaller scale. Someone had copied a popular page from my site. Tweaked the code a little but left the ad code the same. I just changed the ad for that page to be an image that read "This site will be closing soon. Click here to go to our new location." I crack myself up.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
Here's a good flash about how steve cone stole sex.com from jail... How the Grinch Stole Sex.com
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
When the Danish Crown Prince presented his new website last year it was discovered that the design was copied from a Swedish website. A Norwegian on-line magazine has the story. The top image in red is the copied design while the bottom image in blue is the original. Some may find it hard to compare the two images since their attention may be drawn towards Anja, babe of the week on the right.
For a few days it was a big story in Danish media and very embarrasing for the otherwise well-reputed company creating the site.
A supposedly professional designer copying another website instead of creating a new design is lame, but doing that while working for the Crown Prince is really stupid. The designer was silently laid off by the company that apologized and got a good lesson in damage control. And also a lot of media exposure. Maybe they did it on purpose after all?
The article on this was on someone else's site; Silicon.com actually stole it from someplace else. :)
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
"We emailed them via the contact page, which was the same as our own, and heard nothing back."
And strangely enough I had an e-mail from myself with the exact same message I sent then in my inbox!
Mr. T pitied this fool on 27 July 1992.
If carorcar is doing this to make money via adverts and the wronged site owners can not get satisfaction from carorcar, why not put pressure on the people paying or supporting carorcar (e.g. websponsors)?
These people are the same people who are spamming. Since more and more systems are employing RBLs, they're stooping to even more unehtical tactics such as copying high-traffic web sites and using them as fronts to promote the same schemes (home refinance scams, etc.) that they have been doing via e-mail.
Due to the chaotic jurisdictional nature of the Internet, there's no easy way to deal with this.
Personally, I think the best approach is to start blacklisting all IP traffic from ISPs that don't enforce even a remotely responsible policy. We already reject all SMTP traffic from many countries such as Korea, which have proven to be nothing more than spam-havens. Let's just cut off these third-world networks until they learn to behave responsibly. What else are you going to do?
The website was copied, not stolen. Theft deprives the owner of access to something, while duplication doesn't. Copying someone's website is not cool, but it shouldn't be called theft as a way to make it seem like something it isn't.
theft - The act of stealing; specifically, the felonious taking and removing of personal property, with an intent to deprive the rightful owner of the same; larceny.
Note: To constitute theft there must be a taking without the owner's consent, and it must be unlawful or felonious; every part of the property stolen must be removed, however slightly, from its former position; and it must be, at least momentarily, in the complete possession of the thief.
steal - To take and carry away, feloniously; to take without right or leave, and with intent to keep wrongfully; as, to steal the personal goods of another.
To me it has kinda become like a library, only worse. How can you stop someone from taking your stuff, unless you threaten to sue. That's costly. You can ask, but people ignore you. Foriegn countries ( I'm in US ) don't obey the same rules. If they did we'd be able to control spam in the US.
The internet is so open, you just have to let it go. At best you can send them an email and ask them to stop. If that does not work, contact the goverment of that country and see if they give a f***. After they stop laughing at you, you can only do one thing. Cry.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
Quick! Someone form the WWWIAA and get Hilary Rosen on staff! Web designers are losing revenue due to piracy!
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
More insidiously, I've had fanart (from the same site) of mine be copied and printed up on t-shirts sold on eBay - passing them off as official Futurama merchandise. Again, what can you do? Complaining to eBay is all very well, but the people doing it will just open new accounts under different names even if eBay closes them down...
You must think in Russian.
Your link is to a site that HiJacks my broswer you ignorant piece if shit.
Think next time before you post a fucked up link.
Site Theft is pretty common, and not always for "business" reasons as well. I used to webmaster a Final Fantasy VII site and that was stolen too, right down to all the fans' fanart, fan-fiction, etc.
Course, there was no financial gain for that one, I guess they just wanted the credit or something. Still, I was pretty pissed off at the time, and I wasn't webmaster back then -- I only had my fan art stolen.
Wouldn't this problem be easily avoided if you switched to a dynamic site? All of the pages I looked at were .html but if you were to use mySQL and php you could easily prevent anyone without server telnet access from stealing much else than your html outputted by the script.
This sound right?
Take a peek.
www.slashcomma.org
HTML design is inherently open source. The only way to 'close' your website to 'theft' is to render it in one big Flash animation.
.netWeb sites. Well are you fucking happy now you confused idiots? The world needs more collaboration and less legalistic profiteering based on who wrote up an idea first.
Since it's possible to proprietize the web with horrible things like Flash, why not instead celebrate the forced openness of being able to examine and learn from other's web designs?
Wanting to destroy people who borrow wholesale from another's designs seems like the wrong stance from a group of people interested in replacing entrenched commercial operating systems with a community developed alternative.
And if you think theft of your sacrosanct 'ideas' regarding colors and layout is wrong, how can you also be against Disney demanding perpetual copyrights for their talking rat 'invention', or Amazon for their patent for clicking a button to make a purchase, or any number of similarly retarded things?
I'd be all in a frizzle if I saw someone had copied my websites verbatim, but I also learned everything I know about HTML by taking apart other's sites and seeing how things worked for them. I've also been known to copy other things I liked. So I'd just get over it.
The best thing about HTML is the fact that you can pick it up quickly and parse it fairly easily. When you see people doing fancy tricks, its fun to learn how they did it, without taking the $1000 weekend class or reading the $99 books.
Lets all hope that the web doesn't become the next proprietary, locked down, don't steal my idea DRM-sphere.
Next up: Microsoft SecurePages, DRM controlled IE-only executable
end rant.
...More than once with the same site.
The original site www.tasadventures.com some how got listed on www.coolhomepages.com, since then the design has been copied many times by sites such as: www.visitmongolia.com, www.bracecompany.com (what those guys do is scary and icky!) and www.mobilebikerentals.com.
We found these guys because they were too dumb to change the address of the style sheet from the original server, and some of them even left links back to the original site. If these are the ones we managed to find it scares me how many there could be that we don't know about.
We've often wondered what kind of legal recourse we could we could take against these people, I imagine it would be quite difficult to take action since all the copy cats are all in different countries.
Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow?
Copyrighted work on Slashdot (comments) even get copied.
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest (C) 1997-2004 OSDN.
Compare my comment with this comment.
Notice that I include a copyright mark on each of my comments, in addition to Slashdot's notice.
I have nothing to really gain/lose by a Slashdot comment, but it definitely bothers me that people will take obviously copyrighted work and claim it as their own.
You are right - be flattered, or be angry?
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
I've dealt with site theft a few times during the past few years for my own site. On two occassions the ISP immediately removed the site when I complained. On a third occassion last year the ISP immediately sided with their customer and requested that I prove I was the author. It was annoying at the time but, in retrospect, it does protect the webmaster against unfounded plagarism claims.
As people on /. love to point out copying is piracy, not theft. The original websites are still around.
If a slashdotting doesn't wake him up, nothing will.
>But what do you do when someone takes your entire web site and hosts it in a foreign country?
free international hosting.
I'm glad you slashdot editors posted this. I understand that you're the experts at website thievery.
One of the biggest, earliest overclocking retailers in the UK (with the best forums may I add...) had their entire site design stolen by a korean overclocking company I believe, aaaages ago. And I'm sure they weren't the first...
I'm assuming you're talking about collaborative encyclopedias like WikiPedia and E2? If you're feeling nice, you would be doing these sites a favour to alert the powers-that-be. They'd much rather have to remove an article now than face a future lawsuit if the perp continues copying stuff.
I think it is very disturbing, this trend of holding ISPs responsible for content, whether that content is benign, illegally ripped off website, criminal virus code, or what have you. I don't know what the EFF would say, but I sure think they would say the ISP is never to be held responsible for content. It is a first amendment issue. That makes law enforcement and "personal protection" harder, therefore it's not a popular opinion.
Plagurisim isn't copyright infringment. I make sure all the MP3's I commit copy infringment with are properly labeled, with the corret artist's name!
Like something that nukes the disk if not at the authorized IP address?
"Great, now they think that's a picture of you. You'll never be able to use your name in public again."
What makes you think he could before?
In 1995-6, I did support for Compaq at a Unisys facility. I wrote many solutions for our call center, including several guides for troubleshooting various issues. I distributed them on floppies to many of the phone support people, since we were not allowed to have our own resources. Many of them ended up on Compaq's website, attributed to someone else. Some of them ended up on Microsoft's website, attributed to another someone else.
[A manager received permission to put my help system on the network just before I transferred. I still have copies.]
Later, I described how you could not detach attachments in Lotus Notes if Windows95B had been patched with the "a" patch intended for the original Windows95. (The policy to immediately patch Windows95 after installation survived long after the standard install was Windows95B.) I added it to the internal Unisys online help system. A few months later, I found it on Microsoft's site with 3 words changed and attributed to someone else.
In every case, the words changed were prepositions. I thought my original choices were better than the new version (probably because they were MY choices), but the content was otherwise identical. I guess they liked my style, but I would have enjoyed searching for my name and having many results pointing to microsoft.com.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
I sure remember. I haven't been able to moderate for over a year and a half as a result of even mentioning it while logged in.
""If an artist doesn't want something to be copied, they shouldn't release it.""
If L-Train8 doesn't want to get carjacked, he shouldn't leave his house.
If L-Train8 doesn't want his identity stolen, he shouldn't interact with the rest of society.
Now don't you feel guilty that you did the above? Shame on you.
"I admit this doesn't have a lot to do with the wholesale plagerism of websites, but it goes to the argument over the extent of fair use rights. Where does one draw the line between parody, quotation, creative use, and "theft" of "intellectual property?" "
That's why societies have laws and administrators of law, to draw the boundaries, sometimes on a case by case basis.
"Perhaps this kind of plagerism is the price we must pay to have an open and dynamic forum like the web to present and discuss ideas."""
And for how long will it remain open and dynamic, if people continue to do such things. No one's forced to be a participent of this "open and dynamic" forum, and while one may argue that that is their loss. I believe we all lose, and can lose big if enough people get feed up with those who wish to ignore the rules.
This is not about 'open source' nor is it about DRM. It is about wholesale violation of a person or organizations copyrights. Whether you are Microsoft or gnu.org respect for copyright laws is central to your business model so to speak. Taking ideas from another site is one thing, stealing the whole thing without permission is copyrigth violation.
You have clearly posted on the bottom of the page you designed that they hold the copyright. Thus they can do whatever they want.
BTW - your design is much nicer. Theirs is junky and does not even render properly.
What you might do is send them a bill if you feel the designs are close enough. However, when you get it into court (small claims probably) you are going to have to prove your case. I think there are enough differences that you might not win. Yet - you might win in which case they have to pay you. More likely you will partly win - IE a reduced amount.
Your biggest issue is that sure you did a proposal but where was the contract and did they agree to not use ideas you came up with? I think not. And with the copyright transferal you are in even murkier water. Frankly, I don't think this one flies.
Next time, sign them to a non-disclosure. I'd suggest hiring a lawyer specializing in IP law so that you can get a letter of agreement or letter of intent organized before you start showing off your designs.
>We eventually tracked it back to a ripoff site called phpselect.com
... guess who's a paid advertiser ... Clickity click, they have to pay for each click through!
Really want to hit them where it hurts? Do a Google search for PHP Scripts
NT
You can simply phone up the police in fact.
If the site is dynamic, is it possible to copy the site, including all directories and scripts without actually running the scripts? Or rip raw code like php?
The funny thing was that when the last episode of the mole 2 was shown, they told us about all the secret stuff in the show. Turns out that what I caught was in episode 16, but it had also been done in episode 13, which I didn't see... and nobody caught it ever. But of course, once I announced it when it came up in episode 16 after watching the title screen in slow motion, all of a sudden it became common knowledge when people woke up in the morning and read my statements.
Cover your eyes and click this link!
I need to see that article mirrored (ie. stolen) on another site. It would be good performance art. :-)
slashdot.org
apple.slashdot.org
Blasphemy!
I would see this as an opportunity to have a little fun. Chances are that the process is either automated or that they just do a lot of cutting and pasting to do it.
I would try to isolate the ip addresses they use to grab my content. Once I've verified their address, perhaps by making subtle changes that only get fed to ip addresses I suspect are theirs, then the fun would begin.
Since I would, at that point, be able to feed them customized content, I would give them special versions of the content. Just think of the possibilities! I would insert material that was blatantly false, slander their sponsors, insult their readers...the possibilites are endless!
We got a call from a guy in Colorado who wanted to sell our services, when he found out we would only pay 20% residual commission he decided to hire a company in India to reverse engineer our products. He had access to the backend of our demo site and ripped off every feature and even some of the graphics.
Our site:
http://www.dc-motors.com
Copy site:
http://www.usedcarfactory.com
He is now trying to sell the software to other dealers, yesterday we send cease and desist letters to his customers but we don't know what they will do about it.
Sure sucks...
PS. For entertainment check out or other site: http://www.hottiesonhoods.com
Damned dirty apes, trying to take over the planet.
I heard Robin Williams' routine in my head when I read the headline. :-)
I've found that my posts don't format quite right w/o a sig.
Yeah I think plagarism on the net is rampant. It doesn't even escape the ole penis enlargement crowd!
Yeah, this reminds me of the time that I mocked-up my shed into a McDonalds (I think I might have to recognize some sort of trademark there: It's McDonald's (I think I might have to 'kill recursion') property.), and started selling hamburgers made of modelling clay. Yeah, that didn't turn out so well.
perhaps this:
http://www.weblockpro.com
might help?
The news site interviewed the guy running the fake and asked him why he was doing it. Shimanto.com wasn't making him any money. Rather he was paying a fair bit for the hosting fees. Plus it could get him in a bunch of trouble.
He was just doing it for fun...
Apparently, the guy has a history of doing the same thing, as well as domain name squatting, things like that.
Right now the Yahoo fake is gone, but it's now ripping off IBM's news site.
My solution is to usually email them and appeal to their morality. Let them know that "Plagairsm is stealing, 'mkay?" Most times it's good enough to get an apology and, at minimum, credit added to the article, if not removing it altogether. (Or perhaps they just say that and move it to a different URL......)
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
/.ing the bastard is all fine. But aren't you screwing up yourself or your organisation(if you do this from office) in the process, by pumping up your own bandwidth?
Really, I would like to know how this thing that you are proposing, going to screw up the guy? Thanx.
The best planning can be done after the project completes.
More fakes please....we are waiting with fidgety fingers.
The best planning can be done after the project completes.
What's scary about this is that you have a fake sake being passed off as a real, authentic business.
What's to stop the fake site from selling products On-Line, and harvesting Credit Card numbers?
Heck, they don't even have to change the email addresses on their fake site to that of the original company.... and then the original compnay end up with a lot of very angry "customers"........
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
In civil court, you get a default judgment, then you can have it enforced where they are, if they have a treaty that allows foreign judgments to be entered.
Fight Spammers!
But what do you do when someone takes your entire web site and hosts it in a foreign country?
Be flattered that somebody actually likes your web site.
"Geeze, somebody actually reads this shit."
I've noticed a few sites use flash for "static" images - e.g. Anandtech. Does anyone know if this some form of rip-off protection?
I've been too lazy to test it out for myself, but I suspect that theres a bit of code in there to determine which URL is trying to load the Flash image. If so, it might be an increasingly popular practice.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Hmmm, I just tried it with my home DSL (that's what ssh is for :D) and I'm getting 18000 - 22000 ms...
I think I'm going to run it for a bit to see if it's a problem with my connection and if it'll get better after the morning rush.
---- Take the Space Quiz!
now if every little silly idea would get over-head ... where should my poor ...
...
:P
data or meta data that is, like name, date of
"creation" etc. man
brain store all this garbage overhead?
i'd be ending up like 90% overhead as to
who said what to me and 10% of what this guy
acctually told me for important (subjectiv) information
anyway in history we can see alot of stuff
invented / discovered at almost the same time.
just look at ther history of calculus, the
periodic table or "survival of the
fitest (relative by the way)"-theory
not that this web-site would fit in the case above
of course
> But they're not claiming that the website is their own. They've kept the author's picture and contact information intact.
If they're collecting his page views and then getting revenue from the ad companies for those views, then they're misrepresenting themselves as him to the ad company (or trying to convince the ad company that it's their work that's drawing the impressions, not his). Still deception, therefore fraudulent. If they were displaying the content entirely as his and redirecting ad revenue back to him, they'd be a mirror, not webscrapers.
Virg
I run a web site (Help2Go), and someone once ripped off all of my content, saved them as PDF, slapped their name on the cover page, and tried to sell it as an e-book! Google had indexed the PDF, and she had forgotten to take my name off of one of the articles, so I found it inadvertantly when I googled myself. I eventually found her "book" on several e-book retailers!
Intensely pissed off, since I had placed all of my content under a Creative Commons non-commercial license, I tracked down the offender. Called her home, her parent's hopme, her sister's home. I also called the offices of each retailer and threatened a law suit. She finally emailed me and gave me a lame excuse before promising to take all the books of the websites. The retailers took the e-book down immediately after hanging up with me.
I was lucky -- she was in the US and I was able to find her phone number. If they were abroad, I might still be fighting this battle.
"We emailed them via the contact page, which was the same as our own, and heard nothing back," he said. "We then contacted the authority that controls the domain and heard nothing." "Strangely at the time, we also received several emails that we had stolen some guys website. What is the world coming to?"
You Lucky BASTARD! 8-D
I was working at another third-party support center that supported Netscape, back in 1995-6. At one point we had a rash of calls about whether Netscape could be used with AOL. Since I knew something about AOL, I quickly wrote out a HOWTO about this issue & sent it out as email, which ended with a lame joke that the compatibility of the UNIX versions of Netscape with AOL was not known.
A few months later, after I had left said employer & I had to look up some information on the Netscape support website, I found my exact same email, with only a few copy changes -- but with the same lame joke -- under someone's name. Said joke survived several rewrites of the technical note, & for all I know may still be on what's left of the Netscape website.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
I do not have an extensive background with call centers. I worked in one for exactly one year to reenter the computer field in 1995.
Based on my experience, I wrote a proof that call centers for computer support were impossible to maintain. We started with over 200 people. Some (like me) were trying to reenter the computer business because there had been major layoffs in the area over the last few years. Some wanted to enter the computer field. The hiring was done through temp agencies, and many of the people just wanted a job.
We were trained on the about-to-be-released Windows95. By the 4 month mark, almost everybody who had previous computer knowledge had found better jobs. (I stayed because I promised 1 year, and I stayed for 1 year, but at 6 months I had a promise to be transferred to another department.) Phone support is intense work, and anybody with skills could find something better. That means the quality of the people is constantly decreasing. (Call centers work better when the job market is depressed because higher-quality people are willing to do it, and everybody stays longer.)
We had an "expert system" to assist with troubleshooting. It was awful. The worst flaw was that we could not add to the system. Only Compaq HQ could maintain the information. I started my help system because I needed a better tool. The only program available was WordPad, so it was a collection of links to the intranet, plus tons of text copied from the 4 tools provided by Compaq. My text-based system was great for solving issues, but it would not scale.
For an expert system to work, every phone support person must be able to add information. It should be integrated with the call logging system. Any call that required more than reading from existing entries should automatically be added.
It has been 7 years, so maybe there is a new tool that works. Yes, I could write a simple-but-powerful application, but why? Call centers are low profit business, and prefer to buy the standard-but-awful programs. I will not enter the market because internet search is more useful than an expert system (unless your call center denies internet access to the phone support people, which is very counter-productive.)
===
Compaq was using power supplies that were known to be bad more than 4 years after the problem was known. I cannot understand the decision to keep using bad hardware for so long. Releasing information about it could have brought lawsuits from customers and hard drive manufacturers. I have not heard of such a lawsuit, so their policy seems to have been successful.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
Chris-
I hope you get this.. I don't have a problem at all with it. Steal is a bad word.. As I said in the original post I don't really care because its just a mirror.
If you had changed my name on the html to yours...
Glad you enjoyed them. I found them accidently by searching for my name..
-Aram
people have taken things from my site and it sucks
-Brian Alexander