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."

Comments

/. the bastards!

[zedmelon]

This sucks. I don't know if anything can be done legally, but we can slashdot the hell out of the offending site, right?

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? ;)

Re:/. the bastards!

[jargoone]

Someone needs to do a

man wget

Pay special attention to the section on the

-r

option.

Re:/. the bastards!

[pavon]

Yep, so slashdot something that doesn't have an advertizement in it. try:

while yes; do wget -O /dev/null http://www.carorcar.com/gifs/race/gp-start-1.jpg; done

Re:/. the bastards!

[Pieroxy]

Of course. The original site has some dynamic content - hence a CPU usage higher than the second one which probably contains just HTML rips of the original one.

Works like a charm, you scale better, you don't do the content. You just have a wget running on the background every 10 minutes to update your site!

Things you can do

[prostoalex]

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.

Found one today

[Remlik]

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.

Re:Welcome to my site !!!!! NOT OFF TOPIC

[drayzel]

Umm... That post actually isn't off topic.
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_s ite.ht ml

~Z

Depends on the site/program

[blorg]

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.

Wrong!

[www.sorehands.com]

They violated the law in the USA when they took the material from the USA. You can file a lawsuit against them, and potentially serve by e-mail.

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.

More Rip-Offs

[mags330]

It's amazing how many bottom feeders there are out there: http://www.pirated-sites.com/

As seen on CSPAN

[xleeko]

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)

I have a small company in my district called Videx. They developed a new kind of scanning technology. They developed an electronic lock. They are selling in 44 countries, including, their mistake, China, where they were selling about a $1 million a year. But it turns out, they say in China if you bring in intellectual property within 24 hours it is counterfeited and for sale.

And the Videx company had followed all the laws and protections, went to the trouble of getting supposed Chinese protection and patents and all that. One day they found their entire company had been cloned in China including their Web site. In fact, the Chinese, the fake Chinese Videx, had gone them one up. They had a little fake American flag waving at the top of their Web site, this Chinese company.

They even copied and translated into Chinese the U.S. copyright and patents on their software. They did not make a very good product, the company found out, because they started getting product support calls from people who thought they were clients of the U.S. Videx, but were actually clients of the phony Chinese Videx. This happens time and time again.

For the full transcript, go here

- Dave

Re:/. the bastards - with apache bench!

[nosphalot]

I much prefer to use apache benchmark tool for this sort of thing. Not only can you tell it how many times to get a url, you can tell it how many connections to use while doing it.

Should be installed under your apache bin directory as 'ab'. I recommend the following if you have a decent pipe:

/usr/local/apache/bin/ab -n 10000 -c 32 -t 10 -k 'http://www.carorcar.com/gifs/race/gp-start-1.jpg'

Then make sure you add -D

[tepples]

Add -D carorcar.com to keep hits to the ad page from getting through.

Been there, done that

[shish]

There's been a whole site for this, for at least a few years...

pirated-sites

Re:Flattered or angry?

[Idarubicin]

A wholesale copy if credited to the original author, as far as I am aware (IANAL), is fine. A direct copy WITHOUT credit is plagerism.

Er, no. Even if you credit the original author, if you duplicate the work without permission then you've infringed his copyright. Even if you give Peter Jackson and New Line Cinemas full credit, you still aren't allowed to duplicate Return of the King and give copies to all of your friends. Website content is no different.

You may quote a website--in moderation, and with appropriate citation--for various purposes (fair use) but duplication of the whole thing (or a substantial part thereof) is out of bounds.

You are perfectly legal if you link to any content on the public internet. Obviously, you're also in the clear if you obtain permission in advance to mirror a site for someone.

Re:/. the bastards - with apache bench!

[JabberWokky]

while true; do ab -n 90000000 -c 320 -t 10 -k 'http://www.carorcar.com/gifs/race/gp-start-1.jpg' ; done

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