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."
Ad Revenues are based off click-through rates, not page impressions. As long as you don't click the ads, it's fine.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
Theres a big difference between using IP from a source for your own benefit, but its another thing to use that IP to make money for yourself. Neither of which are particularly good.
If you listen music you downloaded from the internet for free, its not the same as copying a CD and selling it with a copied cover.
I'm not saying that copying music for your own use is a good thing to do, but its not nearly as bad as selling something that you've copied as your own.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
Typical /. hypocrisy. When you misappropriate IP in the form of music, movies, and software, you say it's not "theft"
I do.
but when someone does the same to your website, you call them thieves, and get all up at arms about it...
I don't.
You seem to be under the impression that everybody who reads Slashdot thinks the same way, and that you are the lone voice of reason. That simply isn't true.
The reason this isn't hypocrisy is that the same people aren't alternating between the two viewpoints. Different people are responsible for the different viewpoints.
"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..."
Agreed. Typical arguments (which I've seen in just the past few days when discussing MP3/movie piracy here on /.) for abolishing copyrights in the digital domain include:
The important thing is that all of these arguments can be applied to the case of this Taiwanese site. As with MP3 piracy, some might argue that pirating a MP3 is really theft because it reduces the potential market for the material, and the same applies here -- this (if you will) pirated web site might collect ad revenue that the original site might have otherwise gotten. Many slashdotters would gladly tell the greedy artist "tough cookies" -- why no shame on the greedy web site creator who is clearly a luddite if they didn't see this coming?
The bottom line is that in both cases, somebody else is benefitting off the work of an artist without compensating the original artist, and without the artist's permission.
It's my hope that the "abolish online copyrights" crowd will chime in on this case and explain better than I can why pirating MP3s and movies is okay, and this is not.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
"There should be more legislation in place to protect copyright interests."
This is, without a doubt, the last thing I'd ever expect to read on Slashdot!
In all seriousness, sorry to hear your story. Copyright violation is all fun and good when it happens to somebody else, and we can often fool ourselves into thinking that we're actually doing somebody a favor by copying somebody else's work against their will (the "by ripping this CD and putting it in my share directory I am actually giving them free advertising and somebody might go to their concert as a result of downloading it from Kazaa in lieu of buying the CD" argument). But as you've shown, it can mightily suck when it happens to you.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
> 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