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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."
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.
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
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.
The bold print giveth, and the fine print taketh away
...so if that's pay per impression rather than pay per click, you just did them a very big favour.
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
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
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.
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
I run the FreeDOS.org web site, and we have several volunteer mirror sites. Once in a while, a mirror site stops getting updated, and I take them off the mirror list and notify the mirror's owner (if I still have the contact info.)
It so happens that one mirror site hasn't been updated in over 2 years, but they still refer to an image-rotator CGI that is hosted on FreeDOS.org. That CGI now generates an 800x600 "hey dummy! this mirror site is way out of date!" message.
Unfortunately, no one has contacted me and the site is still up. So I assume the mirror site owner is out to lunch. He still gets hits, though (I see the CGI in my access logs.)
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
You know, this isn't necessarily theft. Almost all newspapers and magazines resell their content for newsletters, "special sections," and the web, in exactly the same way that as clip art CDs. Many of them will allow you remove their byline if you're willing to pay them enough (and don't claim that you wrote it). No reason for PM not to do this...an article like "Improve your lawn" is considered filler. They'll probably never republish it, so it'll just sit in a library unless you offer them a few thou to buy the rights to the text.
When I worked in the online newspaper biz, I wrote a piece of software to help rip content from obscure formats on these CDs into XML. We had a stack of hundreds of them, bought cutrate from other content providers who went out of business buying these sorts of articles and trying to resell them. We would then load this content into "online special sections" and give them to our customers to sell local ads and add their own content. The ones who took the initiative and understood the internet saw really good returns and great interest despite the fact that it was all recycled content.
Remember: to most newspapers and magazines, articles are just there to take up space in between ads. Seriously. Ads are laid out first, and then content wraps around them. If content is too big, it gets pared down to fit around the ads. If content is too small, they buy something from AP/Reuters/UPI or take it from one of these CDs of stories...
Hey freaks: now you're ju
This happened not too long ago with The Linux Game Tome. About.com had taken all of the Linux Game Tome's content and printed it as its own.
...Rob
The American Dream isn't an SUV and a house in the suburbs; it's Don't Tread On Me.
The ads are hosted on a different server (which actually, at this moment, seems to not be serving them with ads).
/tmp; while true; do wget -r -nd --delete-after -o /dev/null http://www.carorcar.com/; date | xargs echo "Again at"; done
But in any case, since wget won't pull content from a different server unless you give it the -H flag, this will simply suck their bandwidth without giving them any ad revenue:
cd
(Don't forget to cd, or you might end up deleting files in the current directory named the same thing as files on that site)
They're also using IIS, so someone could conceivably pull out all the IIS hack attempts sitting in their access logs from the script kiddies and see how well patched they are.
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.
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
As for the Fishman affidavits, on the one hand they claim that it's a copyright violation, on the other hand they claim that it's all fake.
Perhaps they mean that they think they own the IP on fakery?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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.
Information being free or not, and regardless of whether it's legal or not, the other people should at least have the decency to state that they did not create the content and give credit where it's due. And just because we know the world is not fair does not mean we shouldn't complain or try to do something about it.
In times like these, it is helpful to remember that there have always been times like these. - Paul Harvey
You may be in luck if the company uses a domain with a TLD mandated by ICANN (COM, NET, ORG, BIZ, INFO, etc.).
With the new WDRP (Whois Data Reminder Policy) from ICANN, domain registrars are obligated to make sure their customers provide valid whois data for their domains. If they don't the domain can be pulled.
As for carorcar.com, the whois data shows an owner in China, but with a US country code and zipcode (I think), and a phone number (+01.3212353319) in Brevard County, Florida. Heck, I can even see it's listed with a R. Young in Orlando.
If you can convince their registrar that this is bogus, he might get the domain shut down.
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
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!
Quite often contacting their hosting provider and simply pointing out to them that they are hosting content violating your IP will be enough.
.ru site also as soon as it's live, with minimum work on their part.
That's what we told the people who stole our content, unfortunately they are a russian hosting company who stole all of our content, edited the company logo images (poorly) and didn't even change the layout! the phone numbers are in the same place, they even used the same "drowning dude help icon" thing.. In any case, as you can probably imagine, they were happy to hear from us until we told them it was OUR site they stole, then all of a sudden they lost their ability to speak english.. Ugh!
Also, we've been designing a new site for some time now, and it kills me to think of the time we've put into this, to know that it will probably end up on the
-matt
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?
Can you provide me with a link to that site? I would love to see it...
Okay. Here's a non-clickable link to the offender:
http://freedos.ne.com.ar/
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.
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?
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.
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
Part of the layout, is "quietly" placing the ads where they fit the best, in a manner which isn't annoying or in the user's way. Color, placement, and ad style are important.
Another important point is that these ads are text-based , and they generate enough to cover a significant portion of our bandwidth bill.
I tried the graphical banner ads for 3 months, which weren't really targeted (OfficeMax, Staples, battery companies, etc.), and hadn't earned a penny. 2 nights after I put up the Google ads, we had covered that month's bandwidth bill.
They work, they aren't annoying, and they are targeted to the audience of my users. It works out all around.
Slippery slope.
I think the trick with the web site copying is not that it's 'not as bad' so much as it is the actual stealing of that persons work.
Example; If I steal a song from the band Barrage because I apriciate there aleternative stylings- the song is still from Barrage, and anyone who asks me what that is will hear 'it's by Barrage'- hence, while I have stolen there work for monitary value, I have not 'stolen' there art.
If I were to take a song of Barrage's and remove the vocals, add my own vocals and release it as my own song, THEN I would be doing the eqivalent of stealing someone's webpage- I'm taking their art, and claiming it as my own!
PS. I like Barrage.
-Millions of Monkeys, Millions of typewriters, 6 hours of sorting through faeces encrusted pages to find: This post
why go to all that illegal trouble, just use your own IP and anonymous proxies
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
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.
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 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.
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