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."
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.
The bold print giveth, and the fine print taketh away
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
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 this mirror site is way out of date!"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
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.
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
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
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.
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?