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.
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
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.
Could someone post a mirror please?
Quite often contacting their hosting provider and simply pointing out to them that they are hosting content violating your IP will be enough. Most hosts have T&Cs that cover this. This is, of course, after simply asking the person to stop using your IP. They may just not realise, or they may just be a 12 year old kid.
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.
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
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.
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!
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
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....
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 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.
Someone did this to /.!
I hope Rob and Co. sue their pants off! Sheesh, what audacity!
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.
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.
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
Flash .. is the same in all browsers....
Yea, in all my browsers it's a little icon that says "Click Here to Get the Plugin".
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
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!
It's amazing how many bottom feeders there are out there: http://www.pirated-sites.com/
His resume doesn't appear to be there anymore, though. At least, the link to it comes up not found.
;-)
Of course, how do we know you're the *original* Jason Slaughter? Maybe *you* copied the resume, and want to point the blame at someone else...
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
Lots more here.
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!
Back when goatse.cx still existed, Hick.org and goatse.cx were the same site. Same server, same IP address. It chose which site to serve based on what URL you typed in.
If you connected to hick.org, and issued an http GET http://goatse.cx/, you would get the disgusting page rather than the reletivly benign hick.org page.
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
Well, since google just passes on the info, its not.
A rip is when you steal the layout and/or info and call it you own.
Google cache is a service, not theft.
The system had the verbosity of HTML combined with all the readability of compiled assembly viewed as bitmap images
Instuctions on how to obtain flash files from a website:
1) Install Lynx. This can be obtained from http://lynx.browser.org/
2) Type in the command 'lynx [URL]' and replace [URL] with the URL of the flash you would like to get.
3) Type 'D' for download, then type the filename you would like it saved as.
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.
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.
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
Add -D carorcar.com to keep hits to the ad page from getting through.
pirated-sites
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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?
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
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
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.
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)?
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
>But what do you do when someone takes your entire web site and hosts it in a foreign country?
free international hosting.
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