Stop! Website Thief! 475
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."
/. the bastards! (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.carorcar.com [carorcar.com]
solo [carorcar.com]
another page [carorcar.com]
and another page [carorcar.com]
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! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:/. the bastards! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:/. the bastards! (Score:5, Informative)
Then make sure you add -D (Score:5, Informative)
Add -D carorcar.com to keep hits to the ad page from getting through.
Depends on the site/program (Score:5, Informative)
Re:/. the bastards! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:/. the bastards! (Score:3, Informative)
Ie, you're wrong.
Re:/. the bastards! (Score:5, Informative)
while yes; do wget -O
Re:/. the bastards - with apache bench! (Score:5, Informative)
Should be installed under your apache bin directory as 'ab'. I recommend the following if you have a decent pipe:
Re:/. the bastards - with apache bench! (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:/. the bastards! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Their business model is banner ads... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:/. the bastards! (Score:5, Funny)
~Berj
Re:/. the bastards! (Score:4, Informative)
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!
Re:/. the bastards! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:/. the bastards! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:/. the bastards! (Score:3, Insightful)
Just this particular set of bastards who have VERY CLEARLY stolen content from at least two sources who DID NOT give them permission to do it -- RTFA.
And I say fire away. It's obvious these folks are intent on screwing legitimate sites. Why else would they take down their illegal mirror of CarEnthusiast and replace it IMMEDIATELY with an illegal mirror of the Finger Lakes Region SCCA chapter's site? If you
Re:/. the bastards! (Score:3, Interesting)
Easy (Score:5, Funny)
1) Submit story to silicon.com /.ing.
2) Submit story to slashdot.org
3) Imagine what Car or Car's [carorcar.com] server looks like as it catches fire do to the
4) ....then, get back to work.
It happens, what can you do? (Score:5, Funny)
You mean *this* one? (Score:4, Funny)
Welcome to my site !!!!! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Welcome to my site !!!!! NOT OFF TOPIC (Score:5, Informative)
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
Flattered or angry? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Flattered or angry? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Flattered or angry? (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.the-spoiler.com/ADVENTURE/Lucas.Arts/f
Doing a google search [google.com] yielded some interesting results. A few people have tried to take credit, but the body of the text still has my name and old email! If you're going to plagiarize, at least do it correctly.
Happens on Slashdot (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [slashdot.org] with this comment. [slashdot.org]
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
My content ended up on microsoft.com (Score:5, Interesting)
[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.
It Happens All of the Time (Score:3, Interesting)
A few months later, after I had left said employer & I had to look up some information on the Netscape support websi
Re:Flattered or angry? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Flattered or angry? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
You do nothing. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:You do nothing. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:You do nothing. (Score:5, Interesting)
That's what we told the people who stole our content [yourhost.com], unfortunately they are a russian hosting company [yourhost.ru] 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
Wrong! (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:You do nothing. (Score:5, Interesting)
With the new WDRP [icann.org] (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 [reversepho...ectory.com] in Orlando.
If you can convince their registrar that this is bogus, he might get the domain shut down.
Re:You do nothing. (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Fight back! (Score:5, Funny)
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!
ICANN (Score:2, Interesting)
Simple!! (Score:2, Redundant)
You post it on slashdot so we can overwhelm it with traffic and take it down immediately.
Hypocrites (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Hypocrites (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Hypocrites (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Hypocrites (Score:4, Insightful)
"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.
Bad Comparison (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:Hypocrites (Score:4, Redundant)
But the information was already freely available on the original site. The forged, plagerised site stole the presentation of the information to make themselves some advertising revenue.
If an artist doesn't want something to be copied, they shouldn't release it."
I can honestly say I've never heard this argument used.
Digital content should be done for the joy of creating
The original site creator did do that. he made it for his enthusiasm in all things car related. He then found out he could pay for the site with ad revenue, and maybe make some money for his hard work. The plagerists stole the presentation of this persons information solely to make money. they had no interest in using the information in an intellectual way.
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.
I'm not against "online copyrights" as you say. I am against the extension of copyrights for the purpose of greed, ie, Disney's fight to not let Mickey Mouse get released into the public domain. Abolishing copyrights is rediculous. Sensible copyright law is not. We don't really have sensible copyright law these days.
I'm not in favor of pirating mp3's or movies, yet I do see a great difference between this and that.
Re:Hypocrites (Score:3, Insightful)
It's simple really. Most slashdotters can't make music or movies, therefore those things should be free. Many slashdotters can make web pages, therefore they deserve credit for them.
It seems to be all to common and very trendy these days, especially here. Some people have no respect for the work of others, only their own.
I expect someon
Re:Hypocrites (Score:4, Insightful)
Typical Anonymous Coward trolling. Slashdot is neither a hive mind nor a borg. Believe it or not, the thousands of readers of Slashdot have diffent opinions. That you don't understand this marks you as an idiot or a troll.
But on a more specific level, why are these two things totally different? If someone took one of my web sites and copied it for personal use I would be fine with that (although I'd ask that they use a bit of tact in doing the site rip; no need to be rude and totally soak all of my bandwidth). I'd be grumpy if someone provided a free public mirror of my site without my permission (that is, sharing my work), I would try to get the site taken down, but I'm going to be mellow about it. However, if someone were to take my web site, represent it as their own work, then try to profit from it, I would very, very angry. Similarly with music, movies, or software. Copies for personal use are fine; non-commercial sharing with original authorship preserved is wrong but we can work it out, commercial copies with authorship removed is evil.
Re:Hypocrites (Score:5, Funny)
Damn, the secret's out. Slashdot is really just one person, clacking madly away at the keyboard and pretending to be a vast community. Carpal Tunnel Syndrome will be the end of Slashdot, mark my words.
Re:Hypocrites (Score:3, Informative)
I've noticed this sort of thinking before, in fact, I used to agree -- Then I took into account that, think about it, slashdot has enough users to take out entire websites at the blink of an eye when a story is posted, and you STILL see a ton of posts by people who did not RTFA, so l
Re:Hypocrites (Score:3, Funny)
You just need to understand that this is one of those irregular verbs; I exercise fair usage, you plagiarize, he has just been arrested under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
domain (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Sadly... (Score:2)
Sic 'em! (Score:2)
Good ol' fashion American lawsuits, without any cost to you!
It's slashdotted (Score:5, Funny)
whats wrong with mirroring? (Score:2, Insightful)
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 insta
I thought ... (Score:2)
Things you can do (Score:5, Informative)
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 [techinterviews.com] 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.
Re:Things you can do (Score:3, Interesting)
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 ,
Its not a new thing (Score:2, Insightful)
avast pirated sites me shipmates [pirated-sites.com]
Found one today (Score:5, Informative)
Now go to This Popular Mechanics Article [popularmechanics.com] 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:Found one today (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
If they're so reputable, why's the job so clumsy? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Imitation is the cheapest form of flattery! (Score:3, Interesting)
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? [mithuro.com]. This site has only one page, and every other page is rendered dynamically. Maybe this is the solution.
www. (Score:4, Funny)
This stuff annoys the hell out of me (Score:5, Interesting)
For instance
www.nevermindus.com [nevermindus.com] vs
www.digitalabstracts.com [digitalabstracts.com]
There is a great selection of these on Pirated Sites [pirated-sites.com]
This happened to me a few years ago. (Score:3, Interesting)
Japanese Slashdot!?! (Score:5, Funny)
Someone did this to /.! [slashdot.jp]
I hope Rob and Co. sue their pants off! Sheesh, what audacity!
Fighting back... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Fighting back... (Score:3, Funny)
this happens to us pretty frequently (Score:4, Interesting)
More Rip-Offs (Score:3, Informative)
As seen on CSPAN (Score:4, Informative)
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 [gpo.gov]
- Dave
Contacting the copycat (Score:5, Funny)
Hmmmmm.... They emailed themselves to complain about the copy, eh? And heard nothing back? Well now, that makes sense.
New business model... (Score:5, Funny)
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
E2 content lift (Score:3, Interesting)
Over on Everything2 [everything2.com], we recently had someone lift a lot of content and use it to populate a portal site [homepages.org] 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...
Been there, done that (Score:5, Informative)
pirated-sites [pirated-sites.com]
happens to me all the time (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [akerman.ca], which I use Google AdSense to pay for (cover bandwidth costs etc.)
Here is a ripoff of my page [mplsgeeks.com], 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.
Re:happens to me all the time (Score:3, Informative)
The issue is what your damages are. At best you _might_ be able to recover the investment in the time that would be required to compile all of this information.
Your position is no different than say Walt Disney who has tee shirt designs, characters and so forth taken illegally. The difference is that in the case of copyright infringment there are now some laws that place some pretty stee
Why won't the guy in the mirror answer me? (Score:4, Funny)
"We emailed them via the contact page, which was the same as our own, and heard nothing back,"
-- Brian
Outrageous! (Score:3, Funny)
Outrageous!
Even worse! (Score:3, Funny)
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?
Happened to me (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Happened to Me Once... (Score:3, Funny)
Why not try putting pressure elsewhere? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 [websponsors.com])?
My own experience... (Score:4, Interesting)
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...
Can you rip dynamic content, like php code? (Score:4, Interesting)
This happened to (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This happened to (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [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.)
Re:This happened to (Score:3, Funny)
Yup, it's being slashdotted right now. According to the last access time in my web server logs, I think his site stopped responding at 21:09 US/Central.
Slashdot has achieved what I could not. :)
Thanks!
Re:This happened to (Score:3, Funny)
No readable text, just a lot of purty colours...
Re:This happened to (Score:5, Funny)
I had an item up for auction on eBay. A luser came along and posted the same item and snagged my photo. Not only did he snag the photo - he simply linked to my original storage location on
Re:This happened to (Score:5, Funny)
I don't think the forum moderators were pleased with the guy who made the post...
Re:first post. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Use Flash? (Score:5, Funny)
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".
Re:Use Flash? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Stolen Resume (Score:4, Funny)
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...
Re:As an information site owner, (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
Re:Yeah, right. (Score:3, Interesting)