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Poster:
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ChrisJBrady |
Date:
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May 04, 2012 03:53:31am |
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Forum:
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web
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Subject:
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Stealing Content from Wayback Archives |
I am a member of an online community on Yahoo Groups. There is a member there who has reported that his entire website has been copied from Archive.org and uploaded to a domain of which he is not the owner.
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Quote: "My name is P... H... (also known as D...).
"Back in the 1990s myself and a number of other people on the (then only) canal forum put together a website called Canals: Roots&Routes. It was the first website to cover the history and routes of almost all of the UK's canals and rivers. The site was removed by me in 2007 due to several issues, including conflicts with certain canal societies and trusts and it being out of date. Some of my pages have remained on various other sites but today I came across a "new" site called Canal Routes at
http://www.canalroutes.net"Guess what? When I go there, I find this is MY original site copied and re-uploaded in full, word for word! [Apparently it was copied byte4byte from Archive.org - hence this post]
"Although it includes copyrights containing my name and all my original text (apparently exactly as it was), no-one has ever contacted me about this site. No-one has ever asked permission to copy my text and of course I have no control over it. It concerns me that anything could be added or removed in "my name".
"Does anyone here know the people or person behind this site? I see a contact is given as alex.simon@lycos.com. Anyone know who this is? I have contacted him and I'm awaiting a reply but any extra info would be great.
"D..." Unquote
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Whois lists the person responsible for the copied site:
Domain name: canalroutes.net
He is listed with an address in Romania.
It also appears that he is associated with about 70+ established domains which he is attempting to sell based on visitor numbers.
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This is like cyber-squatting on domain names, but taken further. He steals the content not the domain name.
Archive.org is a free resource for web sites that go out-of-date or get abandoned by their creators - so anyone can do what he has done and for free. This guy then resurrects the contents and republishes it all - albeit perpetuating old (and possibly by now inaccurate) content.
So what is the pay off for this guy? Holding a website to ransom? Not with out-of-date data. And if he is resurrecting 70+ websites he has to pay the 'rent' for their respective domain names, and storage for their hosting.
So what IS going on?
Chris B.
This post was modified by ChrisJBrady on 2012-05-04 10:53:31
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Poster:
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alexsimon |
Date:
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May 04, 2012 12:40:08am |
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Forum:
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web
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Subject:
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Re: Stealing Content from Wayback Archives |
Hi Chris,
I am in fact the person who copied that site and I am here to answer some things.
1. I don't know how you assume that I "resurrected 70+ websites" from archive.org.
As a technical sidenote, DomainTools (the tool you probably used) reports domains associated with an email address. Domain names do not equal websites. And then a person can have more than one email address or privacy whois settings etc. Plus that it is not reliable.
For your information, the only site I did in fact copy content from archive.org is the one mentioned here.
2. I now have permission from the owner of the former site to use the content and I am sure you know this aspect.
3. You publish my (public whois) that I made available. If I would have been a cyber criminal, I could have used a free whois privacy protection to protect my identity. The issue is that the whois information is not stored, while any forum post does.
4. You practically just stolen some content written by the author of the site in a closed environment (the Yahoo Groups) and published it here without prior permission. I think that means .... stealing content technically.
5. Just for your information, you say this is like cybersquatting on domain names. Now I did not do any domain cybersquatting, but I would like to take some time to you to explain what exactly domain cybersquatting is as many people are in confusion with it.
If a said person has a domain he does not pay for renewal (legally you never OWN a domain, you just lease it), it becomes available. If that term is trademarked and someone registers it, that is cybersquatting. Even in this case, if you have "good faith", you can have trademarks in a domain (like was the case of PaypalSucks.com and Nodaddy.com - complaint sites that have TM in their name).
On the other hand if someone had a site called ChrisRants.com and he fails to renew his lease of the domain and it is not trademarked, anybody in this world is entitled to register it. This was not something related to this subject, but lot of people have misinformation about the issue.
I tried to look at your message to find out what it is about, as it is posted in the forums of archive.org and I thought there is a specific question attached to this, but I have found only this: "But what IS going on?"
I will try to answer that as well, although the question is a bit vague.
It happens that there is a site once that featured excellent data about a topic and someone who liked it so much so that it copied it without gaining any financial benefit from it. And it happens that if there is any issue going on here, that is only between me and the original creator of the site, and the deserted forums of archive.org are not involved.
I felt the need to answer this as you published my name and personal data here (oh, by the way, I would ask you to take those down).
I will not participate in any other discussion, as I have plenty of better things to do. I still did not get the question of this post anyway.
Alex
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Poster:
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ChrisJBrady |
Date:
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May 04, 2012 03:58:16am |
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Forum:
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web
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Subject:
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Re: Stealing Content from Wayback Archives |
Here is a link -
http://penw.ws/JKLAtC - which shows a
forum post where this person is advertising a bunch of domain names for sale. That's cyber-squatting.
As a member opines: "Some have said they would consider linking to the resurrected version of Peter's site from their own sites. If this chap has a record of selling on domain names that attract visitor hits, then these links might one day ending up pointing to a site with very different content."
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At work I have experienced issues with registered domain names lapsing because the 'owner' or rather the Finance Dept. forgot to renew the subscriptions. They were then purchased by others and pointed towards hardcore-porn sites. And it is also known that visiting such porn sites can and frequently does result in rogue web pages downloading viruses onto the said computers.
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This post was modified by ChrisJBrady on 2012-05-04 10:58:16
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Poster:
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alexsimon |
Date:
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May 04, 2012 03:10:22am |
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Forum:
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web
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Subject:
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Re: Stealing Content from Wayback Archives |
Please tell me in which way those domain names are cybersquatting. You are way off the discussion.
Selling domains is cybersquatting? Laughable.
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Poster:
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ChrisJBrady |
Date:
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May 04, 2012 04:00:26am |
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Forum:
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web
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Subject:
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Re: Stealing Content from Wayback Archives |
You want a question - then here's one:
Why did you steal P...'s website and then re-upload it without asking him first, especially since he had copyright statements on the pages?
Actually here is another question.
P... took the website down for good reasons, not least of which because there inaccuracies and a lot of missing details. Why are you not updating it for him?
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Poster:
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jory2 |
Date:
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May 03, 2012 01:21:12pm |
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Forum:
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web
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Subject:
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Re: Stealing Content from Wayback Archives |
I don't know if posting the info to the source of your problems will solve the situation?
Have you sent a DMCA Take Down Notice to the website's hosting company? You'll get a reply; its the law.
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