One Way to Deal with Internet Thieves

This guys website is just others content, HE is taking flash games created by others and publishing them on his website FOR PROFIT. I spotted some friends games on there that they are unlikely to gave permission to put on there.<p>Also, he has taken a popular t-shirt design, copied it and then is selling it for profit here <a href="http://www.cafepress.co.uk/playitontheweb" rel="nofollow">http://www.cafepress.co.uk/playitontheweb</a> as advertised on his website.<p>If the guy who posted this is reading, where do you get the games from you're posting? Are you downloading them from other flash game sites and uploading them? Are you scraping those sites? I bet it's the latter. You're only slightly less shameful than this guy you're attacking.<p>irony eh.

Okay, I'll take the alternative view: this is embarrassing for the OP.<p>What worries me is that the OP found the name Bart Burns on the WHOIS for the domain, and assumed (a) that's who registered the domain, and (b) that the information he found via a quick Google is actually Bart Burns. I can change the information on my domain to be whoever I want, particularly if I'm a scammer. Whatever I put in NameCheap's panel shows up minutes later. If someone doesn't believe me, I'll alter the registration on one of my domains. Just ask.<p>More interesting than that, however, is that the OP is completely aware that there are avenues of recourse for this and that he is technically able to determine who hosts the scraped domain. Rather than pursue those avenues of recourse, however -- said facilities have been keeping the Internet from devolving into a "wild West," at least in ARIN and RIPE regions -- this guy had to take a play from 4chan's book and attack possibly the wrong guy. If everybody did what the OP does, you're absolutely right: the Internet <i>would</i> be a wild West.<p>As an administrator at a very large ISP, I am completely aware that some people lose faith in abuse desk contacts. At my employer, we receive countless abuse complaints and <i>we handle every single one</i>. This is a pattern you will observe in ARIN and RIPE regions, but less so for APNIC and other parts of the world (with exceptions). Particularly for someone hosted with JustHost, a DMCA complaint gets the job done in hours. If it doesn't you can go after the ISP. I was never a fan of the DMCA, but this is a prime example of a use case for it.<p>Above everything else, though, even if the OP is right about the identity of the scammer, calling out the scammer's employment means the OP could be attacking his family. If I were the aforementioned company I'd cut my losses and terminate the employee for bad PR. Now the OP has potentially hurt the suspected perpetrator's family based on actions his family is <i>probably not even familiar with</i>. Because he copied the HTML for a site I've never even heard of. That's icing on the cake, to me, because I protect my family. With teeth.<p>In short, I am totally unimpressed by the OP's vigilantism and I am equally disappointed that it is so popular in this forum. Demonstrating this sort of arrogance to Hacker News is probably a good way to burn your bridges at the innumerable employers and business contacts that frequent the site.

I would've just sent the DMCA notice. It's not a "whole process", it's a couple lines of text you copy/paste, put in the URL of your site and the copy, change the date, and email to the host. It'll take you a few seconds to modify and send out. Most web hosts have a specific mailbox for DMCA notices on their contact page or in their AUP.<p><pre><code> Subject: DMCA Notice of Copyright Infringement The copyrighted work at issue is the text that appears on: [URL(s)] The URLs where our copyrighted material is located include: [URL(s)] You can reach me at [email] for further information or clarification. My phone number is [phone] and my mailing address is [physical address]. I have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted materials described above as allegedly infringing is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law. I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed. [your name] [today's date] </code></pre> Never once have I had a DMCA notice not result in the material taken down within 24 hours, even when the host was outside the US. <i>None</i> of them want to potentially be a party to a copyright infringement suit, however unlikely it may be that you'd take it to court and drag the host into it.

If the OP's planted information identified the wrong guy, then that guy, who was wrongly accused of being a willful copyright infringer, might be able to sue successfully for libel.<p>Otherwise, though, one legal irony about this posting sort of tickles me:<p>* Suppose that the (human) scraper were to sue the OP for libel. And leave aside for now the fact that (at least in the U.S.) truth is usually an absolute defense to a defamation action (although that's not the case in false-light or invasion-of-privacy cases).<p>* The OP should win, it seems to me, if for no other reason than that <i>it was the scraper, not the OP, who published the putatively-libelous information about himself.</i> Presumably, if the scraper himself had not copied and published (what he thought was) the OP's site, then the supposedly-libelous information would have stayed hidden in the OP's server, never seeing the light of day.<p>Of course, I could imagine some judges thinking that the case was like the spring-gun cases you read about in first-year torts class: If you booby-trap your vacant house with a shotgun to protect against burglars, you can be liable to a burglar who gets shot, even though he's breaking the law by breaking in.

I don't quite see the argument myself. As a former dancer in the breakdancing scene the premise of "biting" (stealing) moves comes up a lot. After a lot of consideration I came to the conclusion that if you perform something publicly its pretty much fair game for copying. I don't think there is a benefit in spending your time trying to hunt down these copycats. The time is much better spent creating new works. The Open Source world teaches us that product is not just the object the item being copied but the service, the knowledge, the understanding of the product and the ability to create more. For creatives and dancers it's the brand, and/or your name.<p>By all means if you think its worthwhile you can hunt down people ripping off your stuff but if you're becoming tempted to just sit on your prior work and prevent anyone else from touching it you're becoming stale. Case in point would be Cliff Richard who the RIAA like to roll out whenever they want to extend the terms of their copyright because apparently Cliff Richard relies on this royalties as his pension. I often wonder why he didn't/doesn't have to save for his retirement like everyone else.

"I don’t make idle threats. I have all kinds of information about this person, and I’m going to be keeping an eye on him, this particular domain, and any other domains run by him or his host that access my servers."<p>^ Still the wild west indeed.

Disclaimer: Most of my knowledge of the Wild West comes from the movies.<p>In the WW they used to quite like public hangings, both legal and illegal. Why do you think they did this rather than just shoot people beside a grave and roll them in? As a deterrent to others is my guess.<p>I appreciate jedsmith and others views, and do somewhat support them, but lets say the OP had just issued a DMCA (and it was actioned). What has that achieved. The copier loses his site, so from the OP's perspective for this instance the problem is solved. Until next week the guy registers another domain, and another, and another. And his friends do it too.<p>I bet the guy doing the copying is going to think about it twice next time, and I bet one or two people will have read the blog post and rethought future plans.<p>Don't underestimate the amount of stress, time and legal costs that some people would spend trying to resolve a problem like this.<p>I know this Wild West killing is not the best approach but at this point in the history of the internet I am seeing few alternatives to prevent (ie not resolve post event) these things happening.

This is interesting, because it works on the same principal as software piracy: The original isn't "stolen" it's merely copied. The original is still intact.<p>I'm wondering if the same people that are so zealous and pro-piracy would be fine with someone taking their site and duplicating it.

You'd also think a cisco engineer up to such shenanigans would know enough to use an anonymous/proxy whois registration.

one sneaky thing you could have done is to modify your site very slightly so that his site would load your ads instead of his. He wouldn't have noticed ;)

Was leaving the domain name that easily identifies the person whose name and other details were censored done intentionally?

It'd be interesting to hear the technical details of how the switcheroo was accomplished

Speaking of Internet thieves - check this out:<p>GearSpoke.com Derekfrye.com Badrobots.org<p>Why would anyone copy a website consisting of a single picture? Automated bot scraper?

well played, sir!

Other fun ideas:<p>1) Redirect all of his traffic to your site<p>2) Put an iframe with his site in it. His hosting company would probably shut him down very quickly.<p>3) Put goatse / tubgirl on all pages (for his scraper only).

Great!

<p><pre><code> updating, come back later... </code></pre> The site in question has been updated quite quickly I suppose.

I keep trying to scroll up farther than the page allows