i just launched brokenscript (http://www.brokenscript.com) a couple of days ago. the terms of use clearly specify that you need to keep the 'powered by brokenscript' link intact and live. so far, i've already found 2 sites using brokenscript without the proper credit given. http://t3m.org http://www.l1nx.com/l/ so sad that the internet is full of these type of webmasters. any comments?
Thats a neat script, definitely useful I imagine. Well, not to dishearten you any more, but I wouldn't be surprised if I see this script for sale somewhere or packaged in with a cheaply priced script bundle. It's just the way unscrupulous poeple work.. You may want to add some kind of autoupdater to the script so it checks your server for new releases of the software, and essentially lets you know where it's being used if it's missing the backlink... I'm not a coder so I don't know how difficult this would be and I imagine someone who knows php fairly well would just remove it, but it may give you a bit more of a heads up. Then it just comes down to informing the site owners of their violation, asking them to remedy the problem or to take down the script. If they refuse, file a DMCA with their host, data center, Google, etc... Protecting copyright seems like such a pain though, I definitely wouldn't want to have to deal with it.
Google.com/dmca.html I think all the major search engines have this, so don't stop at Google. This will essentially require them to answer to the engines and remedy the problem or else have their sites removed from the engines. As for the host, I don't know, you can do a Whois to try to see who they are hosting through by looking at the nameservers. Then I imagine its just a process of emailing them and informing them of the violation, not sure if there are some standard DMCA letters out there or not.
I remember a similar thing with Matt Mullenweg and wordpress. He tried to prosecute or sue the WP blogs that were removing the "powered by wordpress" from them. Ended up not being a damn thing he could do except waste a lot of money on lawyers that always promise you positive results.
Another option is to make it so it's not completely open source. Use Zend encoder to restrict someone from removing the backlink. Theres still ways for people to crack this, but I'm sure its fairly difficult and doesn't seem worth it just to remove a backlink.