What to do about folks that "steal" your website

I think the theif is the one mentioned on the end of this post -
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showpost.php?p=10950&postcount=13

read the whole story first. The person who stole your site is the one being biten.

 

Victory to you.... I cannot believe that he tried to say his intent was not nefarious. Anyways, I am glad to hear his ISP slapped him on the wrist.

 

FYI FWIW: It's not clear to me that his ISP "sllapped him on the wrist" - i.e. the note went to the whois record of the SEO company that owns the domain - we're really not sure exactly what the relationship is - could be the same person!

I hope not - in fairness to the SEO company, it would be difficult for them to "control" their clients, but the response was pretty darn fast here, so I'm not sure what to think.

Regardless, I'd say it was more "caught with your hand in the cookie jar" ;-)

alek

 

OK, for those interested, I have updated my scumbags page with the details about how graeme stole my website.

To summarize, it appears that some guy named Graeme (with an Email address of ) stole the entire contents of my copyrighted personal web site (including images) at www.komar.org and then inserted his own Adsense Publisher ID on my content (hosted on his server) in what I assume was an attempt to profit from it. The whois record for his domain listed Epsilis Ltd. (contact Michael Spencer), but it appears that Graeme was a customer of theirs and they were not directly involved. I'll add that Michael was fairly responsive to this "outrageous behavior" (his words) which reflects positively on him and his company.

 

You've been digging Alek.

Hopefully it'll teach the scumball Graeme not to steal other people's content. Somehow I doubt it. I do hope you reported him to the Adsense team.

At least some good may come of it - Michael Spencer from Epsilis Ltd might now be wary of registering other people's domains under his own name. To my mind that is extremely bad practice. Serves him right to get some bad publicity out of this.

 

I agree that folks like Graeme probably will do this again - we'll see. I also agree that it Michael/Epsilis will probably be more careful with their whois registrations in the future which is a "good" thing ... but if you read the summary above and my page, I actually commend them for their quick and forceful response, so as I'd say that is some GOOD publicity.

BTW, he's over in your neck of the woods (UK), and I actually kinda liked him by time we ended our conversations on this whole unfortunate affair.

 

Hi guys,

After reading your story I thought I'd share a solution I use. Basically the same as:

http://ajaxkillswitch.com

Having been bitten by others stealing my websites, I've found this technique invaluable!

I just load a blank JavaScript file directly from my server, which remains present even when someone steals the site. This 'kill switch' can then be used to cause all manner of problems for the would-be thieves

I hope the situation resolves itself for you, I hope this helps in future!

 

I would sent a DMCA to the hosting company you are member. Basically it is a take out notice. Just report this asap.

 

Oh my god, what a cheek?! Why would someone do that, having duplicate content will affect your search engine positioning too won't it?

 

WOW! I've never had this happen to me. However, now that I know it's possible, I wonder if there's a way to prevent something like this from happening....

 

I am glad to have found this post on how to prevent such a thing. It will help me out in the long run.