The sincerest form of flattery ?
Fri, 2004-05-07 12:27 — mrb
Well, this is bizarre : http://yz[dot]freehostingguru[dot]com
Someone has copied large sections of our website and just changed the names from Mr Tall and Mr Balding to Mr Yoju and Mr Zale.
Very strange.
MrB
flattery?
Wow! I suppose this kind of thing happens fairly often, in that there's nothing to stop anyone from copying just about any page they can get their hands on, but this is a case of pretty straightforward theft. And they uglified the design, too! Any tips from readers on what we batgung might do about this?
Re:The sincerest form of flattery ?
wow..straightforward carbon copy of everything! :o
Mr.B, Mr.Tall,
I suggest trying to finding a hacker and bring down that site!!
Re:The sincerest form of flattery ?
Quick things I can think of is for you to copyright your images (ie put a watermark like "BATGUNG.COM").
Some more info for you.
http://www.legal-database.com/internetlaw.htm
http://www.copyright.org.au/PDF/InfoSheets/G057.pdf
There's bound to more information on the net. Hope everything works out as I always enjoy reading YOUR blogs about HK life.
C.W
Re:The sincerest form of flattery ?
The free hosting company they are using says "6. We take copyright infringement very seriously and if your site is found to be infringing on anyone else's, you will not be accepted."
So I guess that's the place to start.
I'm curious why they went to the trouble of copying it though. They did add a couple of links to other sites. Maybe they hope to get traffic from those links ?
Thanks for the suggestions,
MrB
Re:The sincerest form of flattery ?
A reply from the hosting company at last :
[quote]Hi David,
Thank you for bringing this to our attention. I have already forward this to
CRM team, they will contact the site owner for clarification.
Best Regards
Jason
[/quote]
Re:The sincerest form of flattery ?
Well, no response from the "CRM" department yet. Here's the trail so far :
- The response above is from "Jason" at the free hosting company www.freehostingguru[dot]com.
- The only reason I could see for the copied site was to direct traffic to www.fengshuiprophet[dot]com. The homepage of that site is signed by "Jason", and also has links to the free hosting site.
- A quick Whois on their domains finds the first one is registered at 6618 Carriage Trail, Burlington, Ontario, while the second is registered to an "FS Chan" at FS Chan, 6642 Carriage Trail....
- And the one that makes me laugh is that the fake site has a little logo and the text "This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License." Are they worried someone might copy their content ? A visit to the Creative Commons site finds a page for member "Jason FS" listing sites linked to those above.
So either Carriage Trail, Burlington (population 146,000, and "a quality of life second to none") is rapidly developing into Canada's answer to Silicon Valley - and possibly offering tax breaks to people named Jason - or just maybe there is a link between the hosting company and the plagiarised site ?
Will the real Jason please stand up ?
MrB
Re:The sincerest form of flattery ?
They're a well known spam site.
They try to submit copies of lots of sites into directories like dmoz and gain links. Once this is done, they get "PageRank".. more links scored = higher page rank.
They then leak this page rank out to sites they're trying to SEO (Search Engine Optimize).
I've sent MrT the instructions on how to deal with this. Be assured they're not getting into DMOZ (the directory used at directory.google.com) in any of the Hong Kong categories.
In the meantime, I've added this site to
http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/Asia/Hong_Kong/Society_and_Culture/Personal...
Re:The sincerest form of flattery ?
Thanks Shri, it's the first time I've come across something like this, so I really appreciate your help.
Cheers, MrB
Re:The sincerest form of flattery ?
A happy ending to the story - I see that the copy site has been taken off the web.
MrB