Somebody ripped off my website!

[undoIT]

This is funnyl! I recently updated the layout on a site I maintain: Themebot.com. There is usually a good amount of traffic on the site daily. I was checking my Google analytics and saw a noticeable amount of traffic coming from a site I didn't recognize. The referring URL is: freeipodsforstudents.co.nr . Decided to check it out. Hmm, something looks familiar

It is interesting that the site redirects to this other URL: http://boskone.lboro.ac.uk/~masc5/

Do you want a free iPod? Are you ready to sell your soul? Are you ready to get ripped off? It never ceases to amaze me how many ways people find to rip other people off on the internet. These idiots are ripping people off with the lure of a free iPod while ripping my site off. They used HTTrack Website Copier to scrape the content from my site. All of the images for the layout as well as the favicon and CSS are being leeched directly from my server. Even the Google tracking code!

Anyways, before I turn on the hotlink protection, just thought I'd post about this, since it is kind of amusing. I'll let it ride for a little while and take it as a compliment that my new layout was good enough to leech off of

 

[undoIT]

Uh oh! They have a new banner.

Check it out: freeipodsforstudents.co.nr

I wonder how long it will take before they notice that something has gone terribly wrong?

 

[undoIT]

looks like the domain company shut down the domain that they were using to forward to their school's hosting. but you can still visit their site directly:

http://boskone.lboro.ac.uk/~masc5/

 

[ian]

People who do that have no morals, ripping off other peoples hard work.

 

[fizzy]

What about copyrighting your site?

 

[kiko_friendly]

What about copyrighting your site?

As soon as something is in a tangible form, it is copyrighted. It's all about proving that you own the rights to the images, coding, etc which you can do by printing the page out and posting it to yourself but not opening it when it arrives, as the postage mark will have the date. Not sure if this only works in the USA, though. I'm in England so *shrugs*.

 

[Barpro]

That is really crappy on their part..You have a really nice design though ...

 

[noxela]

Original multimedia works are protected by copyright. The Copyright Act's exclusive rights provision gives developers and publishers the right to control unauthorized exploitation of their works. Multimedia works are created by combining "content" - music, text, graphics, illustrations, photographs, software - that is protected under copyright law. Developers and publishers must avoid infringing copyrights owned by others.

 

[sushil]

Yeah that is right statement, Developers and publishers never infringing copyrights owned by others.