DMCA Notice Filed against HotBlogsToday
HotBlogsToday was totally ripping off my content, so I filed the following DMCA notice with their hosting provider:
Sender Information:
Elliott Back
1108 Cascadilla Hall
Ithaca, NY 14853, USA
1-607-229-0623Recipient Information:
Administrator
Schlund + Partner AG
Brauerstrasse 48
D-76135 Karlsruhe, Germany
49-721-913-7450To whom it may concern,
I act on behalf of myself, and am the exclusive owner of the copyright works in question, that is, all of the content and design of my website and blog network, found on elliottback.com and its subdomains. Browsing a server on your network, 217.160.106.16 and the URL www.hotblogstoday.com, I find unauthorized copies of the ElliottBack network material which infringes on my rights as copyright holder:
(list redacted)
The list of copied content continues–many of the 1000+ articles I’ve written have been copied. Please immediately remove or disable all access to the infringing material. This infringing material is not authorized by myself, and this Notice of Copyright is accurate. Under penalty of perjury, I swear that I am authorized to act on behalf of the Owner, which is myself.
Should you require further information, please contact my via any means.
–
Signed,
Elliott C. Back
10-27-2005
I also sent an email to Adsense:
The Adsense publisher pub-5121418238017619 is running your ads on my content that he has stolen without authorization. I have filed a DMCA notice with his hosting provider, and hope that you will remove the economic incentive for his theft of copyright materials. Compare the original work to the stolen work.
It seems he’s using a homebrew tool to scrape websites he thinks is popular or original enough and then cache them on his server. It’s not very clever, and now he’s going to get burned. For a list of infringing material, just search for Elliott and you’ll see most of the items in that list are from this blog. If he were a US resident, and not based in Israel (?), I would also file a civil suit against him, since this is my primary source of income.
Some interesting facts about this spammer:
Revolution Media Ltd., a Jerusalem based company which provides Internet-centered multimedia services. Revolution Media also operates several e-commerce ventures to promote Israeli products around the world. The company currently employs people and is owned and run by Ulf Diebel, a German immigrant to Israel in 1996.
There’s also (gasp) an entry on ALA about RM:
American-Israeli webmaster Michael Cohen has been coding web pages since 1995. He is currently vice president of the Internet design and hosting company Revolution Media LTD.. During his free time, he enjoys haunting (and administrating) the still-very-much-active Freespace-oriented Hard Light Productions.
According to his resume, he still works there:
Resume for Michael E. Cohen
michaelc@revolutionmedia.com[…]
Experience
* (Oct. 2001-present) - Webmaster, web page design and site creation for Revolution Media, Ltd.
* […]
A search for Revolution Media Ltd. turns up more interesting results, a huge list of online business and shops they run. This means that they have assets. Having identifiable assets means that filing civil suit is now profitable, for in the case that you win, you can sieze those assets. I was also able to find a US address:
Revolution Media LTD.
1407 Airport Road
Suite 2271
Monroe, NC 28110
USA
I will consult with some lawyer friends of mine and see what the consensus is, and keep you informed.
Update:
I received the following email from one Alexander Rhodes:
Just stumbled across your post by accident. All of your content has
been taken down, and I’ve set it to no longer fetch from your blog.
Sorry for any inconvenience. (Incidentally, neither I nor Mike work
for Revolution Media anymore).Alex Rhodes
Unfortunately, that doesn’t make what they are doing any less illegal! It doesn’t matter if they’re mirroring my content in whole, or mirroring some else’s, it’s still a violation of copyright. Just, now I can’t seek remedy because they’ve stopped violating my rights. I write back:
While I appreciate that you’ve stopped violating my copyrights, your action doesn’t really address the larger legal issue. You’re mirroring whole content, slapping advertising on top of it, and aggregating other people labour for your profit. There’s no value added with hotblogstoday. If you were to add value and go to content summaries, you would be in a much better moral and legal position, and perhaps humans and not random search engines would start using your site.
Update 2:
Michael Cohen says he no longer works for Revolution Media and that they’ve been sold off to some other group:
I quit working there on January 31st, 2005, went in for a month of IDF reserves, and joined another organization on March 1st. In the months that followed, Ulf Diebel sold the reolutionmedia.com domain to another company, and moved the business to operate under the umbrella of IsraelShop.com. Therefore, my old email address of michaelc@revolutionmedia.com is no longer valid.
The spam operation continues, however, just without me as a target…
This entry was posted on Thursday, October 27th, 2005 at 3:15 am and is tagged with penalty of perjury, karlsruhe germany, ithaca ny, information administrator, copyright materials, partner ag, dmca notice, unauthorized copies, economic incentive, homebrew, subdomains, hosting provider, email. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.
on October 27th, 2005 at 4:23 am
He doesn’t seem to clever either - this post is currently number two on his front page!
on October 27th, 2005 at 5:16 am
This is interesting. I never know that we can actually sue people who copy my content.
on October 27th, 2005 at 7:41 am
I hope you win lots of money and at least the company jet!
on October 28th, 2005 at 7:33 pm
Ha! Sue that punk, enforce copyright law, uphold American justice, and perhaps even become the first hero of bloggers! Que buena idea!
on October 30th, 2005 at 10:53 pm
Wield the big stick gently!
Love,
Dad
on December 6th, 2005 at 8:23 am
Elliot,
I emailed you on November 8th about this. Would you mind responding? Thanks.
on December 12th, 2005 at 6:01 am
Hi Elliot,
some time ago I received an email from you explaining the situation. HotBlogsToday.com is an experimental project without any financial interest. Apparently our script is still picking up your RSS feeds. I wonder for what these RSS feeds are?? Perhaps to display original content on other websites?
As we wanted to find a solution and we din’t want to offend anybody, we corresponded with you.
Instead we find our name written all over your, are accused of spamming and stealing.
One tiny email would have been enough. You just could have ASKED.
But as it seems, you like to waist your time and writing lies about others???
Locking forward to hear from you.
Ulf
on December 12th, 2005 at 2:20 pm
Ulf, I’m not sure why you, who are stealing other people’s content, are in a huff and in turn accusing me of … something? RSS feeds are indeed to syndicate content, but only from an end-consumer point of view, not a “let’s steal his content and create a big splog” point of view. And, your scripts didn’t parse my RSS, they actually scraped the pages themselves, lol. I don’t feel that I need to ask you to find a solution to this problem; you were in clear violation of my copyrights.
Learn to spell, hire a lawyer, and acquire some morals.
on November 27th, 2007 at 11:02 am
You know, you do not seem too smart, for one, you cannot sue for profit, that is more illegal than what the person did to you. two, you either DO, or USED to do the exact same thing as the person who did this to you.