NEWS In a twist on the website copycat rip-off exposed by silicon.com earlier this week, another scam has been uncovered involving the theft of online content that is then used to sell advertising.
Following on from our exposé of the serial website thief ripping off car websites wholesale and gaining from advertising sales on the bogus sites, silicon.com has been alerted to a domain-name website that is stealing content from organisations such as the New York Times.
Domains Magazine at first appears to be a genuine information source on domain-name registration and website hosting, complete with the latest news about the industry.
But the twist is that none of the content is its own. The site steals content word-for-word from a variety of computer and internet publications and more mainstream sites including The New York Times, removing the author and publication name and passing it off as its own.
The clicks this regular news service attracts from people looking for advice on domain names are then used to sell advertising to a host of gambling, casino and porn sites.
silicon.com was alerted to the ruse by Kevin Heller, an intellectual property and internet lawyer based in New York, who said he is aware of an increase in these types of scams.
"I have received several complaints recently from website operators that either individual posts have been taken without attribution or entire sites," he said. "I am also aware that Google has received notifications under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to remove links to such offending websites."
Heller said firms hit by these rip-offs should take a screenshot of the infringement to preserve the evidence and then serve DMCA take-down or copyright infringement notices to the hosting ISP and search engines listing the offending site.
The Domains Magazine website is managed by Internet Billions Domains Inc, based in Costa Rica and hosted by a Canadian company. The company did not respond to requests for comment.
Comments
There are 2 comments. Join the discussion
1. Daniel Brandt
If you ask Google for the sites linking to www.domainmagazines.com you will see other domains, many with the letters "magazine" in the domain name, that are obviously generated by the same company and steal the same content. This is done by software -- you feed the stolen content into one port, the domain names into another port, and the desired linking patterns into a third port, and presto, you have a Google PageRank generator through the use of templates. These spammers are so far ahead of you, and can act so quickly, that it is almost silly to go after each piece of stolen content with a DMCA complaint. What's needed is a closer look at the weaknesses in the PageRank algorithm.
2. Wayne Barsanti
I once supported a company called displayIT that sold software to deliver online viewing of stock exchanges' share trading information services. Their trick was to capture the urls and forward them as links through their software, paying no fee to the originators. This was soon a problem for the exchanges and originating providers as their services were being overloaded by the access from the DisplayIT service. To overcome the problem they set up virtual urls that were changed at irregular intervals. Very quickly DisplayIT lost sight of the host and the service failed. This is not so easy to do for a small company but can easily be accomplished if your web site is hosted by a larger provider such as an ISP.