Caution Illegal Practices

[G.A. Kokes]

Ladies and Gents this could happen to your website too:

http://www.auroracoast.com/ - The real one

www. writecut .com - (put it together to make the url) The copycat - Write Cut Productions, by Ericka M Smith; a graduate of University of Michigan Film School and Good Joseph.

Notice the plagiarisms? Even some of our videos are copied over! I spoke to Mr Good Joseph, the sites owner today. He assured me that they were only interested in our site design and where going to change it. I see they only put their names in where ours was!

My Lawyer is all over it. Just beware. Its so easy for your life's work to be plagiarized.

Anyone know these guys?

Cheers,
G

[Cüneyt Kaya]

i dont know them, but hey this is no special site design...its regular.
maybe i am wrong...but what is so unique on your page design?

[B Newberry]

lawyers work fast. i can't get page to load. already pulled?

[G.A. Kokes]

Nothing special about the design. But, they duplicated it word for word except they put their name on it.

The site loads slowly but is still live.

G

[Cüneyt Kaya]

the link is dead now for me...but stealing words isn`t polite...

[Omar Saad]

Holy crap that sucks! That's on hell of a set of stones they've got trying to pull something like that. Are they in your neck of the woods? By the way it's still loading for me.

Omar

[Eirik Tyrihjel]

I managed to access it without problem,

this is clearly a violation of copyright laws - unless they pull their version promptly - I´d say you got a good case. Not beeing a lawyer, nor a citizen of your country - my opinion means nothing of course ;-)

[Dexter Gregoire]

Registrant:
good joseph
696 devirian place
altadena, California 91001
United States

I'm sure he will change it.

[Andrew McCarrick]

I've done the same thing before to learn how to make or base a portion of my websites design on.... but atleast I do the copying and playing around with coding off-line until I get it to look like what I was picturing. It gets done faster by using portions of coding from other sites.... but I atleast keep it off the internet until it's fully converted into my own material. Or atleast make it a weird file name so I can only share it with people I know to get input. But doing somethinkg like what they did is just plan rediculous.

[G.A. Kokes]

It loads slow. Perhaps because everyone from reduser is trying to access it at the same time.

Shame. He was very polite when I called him and assured me it was going to be all taken down, but that was earlier today. They still show most of it. They did take the formating down from some of the other pages, but the text remains. It took us a long time to write all of that.

Here is what we found:

Website is registered to the following:

Registrant:
good joseph
696 devirian place
altadena, California 91001
United States

Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: WRITECUT.COM
Created on: 03-Mar-08
Expires on: 04-Mar-09
Last Updated on: 03-Mar-08

Administrative Contact:
joseph, good meatchops@gmail.com
696 devirian place
altadena, California 91001
United States
(323) 603-9621 Fax --

Technical Contact:
joseph, good meatchops@gmail.com
696 devirian place
altadena, California 91001
United States
(323) 603-9621 Fax --

Domain servers in listed order:
NS11.DOMAINCONTROL.COM
NS12.DOMAINCONTROL.COM

Current Registrar: GODADDY.COM, INC.
IP Address: 208.109.181.231 (ARIN & RIPE IP search)
IP Location: US(UNITED STATES)-NEW YORK-NEW YORK
Lock Status: clientDeleteProhibited
DMOZ no listings
Y! Directory: see listings
Data as of: 14-Jun-2005


Shame it takes so much out of a busy day defending turf. I'd rather be out shooting something with my RED!
G

[Brent J. Craig]

You're in the US. You have a great law called the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). It is ridiculously easy to lodge a complaint with his hosting provider and get the offending site taken down. It's a shame you are already paying a wea$ely lawyer, but it is really quite simple to get it straightened out.

Since the domain is registered at Godaddy, it's even easier. They will take down a site no questions asked.

[Ivan G]

This has happened to me as well. Copied my design and wording. although I never did get it copyrighted.

[Michael "Dorkman" Scott]

They also stole their heading image (HELP OTHERS, HELP YOURSELF. Feedback - Exposure - Opportunity) from Triggerstreet.com (http://www.triggerstreet.com).

It's not even just that they took the (presumably trademarked) tagline. They downloaded the actual image from the Triggerstreet site, put it on their server, and slapped it on the page.

[Ed Watkins]

Nothing new in this practice.

Every time I design a site and it gets featured on one of the CSS design galleries some crappy developer in the armpits of the world rips it off and I get a message from a client asking me to magically take the copycat's site down. DCMA can't do crap in situations like this.

Have a look at this:
http://revolutionrentals.com (the original, mine)
http://www.rashidyounus.com/ (douchey McDouchbag's)

Bugger all I can do about it, he's based in Pakistan running the site from his own server, he stole all the graphics and the design elements from my site. Sad thing is he calls himself a web designer.

Abu Reno, you don't need to explicitly copyright your text/images it is protected from the moment it is made public (unless you state that you waive those rights). It's good practice to have a copy right notice and terms & conditions though.

[Brian Valente]

appears to be offline now

Brian

[Fredrik Harreschou]

Nothing new in this practice.

Every time I design a site and it gets featured on one of the CSS design galleries some crappy developer in the armpits of the world rips it off and I get a message from a client asking me to magically take the copycat's site down. DCMA can't do crap in situations like this.

Have a look at this:
http://revolutionrentals.com (the original, mine)
http://www.rashidyounus.com/ (douchey McDouchbag's)

Bugger all I can do about it, he's based in Pakistan running the site from his own server, he stole all the graphics and the design elements from my site. Sad thing is he calls himself a web designer.

Abu Reno, you don't need to explicitly copyright your text/images it is protected from the moment it is made public (unless you state that you waive those rights). It's good practice to have a copy right notice and terms & conditions though.

Considering your information, this quote from Mr Younus is rather amusing:

"I successfully work with partners from Pakistan, U.S.A, and UAE.
With me your business will progress to a new level of success."

I guess you didn't know you were a partner? And that he was progressing, or actually abusing, your business to a new level of success - for him?

But one thing, how did you discover this? There are more than a hundred million web sites on the internet...

[Brent J. Craig]

But one thing, how did you discover this? There are more than a hundred million web sites on the internet...

You just check 'em all! :-)


I have found thieves before by Googling random phrases from my sites or searching for the names of jpg files that should be unique to my site.

I have also found several by examining my server logs and seeing when external websites were loading my images. Many of these jerks don't even change the code and use your server to show the stolen images on their sites!

[Dj Joofa]

But one thing, how did you discover this? There are more than a hundred million web sites on the internet...

Automated technology exists for finding malicious use of images and/or text online -- for e.g., http://www.attributor.com/

Unlike Google image search which is actually text based, such technologies go and look at actual image data content to decide if it is the same image or not. People are trying to adapt these image based approaches into video, especially music videos -- so that even if you change data encoding and do some minor variation of the image data they can still recognize the video being the same. Very powerful applications in billion-dollar DRM market.

Finger print matching is another application. However, I must caution you that this technology is currently not near what you see in Bond/Bourne type movies where they scan databases to find suspects.

Shawn Fanning, the guy who developed Napster, also formed a company called SnoCap, to do such things: http://www.snocap.com/

[jbeale]

Many of these jerks don't even change the code and use your server to show the stolen images on their sites!

...yes, but when they do that, you still have control of it. When that happened to me I substituted a few images (changed my own HTML too of course so my site looked the same). The thief sent me a stunned email, something about how did I manage to hack his site...

[Dj Joofa]

Oh, one more point on my post above on automated techniques to find malicious use of content. Internally they use may of the same pattern recognition techniques that motion tracking uses. Motion tracking using SynthEyes, etc., is something that I am sure many people on this forum must have used, perhaps without realizing, that what has this to do internally with music video DRM or finding similar content on the internet !!!

[G.A. Kokes]

They copied our entire code. Every bit of it. We were able to track them as it looked as though someone was working on our site. Here you can see a bit more:

http://www. writecut .com/digital_cinematography.htm

put it together to form the url)

They only took down the first page. I will tell you all that when I first saw their site, it was an exact copy. Demo videos and all! As you can see here my demo is still up on their site, only on a back page. The main page no longer links here, but they had everything up yesterday....

Cheers,
G

[Andrew Benz]

I cannot believe this supreme level of stupidity... as you said G.A. they were linked to YOUR demos--Your hard work, your crews hard and collective craft/creativity. I hope you are able to legally "stomp a mud hole" out of these despicable people.

Please keep us posted on this and thank you for throwing light on this inane act. I am torqued for you...


They copied our entire code. Every bit of it. We were able to track them as it looked as though someone was working on our site. Here you can see a bit more:

http://www. writecut .com/digital_cinematography.htm

put it together to form the url)

They only took down the first page. I will tell you all that when I first saw their site, it was an exact copy. Demo videos and all! As you can see here my demo is still up on their site, only on a back page. The main page no longer links here, but they had everything up yesterday....

Cheers,
G

[Ed Watkins]

But one thing, how did you discover this? There are more than a hundred million web sites on the internet...

A visitor to my site actually alerted me to this copycat. Apparently the person was a webmaster and had seen my original design on a CSS gallery. By chance he had just contracted said copycat to do a site for him, when he saw the guys site and recognized it he let me know.

Usually however google, or my site logs turn up suspicious activity that often leads to a copied site.

[Dominic Cochran]

Write Cut Productions, by Ericka M Smith; a graduate of University of Michigan Film School

Typical Wolverine behavior.