Geocities Copyright
2 years, 10 months ago A while ago, when I had a copyright issue with Design Shack, I contacted GeoCities about a rip-off of the website. That was well over a month ago. I had expected a fairly prompt response, and immediate action to be taken against the blatantly offending site. I received this, today:
Hello,
Yahoo! respects the intellectual property of others, and we ask our
users to do the same. Yahoo! may, in appropriate circumstances and at
its discretion, disable and/or terminate the accounts of users who may
be infringing the intellectual property rights of others.If you believe that your work has been copied in a way that constitutes
trademark infringement, or your intellectual property rights have been
otherwise violated, please provide Yahoo!’s Copyright Agent the
following information:1. an electronic or physical signature of the person authorized to act
on behalf of the owner of the trademark or other intellectual property
interest;2. a description of the trademarked work or other intellectual property
that you claim has been infringed;and so on…
First of all, I can’t believe it took them so long to reply. One month is completely unacceptable when dealing with a problem such as this. Secondly, due to how blatant this is, I’m amazed they have not just dealt with suspending the account outright. I’m very, very disappointed with Yahoo/Geocities, and I am in awe with their incompetence in this matter!
Geocities, Copyright, Design
October 30th, 2005 at 1:32 am
Man, get over it, it is not even a good design.
October 30th, 2005 at 4:57 am
what the heck? why are the related images on google a bunch of pics of crap in a toilet?
October 30th, 2005 at 8:42 am
John: Whether you think it’s a good design or not, that’s not important. The fact you didn’t include a URL with your comment makes me think you have little weight to throw in this area anyway. What is important is the lack of response to blatant copyright infringements.
Tyler: Those seemed to be the latest photos uploaded to Flickr, tagged with ‘copyright’. Strange, but now changed to ‘geocities’. Thanks.
October 30th, 2005 at 11:23 am
I just hope now that none of the designs I do appear on a Geocities site.
If it was a leaked design, it would be even more annoying I would think. Still, this is pretty bad and Yahoo! really needs to sort their copyright infrigement policies.
October 30th, 2005 at 11:27 am
After looking at the site’s source code, I have noticed that the images etc. are coming from DesignShack (I assume this is how you found out about the site in the first place).
Have you thought about blocking the site from accessing your server (if the server allows it).
October 30th, 2005 at 12:48 pm
Good idea. I might look into that.
October 30th, 2005 at 9:52 pm
Nono, dont block the site, have a little php do some nifty work for you.
Have the PHP detect if the refferrer is from the geocities site and replace the images with something else. Do something like
Replace designshack with like.. “DESINGRIPPED” or something.
Someone did this with ebay once and it was great. If I can find the url ill send it to you.
October 30th, 2005 at 9:54 pm
Would love to do that. If you can find a tutorial on how to do it, it would be much appreciated!
October 30th, 2005 at 10:54 pm
Yeah, you are better at php than I, but basically, how it works is, the server filters requests for the images, and if the request is coming from the geocities ripoff then it will redirect the request to the alternate image. So whenever someone loads the geocities site, all teh images are something else.
The best thing about it is, they can’t do anything about it except to change their URL or host the images themselves.
I will continue to look around, but so far I haven’t been able to locate the article.
October 30th, 2005 at 11:13 pm
Sounds like .htaccess to me. Will look into it.
October 31st, 2005 at 3:25 am
Hey, I haven’t been able to find the exact article, but I did find this tutorial on how to stop leechers dead in their tracks and only allow images and such to be loaded from your domain only.
Check it out:
http://kb.powweb.com/questions/292/Stop-Image%7B47%7DBandwidth-Theft–%28Anti-Leech%29
I haven’t tried it, but it seems like it should do the trick
October 31st, 2005 at 12:58 pm
Looks like someone is pointing the finger at you.
http://forums.pirated-sites.com/viewtopic.php?t=204
A bit cheeky! (Them not you!)
November 4th, 2005 at 12:22 am
Dude! He’s linking to your CSS file - ruin him that way!!! What a GLORIOUS opportunity….. I’m trembling.
November 4th, 2005 at 3:50 am
Take him down.. Kitta style. http://kitta.net/2005/11/02/lemon-party/