[RESOLVED] Leechers - Can anything be done

[Nightwalker83]

Hi,

I have come access dozens of sites that have been pinching code, articles from vbforums and hosting them as their own. I have even been a victim of this myself I found a vb6 code bank post I made posted on another website. I was wondering are there any measures vbforums could take to prevent this from happening?

Thanks,


Nightwalker

[techgnome]

Send a PM to the admins, with a link to the offending site... if you provide a link to the original VBf posting it was pilfered from... that would probably help. Seems like there's more and more of these sites cropping up... this isn't the first complaint I've seen recently.

-tg

[Nightwalker83]

Yeah, I actually noticed it weeks ago but didn't think anything could be done solve the problem.

[techgnome]

There's another thread where it's discussed... if I remember right, VBf actually sent a cease and decease order of some kind... because what we post here becomes property of the internet.com company, they actually have a legal recourse. I think...

-tg

[brad jones]

Do let me / us know if you find people copying posts on other sites. We do take action on a lot of this for a variety of reasons including SEO and simply to protect the content itself. The best thing to do is email me at my address or the webmaster.at.this site's domain.com address. The webmaster address goes to more than just me, so it is good to use.

If you can include the URL of the item on this site (or any internet.com site) and the URL on the offendign site, then we will generally have what we need.

Just a note - there are a few sites that we are currently following up with. Unfortunately some are harder to address than others. Never fear though, we stay on it.

Brad!

[Nightwalker83]

Do let me / us know if you find people copying posts on other sites. We do take action on a lot of this for a variety of reasons including SEO and simply to protect the content itself. The best thing to do is email me at my address or the webmaster.at.this site's domain.com address. The webmaster address goes to more than just me, so it is good to use.

Pm you the links or post them here? Also, do you know what action I can take about someone using videos and pictures from my youtube channel for purposes which might suggest I'm something I'm not?

[techgnome]

The best thing to do is email me at my address or the webmaster.at.this site's domain.com address.

as for something like youTube... you would need to go through them, and have them pull the videos... not sure what their policy is exactly though.

-tg

[Nightwalker83]

as for something like youTube... you would need to go through them, and have them pull the videos... not sure what their policy is exactly though.

-tg

Ah ok, thanks! Yeah, I have email youtube about the situation I hope they resolve the situation soon.


Edit:

I've sent an email to the webmaster of vbforums with a list of sites I've found that leech off the forums.

[AsmIscool]

As the Administrator of another site I would have to say that we have a contact us button. If you find something on my site that upsets you then please click it and let me know. This may take some time as there are things called time zones and I do sleep every now and then and have been known to occasionaly bathe. However I do not like problems on my site and if I find one it will be fixed as quickly as I can.

I hope Admin has noticed that I did not use this opportunity to shamelessly plug my site

[honeybee]

as for something like youTube... you would need to go through them, and have them pull the videos... not sure what their policy is exactly though.

-tg

The policy should be clear enough on/in the user agreement. I have found some of the videos have indeed been pulled off youtube for violation of the rules. So if you can prove that it's your own video being hosted by someone else, I guess it will be pulled down in due course.

Of course in all such matters you must remember that since the owner/hosting website will have to resort to legal recourse, things may move slowly sometimes.

.

[Nightwalker83]

The policy should be clear enough on/in the user agreement. I have found some of the videos have indeed been pulled off youtube for violation of the rules. So if you can prove that it's your own video being hosted by someone else, I guess it will be pulled down in due course.

Yes, I can prove that I own the pictures in question because they are of me and things I like. Unfortunately, I can't link to the offending site here since it seems to be a gay porn site. The only thing I can say is that the gay guys who view the video are going to be disappointed when they find out that the guy in the video looks nothing like the guy in the photos. By the way, I am not gay.

Edit;

I also emailed the security people at youtube and informed them of the situation but I haven't heard anything back from them yet. I couldn't find the link to email the youtube privacy people?

Edit 2:

Reading through the sites forums I am not the only person this has happened too I will see if I can contact the administrator of that site and get the stuff removed.

[honeybee]

Maybe you can take this up with the local law enforcement agencies, such as the cyber crimes cell of the police department?

.

[Nightwalker83]

Maybe you can take this up with the local law enforcement agencies, such as the cyber crimes cell of the police department?

.

They would probably just laugh at me.

[techgnome]

You might be surprised.

-tg

[Nightwalker83]

I've sent an email to the administrator of the site asking for the images to be removed and also telling him that I contacted youtube regarding the sites' use of the youtube logo.

Edit:

According to the admin of the site it is a youtube thing:

The videos are here only for members enjoyment. Nobody has done anything sneaky or illegal here. All videos from youtube are on here via an API feed that is to the standards of the youtube user agreement that you agreed to when you signed up for youtube. You can disable all your videos from showing on other sites via your youtube account.

[honeybee]

So there's a way in your youtube account to disable your videos being shared across other websites? If that's the case you should disable the sharing of your videos immediately.

If they have managed to hide it under the user agreement and a myriad of settings which are set to a default value of true for sharing, then there's pretty much little you can do about the videos which have already been shared. But you could at least stop any future videos being shared.

That sounds just like the so called privacy settings on Facebook which were set to have no privacy by default.

.

[penagate]

The point of social media sites like YouTube and Facebook is to publish content that's accessible to everyone. I think people often think they are entitled to more privacy than they really are.

[Nightwalker83]

So there's a way in your youtube account to disable your videos being shared across other websites? If that's the case you should disable the sharing of your videos immediately.

Yeah, I have done that! Although, true to the word of the word of the admin of gay forum my videos weren't posted on that site. However, someone spent their time taking a snapshot of the first frame of the videos so they could then host them on their site hence bypassing youtube altogether.

Edit:

The point of social media sites like YouTube and Facebook is to publish content that's accessible to everyone. I think people often think they are entitled to more privacy than they really are.

However, it doesn't give them the right to do as I stated above.

[DeanMc]

Actually it does freely available means freely available. When you publish something on the web you have to understand that there are 3 levels of ownership. Your's, There's and and ours. The first is content on your own site or one who confers all rights back to you. The second is much like VBforum's policy which states that they own the content and actively protect it. The last is most social platforms. The do not enforce rights outside of legal ones.

most content is removed from youtube due to the fact that the original owner is not the publisher of the content to the site in question. This means the original owner did not agree to the TOC's and as such is forced to take it down. In your case you did agree to youtub's TOC's and since you do not own any form of legal copyright to your work it can be taken by other users.

Remember that the internet is everywhere, just because your country may have proxy laws relating to content ownership to not think they are valid on the web as the offender may be in a different country who don't confer the same rights.

I agree with pena, Just because it is your right in your country does not mean its your right in mine.

[Nightwalker83]

most content is removed from youtube due to the fact that the original owner is not the publisher of the content to the site in question. This means the original owner did not agree to the TOC's and as such is forced to take it down. In your case you did agree to youtub's TOC's and since you do not own any form of legal copyright to your work it can be taken by other users.

Setting the videos to private will hopefully solve the problem! Pity, something like that can't be done to protect posts on a forum.