Boycotting 1and1, Outing a Thief

I am afraid I have to interupt the “aww”s of yesterday’s post with something a little more serious.

On the 19th August I found myself at minuit-soleil.net. I’m not entirely sure how I got there, but searching for potential Pants Award material I dived straight for the Visitor section, because there’s always bound to be tutorials. Lo and behold we have a fine array with “Skinning Your Site” tucked neatly away at the bottom. I’m guessing I clicked this first because I expected to see the well-known Domesticat tutorial, hacked about and redistributed (again).

You can imagine my surprise when the tutorial loaded and I saw some very familiar code. I did a double-take at first, because I remember that I wrote the code for my own site a while ago, nonetheless it clicked: I must have put the code up on tutorialtastic. Here was my code that I spent my time organising… being given away on somebody else’s site with not so much as a “stolen from here” credit link. Talk about fucking cheeky! Even the credits page is devoid of any mention of the fact that this webmaster thinks it’s ok to lift other people’s code.

Don’t get me wrong, people use my code without credit all the time. I don’t write out tutorials for the sake of a link back, I do it because I know that every person that follows one of my (usually) correct tutorials is not following one on a shitty website like pixelfx. However, these people use it on their website for the intended purpose. They’re not blatantly ignoring the disclaimer, which clearly states permission must be gained to redistribute my code!

So anyway, rambling aside, I sent Claire the webmaster an e-mail. Not a particularly pleasant e-mail, no sucking up involved I’m afraid. It was an out and out demand to remove the content from her website. The e-mail was as follows:

Dear Claire,

It has come to my attention that you have made an unauthorized copy of copyrighted code from my tutorial “Skinning Your Website” (tutorialtastic.co.uk/tutorial/skinning_your_website). I have reserved all rights for the tutorial, first published on 10th March 2006. ‘Your’ tutorial “Skinning Your Site” (minuit-soleil.net/[..]/skinning.php) is essentially identical.

As you neither asked for nor received permission to use the code as the basis for ‘your’ tutorial, you are infringing on my intellectual rights and are in violation of Title 17 U.S. Code, Section 106(a) of the Copyright Act of 1976, and several recognized international copyright laws.

You are hereby to immediately CEASE AND DESIST the use of my code. You are to immediately inform myself once you have complied with the aforementioned request.

If you do not comply, I will make arragements with your host to have the code and any offending page(s) removed.

To the point, I think. There’s certainly no room for misunderstanding about what content has been taken and what I expect to be done. Perhaps it was naive of me to honestly believe that people actually give a crap about intellectual property any more — what with this generation of ‘net users downloading anything and everything for free — but not as naive as it was to think that Claire’s host (1&1) would do anything. After a week of no response from Claire, I actually e-mailed the 1&1 abuse team quoting them their terms and conditions:

   7.10. You affirmatively represent, agree and warrant that you have and at all times shall have all necessary intellectual property rights, including, but not limited to, all copyrights, trademark and service mark rights and rights of publicity, both in the United States and throughout the world, to reproduce and disseminate, via the Internet [..]

   7.11. You agree and warrant that Your Data shall not constitute or contain […] or which will violate or infringe upon or will otherwise give rise to any adverse claim with respect to any common law or other right of any person or other entity, including, without limitation, privacy rights and all other personal and proprietary rights.

…and I asked the for them to action whatever was needed to get the offending content removed. Five days later (the 1st September) I was still waiting and the content was still up, so I sent a follow-up e-mail expressing my distaste at a company who fail to enforce their terms and conditions, especially as a customer who has given them a decent amount of business through my domains and the referral of people through affiliate linking.

As you can plainly see, the stolen content is still up and I can’t be arsed to wait around any longer. I’m boycotting 1&1 by moving my domains elsewhere and removing all affiliate linking from my website. As for Claire… I’ll leave it up to the rest of you to deal with her as you would any other web content thief.

Update: The content has been removed and I’ve received an apology. Thanks for your support everyone.