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Ask HN: Someone ripped off my website and is making money off it. What can I do?

10 points by duiker101 ↗ HN
Many years ago I made a website and posted it here. It because a hit and I am proud of it. It's open source under a share-alike non-commercial license. Someone took it, bought the same domain with a different extension and slammed ads on it. This has been going on for many years and I never knew what to do, we are talking pennies and it's not something I would like to get in to legal stuff to fix. I don't have neither the time or money. But if someone knew a way I could at least have this person remove the ads it would be great. Thanks!

Edit: could I maybe complain to the domain hosting? I would go to the advertisers but really it's mostly just referral links bitcoin exchanges.

12 comments

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schoen
I remember that there was some debate inside the Creative Commons community about whether ads on a website made the web site "commercial" for purposes of CC-NC. There were certainly many people who felt that it shouldn't, arguing that many sites that people understand as "noncommercial" do include ads.

You might want to try to find out a bit more about how this issue has been discussed (and resolved?) within the CC community, for example because it's possible that the person who copied your site might feel that the copy is genuinely "noncommercial".

The DMCA takedown process is easy to use, and you don't need a lawyer to use it. However, it's only available if the site is hosted in the United States and the hosting provider has a DMCA agent (which typical hosting providers do). There's also no guarantee that the site will stay down or that you won't end up in court since, by design, the other party has the right to challenge the DMCA notice either by a counter-notice (asserting that the use of the copyrighted work is in fact legitimate) or by asking a court to resolve the dispute (an "action for declaratory judgment").

Also, by design, it's hard to force other people to do things without involving the legal system in some way. :-)

duiker101
Thank you for the answer! I'll see if I can do DMCA but I might just have to live with it I guess
rman666
It might help if you told us the domains involved so we can see for ourselves what is going on.
duiker101
hackertyper.net is mine, .com is the other.
iDemonix
Ha, wow! Almost everyone in my office has brought up hackertyper.com at some point, I'd never heard of the .net one. I do recall once noticing that the 'ad shortcuts' weren't there and thought nothing of it, maybe I'd stumbled upon the .net version that time.

Was there a reason you didn't buy the .com if it was available? I'd personally see it as a lesson learned and move on.

duiker101
No reason other than being young and naive, I guess I'll do that and just live with it :)
gvb
I recall (but cannot find) a story of someone that this happened to. The copycat in his case was not very sophisticated and just did a direct copy clone of the source site. His solution (IIRC) was to add some simple javascript that detected if the host was the copycat site and redirected(?) the visitor to the real site (his).

When the copycat site did a verbatim copy, it picked up the javascript as well and solved the problem.

duiker101
The website is basically a single static page, so it's not pulling resources from mine.
gvb
The concept is you update your script.js with the code to check the source and redirect if the source is hackertyper.com and then get the copycatter to copy your New Improved source as his script.js.

Unfortunately, I see the copycat edited your source so he is unlikely to fall for the "update" trick since he would likely see and understand the redirection when he re-edited any changed script.js that you provide. You would also need to have some New Improved features in your script.js to entice him to re-copy your source with the redirect - the copycatter doesn't really have any reason to re-copy your script.js.

:-/

benologist
- Best solution: use a more permissive license so you don't create these problems for yourself as people then have the right to use your work how they see fit.

- Second best solution: never think of it again. There are no actions you can take against that person that will end in time well spent, they might not even be the only such person or method of monetizing your work, it's futile and your time and attention is worth much more.

- Third best solution: don't publish your work where others can see it. Fortunately the many unthanked people who invented our internet, our computers, the languages we use etc, all the stuff that enabled you to make your website, did not choose this route!

Rjevski
Try a DMCA/similar intellectual property takedown request against the host or domain registrar.