[thelist] Rip-Offs - You Have to Laugh...

[Richard H. Morris]

Andy Warwick [mailing.lists at creed.co.uk] (he of the nicely-designed
site) asked:

> -----Original Message-----
> How many is that now Richard? I've lost count.

Since we started archiving the off-line copies, there've been 29 copies,
either of the text (all or significant parts) or of the whole site (cf
www.phoenix-club.org) and there were quite a few before then.  There are
also a few in addition where they've only used very small portions of
the body copy: we've applied the William Shakespeare/Monkey test to give
them the benefit of the doubt...

> (I'm also midly courious as to how you find them: tip-offs,
> or hours spent
> searching for blocks of text in the search engines?)

See a tip below!

> You must be well on the way to the most plagarised site on
> the Internet.

Not in the slightest: that's reserved for the big boys.  Try looking at
www.pirated-sites.com for some great examples of rip-offs.

> If I was you, I'd be selling the code and images to the site
> as an easy-to-use
> web site construction kit and give up on the day job...

It's already used for that, apparently!

> > I owe a tip...
>
> So do I...

Here's mine:

<tip type="copyright violations" author="Richard Morris">

When writing or coding your site, consider using one of the freebie web
stat./counter providers as rip-off artists sometimes forget to delete
the coding which allows you to find them very easily from the logs.
Secondly, include some peculiar image naming conventions for images for
graphically-intensive sites as an image search on Google or AltaVista
will come up with some hits in time. Thirdly, if you've written the body
copy yourself and you have an archaic turn of phrase or if you simply
include a peculiar phrase or sentence, it is easy to do a web search
every now and again to turn up the copycat sites.  Fourthly, use a
particular expression in your HTML either directly or as a comment;
again this easy to search on later.

</tip>

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Richard. H. Morris, Web Designers Limited
~~ http://www.web-designers.co.uk ~~
"I'd rather have a full bottle in front of me
          than a full frontal lobotomy"
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