STEALING WEBSITES

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Some people don’t just steal a few images from a neighboring website. They steal the entire website. It’s much easier to change a few words on an existing site than to create one from scratch or hire a web designer. So, after changing a few links, the pirates post the copied site onto their own server under their own domain name. This saves them the time and expense of creating their own websites from scratch while mimicking a more established company’s website that can trick people into buying products from the thief’s website rather than the original website that the thief copied.

The Internet’s open nature makes stealing a website fairly easy. Just choose Source from a browser’s View menu, and a text editor quickly lists the web page’s programming. There are even specialized programs, like SurfOffline (http://www.surfoffline.com), that will download up to 100 files simultaneously, copying a website as fast as your Internet connection allows.

Once you’ve copied and saved the website’s entire source code, it’s easy to pick through it for useful tidbits. Some people steal logos, alter them a little bit, and call them their own. Others steal buttons, graphics, and other attractive, custom-made design elements.

The Pirated Sites website (http://www.pirated-sites.com), shown in Figure 15-3, showcases side-by-side comparisons of sites “suspected of borrowing, copying or stealing copyright-protected content, design or code.”

Figure 15-3: The Pirated Sites website showcases side-by-side comparisons of websites suspected of copying from each other.

For instance, the BidBay (http://www.bidbay.com) site in Figure 15-4 once bore a striking resemblance to eBay (http://www.ebay.com). The resemblance was so close that eBay eventually sued for trademark infringement, forcing the site to drop the design elements that mimicked eBay.

Figure 15-4: The eBay auction site sued BidBay for trademark infringement when the site mimicked eBay’s own name and design.

When one person found out his website had been stolen, he turned the tables by changing his own site to link to the images and content on the thief’s site. Suddenly, everyone trying to access the thief’s and the victim’s sites were directed to the thief’s site, essentially creating a simple denial-of-service attack by overloading the thief’s servers, which couldn’t handle the sudden increase in traffic.

To protect your website from theft, try a program like one of these:

WebLock Pro http://webpageprotect.com

HTML Protector http://www.antssoft.com

HTML Guard http://www.aw-soft.com

These programs prevent people from viewing (and copying) the HTML source code for your site, while still allowing browsers to display the web page correctly.

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