The ORACLE-BASE Blog

You’ll know from my last post that my whole website was ripped by someone. It now looks as though his hosting company has done the right thing and withdrawn his whole site as a result of my complaint. For anyone who suffers a similar issue, here’s what you need to do to try and resolve the issue.

• Contact the person who ripped the site and ask them to remove it. There’s no point getting nasty if it was an “honest” mistake. You can use DNS Stuff to locate the owner of the domain and get their contact details.
• If that doesn’t help, the WhoIs information from DNS Stuff will tell you the names of the DNS servers used by the site. Usually, these DNS names relate to the hosting provider. You can look them up and find their “abuse” contact. You can then report the issue directly to their hosting company. When you do this you have to provide certain information. I’ll get back to this later.
• If that fails, you can always find the owner of the IP address, which may not be the hosting company, and you can report the incident to them.
• If the site has any advertising you can contact the relevant companies (Amazon, Google etc.) and inform them of the issue. Their Ts&Cs usually state that such acts will result in the accounts being suspended.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (1998) sets guidelines for what information must be presented to a service provider in such cases. If you do not provide all the information, worded in a similar fashion to the original document, they are within their rights to ignore your complaint. As a result, it’s worth sticking pretty rigidly to the recommended format. This document shows what I sent to this guys hosting company…

Hopefully, you won’t need this information!

Cheers

Tim…