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About.com steals from Happypenguin.org |
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3 Feb 04 9:05
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| | posted by bobz |
I just came across a feature at linux.about.com called 1000 Linux Games. It's an exact copy of the Game Tome database, right down to the category names, game descriptions and database field names.
Lest you think I exaggerate, please compare:
A stunning coincidence, don't you agree? There are hundreds more such examples if you care to look further. Inexplicably, they label every game "Blockit". Perhaps they thought that would keep us from noticing the stolen content.
Let me repeat this: linux.about.com has taken all of the Linux Game Tome's content and printed it as its own. There is no mention of the Linux Game Tome, much less an attribution, anywhere on the site.
The maintainer of the Linux section at about.com, and presumably the person responsible for this plagiarism, is a fellow named "Juergen Haas". Actual contact details for any person at about.com are frustratingly hard to come by, but Mr. Haas can apparently be reached at linux.guide@about.com. I have sent email to this address and every other about.com contact address I could find, but so far have received no response. If anyone out there has a clue about how to reach a real person at this company, I'd be happy to hear from you.
We now return to the regularly scheduled game news.
Update: I've received mail from Primedia About, Inc. CEO Peter Horan. He's "looking into it", and all of the offending material has apparently vanished. After 36 hours of emailing and phoning into empty space, it's nice to finally be heard! If it hadn't occurred to me to phone the Investor Relations office, I might never have learned of Mr. Horan's existence, nor received his email address. Note to About.com: post phone numbers and email addresses for real people on your contact page and I won't have to bother the CEO about content issues...
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Comments
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referrer traps?
posted by
Anonymous
@ 24.194.98.94
on Apr 6 2004 5:41 PM
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| If enough people set their servers to redirect anyone with an about.com referrer to goat.cx then maybe about would start to rethink their policies, especially that crap with putting their frame banner above other sites, that's not cool |
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About.com
posted by
Anonymous
@ 66.21.128.239
on Feb 12 2004 10:49 AM
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I'm a former "contributor" to one of About.com's many forums (although not the Linux forum). Their hosts are under constant pressure to provide content relevant to the forum topic. The host I formerly worked with on the site had tons of his own material and had no need to plagiarize, but I'm sure that more than one of their hosts have done as you have found Juergen Haas has done. Their compensation is tied to their production of content (which if unchallenged, will remain long after the host has disappeared).
You all might be interested in reading this article regarding About.com and some of it's former hosts. Primedia/About.com Lawsuit
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Evidence
posted by
Anonymous
@ 136.162.90.58
on Feb 11 2004 6:51 PM
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| In case anyone wants to see some startling evidence check out some google cache links
of about.com's linux games such as:
http://216.109.117.135/search/cache?p=legends+debian&url=0BwtdxRkOH8J:linux.about.com/library/games/blgame_00582.htm |
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Re: Evidence
posted by
Anonymous
@ 136.162.90.58
on Feb 12 2004 4:31 PM
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User agreement says:
2 The materials used and displayed on the Service and the Sites, including but not limited to text, software, photographs, graphics, illustrations and artwork, video, music and sound, and names, logos, trademarks and service marks, are the property of About.com or its affiliates or licensors and are protected by copyright, trademark and other laws. Any such content may be displayed solely for your personal, non-commercial use. You agree not to modify, reproduce, retransmit, distribute, disseminate, sell, publish, broadcast or circulate any such material without the written permission of About.com or the appropriate affiliate.
So all of happypenguin.org is now property of about.com. Better be careful linux game tome. You are now illegaly distributing about.com property. |
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urgent response from you,
posted by
Anonymous
@ 212.52.156.2
on Jul 6 2005 4:16 AM
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| FROM THE DESK OF DR MUSA
AFRICAN DEVELOPMENT BANK
OUAGADOUGOU, BURKINA FASO.
BILL AND EXCHANGE MANAGER,
PRIVATE CONFIDENTIAL
COMPLIMENTS OF THE SEASON.
I am the manager of bill and exchange at the foreign remittance department of bank lnternationale pour le Commerce et le lndustrie et de la Agriculture du Burkina-Faso I am writing following the impressive information about you through one of my friends who runs a consultancy firm in your country. He assured me of your capability and reliability to champion this business opportunity.In my department we discovered an abandoned sum of $ 20m US dollars ( Twenty million US dollars) . In an account that belongs to one of our foreign customer who died along with his entire family in november 16,2001 in a plane crash.
Since we got information about his death, we have been expecting his next of kin to come over and claim his money because we cannot release it unless somebody applies for it as next of kin or relation to the deceased as indicated in our banking guidelines but unfortunately we learnt that all his supposed next of kin or relation died alongside with him at the plane crash leaving nobody behind for the claim. It is therefore upon this discovery that I now decided to make this businness proposal to you and release the money to you as the next of kin or relation to the deceased for safety and subsequent disbursement since nobody is coming for it and I donīt want this money to go into the Bank treasury as unclaimed Bill.
The Banking law and guideline here stipulatesthat if such money remained unclamed after five years, the money will be transfered into the Bank treasury as unclaimed fund.
The request of foreigner as next of kin in this business is occasioned by thefact that the customer was a foreigner and a Burkinabe cannot stand as next of kin to a foreigner.50 % of this money will be for you as foreign partner, in respect to the provision of a foreign account, 50 % would be for me .
There after I will visit your country for disbursement accoding to the percentages indicated.
Therefore to enable the immediate transfer of this fund to you as arranged,you must apply first to the bank as relations or next of kin of the deceased indicating your bank name, your bank account number, your private telephone and fax number for easy and effective communication and location where in the money will be remitted .Upon receipt of your reply, I will send to you by fax or email the text of the application. I will not fail to bring to your notice that this transaction is hitch free and that you should not entertain any atom of fear as all required arrangements have been made for the transfer .You should contact me immediately as soon as you receive this letter.Trusting to hear from you immediately.
dr_ali_musa9@hotmail.com
Yourīs faithfully,
DR ALI MUSA
Dr Musa Bill and exchange manager,
African Development Bank(ADB). |
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Primedia debacle
posted by
Anonymous
@ 68.161.75.62
on Feb 4 2004 8:13 PM
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| Wow, I'm really glad my friend who worked at about.com was let go in one of the more recent rounds of quarterly layoffs layoffs since Primedia bought them. I'd have hated for him to be tarred with the same brush that deserves to be stuck up Jurgen's.... |
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Frames
posted by
lightspeed
@ 66.25.9.23
on Feb 4 2004 3:36 AM
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Aside from the happypenguin content, they're loading all the third-party sites in a frame so they can pop a banner ad at the top of the page. If you notice one of your pages being framed that way you might want to add a bit of javascript to get rid of their banner ad.
http://www.codeave.com/javascript/code.asp?u_log=7036 |
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It is probably common :(
posted by
Anonymous
@ 192.38.93.23
on Feb 4 2004 1:25 AM
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| It is probably common that commercial firms or programmers steal from the GPL or open source community. It is hard to say how common prove that the code or other data has been stolen. But there are obvious cases like this where the material is just "copy and paste". Another recent case is the one with MPlayer (www.mplayerhq.hu), where a danish company called Kiss had stolen the subtitle handling code directly from mplayer. |
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They tricked usss....
posted by
Anonymous
@ 212.214.82.21
on Feb 3 2004 11:30 PM
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..Yessss they got our preciousss, the filthy little hob...oh! Sorry, just been seing lotr again. *s*
Good work by HP-staff! And good having this cleared out of the way too. (as it seems) |
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Sorry, but...
posted by
tomble
@ 195.92.168.172
on Feb 3 2004 8:01 PM
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| Actually, looking through the logs for my hit counter in previous weeks, I found a couple coming
from about.com pointing to my games, and thought "hmm?" then looked at the page in question
and found it seemed to be a copy of the blurb I submitted to happypenguin. I'm afraid it didn't
occur to me to actually report this. There was another site that was doing much the same thing too,
but it was another community site rather than a commercial site like about.com.
Anyways, sorry I didn't mention this when I first saw it. |
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Juergen's content all stolen
posted by
Anonymous
@ 67.113.43.167
on Feb 3 2004 2:38 PM
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| A bunch of his content is also stolen from freshmeat.net and other linux websites. Take one of his sentences from his pages and put it into google in quotes. You'll always get a match from a site with original content. |
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Seems to be gone
posted by
Anonymous
@ 63.200.93.226
on Feb 3 2004 2:04 PM
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| All of the links folks have made to About.com seem to redirect to the main About Linux page. Even when I type "happypenguin" into About's search ('in this topic') and click one of the results at the top, it automagically redirects me to the front page.
Apparently, they've pulled the plug, but haven't cleaned up after themselves.
(Or, perhaps, they're blocking based on happypenguin.org as a referrer... I should double-check ;) ) |
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Thats not kosher!
posted by
Anonymous
@ 202.37.101.102
on Feb 3 2004 1:50 PM
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Sick 'em tiger!
That is a clear violation of copyright. Inform about.com stating what has happened, and request that they have the offending maintainer remove all such material, or face the removal of their entire page.
It takes a true scumbag to steal IP like that...
Kind regards, Chris W, New Zealand.
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Re: Thats not kosher!
posted by
blaze
@ 62.255.64.10
on Feb 3 2004 5:08 PM
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| http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#IntellectualProperty |
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Re: Thats not kosher!
posted by
Anonymous
@ 202.37.101.102
on Feb 4 2004 8:15 PM
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Hi there,
I guess all people have a different view of what IP entails.. Everything on Happypenguin.org I would class as IP belonging to its owner/creator/writer(s). The offending site has reproduced, in near exact detail, the entire database listed here on HP, without the written consent of the HP authors, and without giving them 1 iota of kudos for writing the material.
Whoever did so is not a scumbag - I take that back - they are instead a pimple on the bottom of pond-scum... :-)
Kind regards, Chris W., New Zealand. |
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Why IP should be avoided
posted by
Anonymous
@ 193.13.178.170
on Feb 4 2004 10:26 PM
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| "I guess all people have a different view of what IP entails."
Which is one of the reasons why the term should never be used. If you are talking about trademarks, say trademarks. If you are talking about patents, say patents. If you are talking about copyright, say copyright. They are all different, and so are the legal aspects concerning them. |
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Using the DMCA to fix this
posted by
ChaosDisco
@ 144.92.164.197
on Feb 3 2004 1:40 PM
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I strongly suggest starting with a polite letter the the site maintainer explaining the problem and suggesting ways to move forward (Is attribution and links to the original acceptable?). This might be a great opportunity to make more people aware of HappyPenguin. If you can't work something out then it's time to bring out the DMCA. The DMCA may be a seriously flawed law, but it can serve the little guy.
Under Title II About.Com must provide a "Designated Agent" to field complaints. If you send the designated agent a properly formed complaint they either need to immediately remove the offending documents or they face liability. I assure you that About.Com has better things to do than face liability; they'll just pull the pages. About.Com's designated agent is listed here, specifically in this 29kB PDF document. Here's the key parts:
Name of Agent Designated to Receive Notification of Claimed Infringement: Chris Fraser
Full Address of Designated Agent to which Notification Should Sent (a P.O. Box or similar designation is not acceptable except where ins the only address that can be used in the geographic location):
c/o PRIMEDIA Inc., 745 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10151
Telephone Number of Designated Agent: 212-745-0100
Facsimile Number of Designated Agent: 212-745-0131
Email address of Designated Agent: gethelp@about.com
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DMCA
posted by
Anonymous
@ 18.21.0.83
on Feb 3 2004 12:50 PM
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| DMCA, people. If you own copyright to any of these game descriptions (and you do if you wrote one, unless you transferred it), all you have to do is tell the website hosting company that the site they are hosting violates copyright. Then they have to remove it, or trouble ensues. You don't even have to prove copyright, which is why the DMCA is a ... rather suspect piece of legislation.
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Editorial Content, not Factual Database
posted by
Anonymous
@ 207.190.234.42
on Feb 3 2004 12:36 PM
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The entries in Happy Penguin aren't simply a factual database, it's editorial content. Descriptions are all handwritten in if I don't miss my guess, which would make me think they're copyrighted by the site unless otherwise noted.
An RSS feed's one thing, that being freely distributed to syndicate the content but this is alltogether awfull... and a large site like about.com too! It's one thing to take a feed or post a link to content with a synopsis. But this is outrageous. I woud think making and updating a resource like HP doesn't imply that others can copy it without permission. Keep us up to date Bob!
-- Chris |
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Burn them BURN THEM !
posted by
Anonymous
@ 132.208.196.171
on Feb 3 2004 12:33 PM
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| For all those poeple thinking this isn't bad, how if I took your GPL code, redistributed it with minor cosmetic change but removed your name and copyright all over and claimed I had written it instead of giving you credit and leaving your copyrights intact ?
Sharing is all well and good, but give credit where credit is due.
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Hang on..
posted by
Anonymous
@ 61.95.18.234
on Feb 3 2004 12:02 PM
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| How do we know that happypenguin.org didn't rip off content from linux.about.com??
and what about http://www.archive.org/ copying everyone's site!!
*hugglez*
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This is ticking me off...
posted by
UglyMike
@ 213.224.227.22
on Feb 3 2004 11:08 AM
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Go to one of the game links
enter happypenguin in the search box at the top of the page ( keep "in this topic")
Download links still have the "referrer=happypenguin" in them!
Download link for Dopewars IS happypenguin
It would be farcical if it wasn't so sad...... |
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whois info
posted by
Anonymous
@ 204.95.178.30
on Feb 3 2004 11:05 AM
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About.com, Inc.
Nayden Naydenov
249 West 17th Street, 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10011
US
Phone: (212) 204 - 4000
Fax..: (212) 204 - 1521
Email: adminbox@ABOUT.COM
you might try contacting this person, to find Juergen Haas. Act real cool like you a business idea.
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Immoral, not necessarily illegal.
posted by
Anonymous
@ 209.150.201.42
on Feb 3 2004 9:50 AM
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| Databases of facts aren't copyrightable, are they? Isn't that essentially what the Linux Game Tome is? (Except for the comments, which they didn't copy.)
Look at all the software directories out there. If you've ever released OpenSource software, you know how quickly it spreads to all of them.
Not that I like the fact that they did it without asking, but I think it is perfectly legal. |
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Re: Immoral, not necessarily illegal.
posted by
bobz
@ 137.192.134.61
on Feb 3 2004 10:08 AM
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| I'm less concerned with the legality of this behavior than with the sheer wrongness of it! The fact that some turd would take the time to rip off all of the primary content from this site and attempt to pass it off as his own is despicable! What kind of idiot thinks he can do something like that on the web and get away with it? |
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Re: Immoral, not necessarily illegal.
posted by
Anonymous
@ 213.224.227.22
on Feb 3 2004 10:54 AM
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| I believe the 'copyrightability' has a lot to do with the amount of work needed to create the content of the DB... Just having an identical set of game links with publisher/website would be ok as there is nothing original in there, but the Game Tome's description and the additional requirement/possibilities listing go way beyond that.
But just as Bobz said, it is not the legality of the matter, but it is the sheer fact that someone out there does such a complete rip-off job with no added value whatsoever and without any kind of reference which is so galling. Shame on him!
( there are quite a few linux game oriented sites which 'mirror' Happypenguin's entries but they are all just statements of fact (ie game X updated on xx/yy) and they all show clearly where the content is coming from.)
I just hope that cooler heads prevail and that this turns out to be a (major) misunderstanding quickly righted.
We're all with ya, Bobz! Go tear the guy another one! (had to get that of my chest) |
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4362
posted by
Anonymous
@ 147.62.42.119
on Feb 3 2004 9:27 AM
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I noticed this a while ago, but I thought it was something that was just going on between HP and About.com
Now that I've heard it's not, I'm disgusted. Whilst it does give Linux gaming more exposure the method is not right. This must be stopped. It's simply unethical to take the hard work of one website and throw it onto another in pretty much its entirity.
Stephen Sweeney, Parallel Realities
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Happypenguin Poll
What genre of free games would you like to see more of?
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