Today I’ve embarked on a course of action that I’ve not been provoked to do before today – pursuing a copyright infringement.

My popular article on how to add CyanogenMod to a Lenovo A1 tablet has been ripped off by another site named TOP Tablet PC. They have copied my article entirely but removing any post-production links (and therefore any advertising revenue). The only link to my site is a small link at the very bottom of the page.

Now, I don’t mind people using content, as long as it’s not entire articles and then making it very clear up-front that it’s not their content and where it’s from. This, however, is wholesale theft.

Unfortunately, TOP Tablet PC seems to know what they’re doing isn’t legit. Their are no contact details on the site and their WHOIS entry is protected by a company named WhoisGuard (which, in turn, is owned by Namecheap.com). However, their WHOIS does show that the registration originated from a hosting company named eNom. In both cases – WhoisGuard and eNon – I’ve contacted them requesting them to reveal the site’s contact details.

Indeed, I quickly got a response from WhoisGuard…

Whois contact information protected by WhoisGuard privacy protection service can be revealed only in case we receive the court order, the request from legal authority or the valid claim from your attorney to do so.

Even though the contact details are protected by WhoisGuard, the email sent to a WhoisGuard email address should be forwarded to the real email address of the domain owner. You may find the WhoisGuard email address using any Whois service. Note that we do not guarantee that you will receive a response from our client as we cannot force him to reply to your email.

Now, on the face of it you can’t blame them – they’re being paid to protect the identity of their client and aren’t just going to give that out. However, the idea behind WHOIS is to prevent people from hiding their identity – something this company is allowing. It may be a legal service, but it’s cowardly.

Anyway, I’ve now used the email address to contact the site owner. Meantime, however, I have initiated cracking plan.

As well as ripping off my content, they’re also hot-linking to an image of mine. Because they’ve also copied my source code it means that the image is not size restricted – the image will display whatever size the original is. A-ha. So, I’ve copied the image, updating my post to point to the copy. I’ve then changed the original to be BIG, red and with a big message indicating that the site have violated copyright. Nice.

Feel free to take a look. Sadly, comments are closed so you can’t mock them.

Update:

Some success!

Thanks for reaching out to us.

In accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have completed processing your infringement complaint. The following webpage will be removed from Google in a few hours:

http://toptabletpc.org/installing-cyanogenmod-on-a-lenovo-ideapad-a1-artiss-co-uk.html

Please let us know if we can assist you further.

Regards,

The Google Team