The above seal is what you see when you go to dvdscollection.com now. (I wouldn't recommend going there, as I've heard that when you visit, you're IP is flagged which I guess mine is now if you believe those things.) As I detailed in a previous post (click here), I began the war around a month ago after finding a stolen article of mine on their site. Read the previous post to see what I went through with the aforementioned site.
Now, I'm not gonna be so vain as to assume that all my reporting and phone calls were the direct result of this site finally being removed. I can only assume that maybe I played some small role in it. Either way, it makes my day that someone who was profiting from others' work can no longer do so.
Does this make me a hypocrite?
Not even a week ago, I read an article that had been posted by the Jefferson Republican Party Facebook page (as a disclaimer, I'm not an actual member of this political group; I support a couple of politician friends who are and I do agree with some of the party's ideals) about the government being able to yank down a website in the name of copyright infringement without having to prove that it actually was copyright infringement. In other words, there's no accountability which leaves things wide open for abuse of power. I don't agree with that. I own a few websites and would hate to have someone with an agenda to just flip a switch and turn them off if I (and I often do) piss someone off.
On the flip side, of many of the domains that were seized, it's easy to see that the vast majority of them are product sites which for all cases of appearance were more than likely selling bootlegged, fake products, etc. According to this report from Stanford, over 70 sites were seized in this "internet raid".
I feel like a bit of a hypocrite that I'm happy this site has been pulled while at the same time not supporting the method, so to speak, in which it was removed.
I'm sorry I'm happy.
But I can't help it. I've been reporting this site to many, many places for the last month and to finally see them taken down makes me happy.
I feel slightly dirty now.
thanks for letting me know. as i hope i mentioned in my blog, i did report the one with which i had the encounter, to everyone i could think of, including the fbi. i think in that case they had enough evidence to pull the site. i don't know how international law works in terms of enforcement; who conducts a trial, who metes out punishment to the guilty? if an individual or a nation is the victim, that makes the answer clear, but copyright law itself is international and everyone suffers from its breachment. so i'm afraid i don't feel dirty at all here. in fact it makes me feel good that my reports were not ignored, as i feared they were; they certainly didn't consult ME about any of this! of course they didn't have to. i probably gave them moe information than they needed, and what i left out, i trust you filled in! (i am glad you went after the plagiarists too.)
ReplyDeletei will repost my response here on my blog as well at http://genessa18.blogspot.com/2009/11/criminal-minds-revisited-and-bootlegged.html to make sure anyone who was concerned there is informed. again, thnks for letting me know.
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