Copyright issue
> My web site host receive a specific complaint that my site contained 2 pages that had content also on the site of the complaining company.
>
> My host took down my entire site without warning.
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> It is my opinion that as the subdomains, and the site itself contained no live links to these pages, then only the two pages under dispute being removed should satify Federal law. My host didn't agree and took down all the site, subdomains, cpanels, e-mail, everything.
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> I wrote twice to the complaining commercial site asking them to withdraw their complaint on the basis the two pages under question would be removed; but they ignorred this request. My site was non commercial.
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> The two pages in question mostly contained public domain information which also happened to be on the complaining site.
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> I have no way to determine now how many hits were actually to those two pages in question, if any, as the site stats have been eliminated by the host.
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> Does anyone have any comments or ideas about this issue.
Thank you for the input
Cheers,
Steven
openmind posted this at 07:55 — 31st October 2004.
He has: 945 posts
Joined: Aug 2001
It sounds like the host may have have been a little zealous in their action by removing the entire site. Trouble is they have an obligation to act if there is a copyright infringement complaint issued against them.
A famous example of this was an author who sued AOL after they continued to host his work on their message boards despite being informed that the content was breaching copyright. He won btw...
Without seeing the content in question or the site who made the complaint I cannot comment on any similarirites between the two.
My advice would be to move to a new host and reupload your site without using the two offending pages.
Vivvy posted this at 14:15 — 31st October 2004.
She has: 3 posts
Joined: Oct 2004
When I saw this on another forum this morning I had the same thought .. wow, that was over the top for a host to do, if... and this is an important if.... there was no legal pressure for them to dump a perfectly good client. Most hosts have provisos in their TOS that hold them harmless from this kind of issue. But even if their policy is to discontinue an account in this situation, dumping the whole site is a pretty intense response.
The hosting business has many challenges.. protecting the world from possible copyright infringement seems like it's one challenge they wouldn't want to take on!
Vivvy
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