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[RANT] Alt.food.wine through the looking glass

Those of you who've spent much time here have probably encountered the various websites, usually at least vaguely food/wine related that provide a "portal" to alt.food.wine posts. Over the years, I've stumbled across several of these sites when Googling for posts. Yesterday, though, I came across a unique twist on that phenomenon, at the website

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As with the others, posts from alt.food.wine show up on their "wine's planet" forum. BUT...

  1. They make no attribution to alt.food.wine
  2. Afw posts from '04 and '05 are showing up there in '07/'08!
  3. Afw posters' names have been changed to unique and colorful "user names"

Want to see an example? Look at the recent thread there on 2 Buck Chuck:

and compare it to an afw thread by the same name from *2004*:

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And just to add an extra layer of surreality to it all, look at the names used in the drinksplanet forum.

/Dramatis/ /personae/: David Rheault - openfriday Mike - SnapperJack D. Gerasimatos - nbrown Dana Myers - Justin Timberlake (Way to go, Dana!!)

At the end of the thread, you'll see a recent post made to that forum and the board Admin (MaiTai) weighing in to mention that it's a year-old thread... Make that 3+ years, please!

And that's just one of many such threads there. So, what's going on? After some thought I decided that it's a way for a webforum with little traffic to improve appearances by stealing traffic from here and repackaging it as their own. Sleazy? Of course. Illegal? I guess not. Just another example of the wacky Brave New World of the Internet.

Mark Lipton

Reply to
Mark Lipton
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If not illegal, it certainly is unethical ... and most importantly - pathetic.

Reply to
AxisOfBeagles

I can't imagine anyone would want to read my posts or rename them. Hell I have blocked myself

Reply to
Richard Neidich

So I'm both Laidback420 AND Azn_Girl? Pathetic is the word!

Reply to
DaleW
Reply to
Joseph Coulter

Not to mention Krispy Kritters! (See "What to eat with PN?" thread from

2003)

Mark Lipton aka wartaymer aka furball99 :P

Reply to
Mark Lipton

Hi Mark - I also found some of my old postings to AFW at the abovementioned site along with various plagiarised variations on copyrighted articles I've contributed to wine websites - none approved by or attributed to me - all allegedly posted by one "lexreeves". I complained to the webmaster and those postings, as far as I can tell, were immediately removed.

What the hell is going on?

Cheers! Martin

Reply to
Martin Field

I quickly noticed this, and I'm glad to say I'm bringing sexy back...

Dana

Reply to
Dana Myers

Ah, don't be hatin' 'cause you're not Justin Timberlake...

;-)

Reply to
Dana Myers

We, the posters to AFW, hold the copyright to our text. And these guys are using and misattributing it without our permission. IANAL but but seems to be an open and shut case of copyright violation.

It might be slightly different for the other AFW-copy sites, as we did make our posts publically available to AFW.

They are apparently ripping off other websites too

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Reply to
Steve Slatcher

"Richard Neidich" skrev i meddelandet news: snipped-for-privacy@corp.supernews.com...

Good one, good one .... Cheers Nils

Reply to
Nils Gustaf Lindgren

It gets even worse for you, Dale. The site keeps a word count and puts frequent hits on the front page. Thus your _real_ name figures on the home page, in bold! That's pretty ugly.

I found this site a while ago, thought I had posted a note about it here. Maybe forgot. It is certainly one of the most blatant web ripoffs of usenet I've seen. Seeing as they strip our names and reprint only articles, there really ought be legal recourse. Any lawyers out there willing to write a letter?

BTW with 70 posts Azn_Girl is a Senior Member! Gosh, none of my replicants rate so high!

-E

Reply to
Emery Davis

Their web stats must have just shot up thanks to us... :-0

Reply to
Mike Tommasi

I don't see how anything posted on Usenet can be copyrighted. Usenet is sort of the definition of public domain.

Reply to
Dave

Pretty much everything[1] you or I write is copyrighted. The basic assumption, from there on, is that no one is allowed to copy that text without permission of the copyright holder.

However, if you post it to usenet you are implicitly giving permission for it to be distributed through usenet. Arguably websites can legally also make available usenet content - google certainly gets away with it, so I dont see why others shouldn't. But just because it is on usenet does not make it pubilc domain.

But if I post to usenet I am sure as hell am not giving any Tom, Dick or Harry the right to take my words, attribute them to someone else, and stick them on some poxy webforum to boost its ratings.

IANAL (but I am pretty sure of my facts).

[1] Varies a bit from country to country. Some countries (US?) require a degree of creativity in the writing I think.

The following line is not necessary to copyright a post, but, for the record :)

Copyright 2008, Stephen Slatcher

Reply to
Steve Slatcher

[ copyrighted material snipped :-) ]

Steve makes the point that "pretty much everything" is copyrighted. I am not a lawyer and had assumed that anything posted to Usenet is in the public domain. This is apparently not so, as I learned when I Googled "usenet copyright" and found this

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The above article points out that Usenet is sort of a gray area, but generally an authors content is protected unless the copyright expires or if explicitly waived.

-dave

Reply to
Dave

Dave wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@news5.newsguy.com:

Even Google really complies with copyright ideas by pointing back to the original just as you or I might in a scholarly work cite something from a copyrighted source with full disclosure of the source. This is what dimwitdrinks.com is not doing attributing the source or using the full text without permission.

Reply to
Joseph Coulter

As I understand it, Steve, Usenet copyright is a vague area of the law. As for the post above, that was Martin Field (see his post upthread) complaining, as he mentioned in this thread. MaiTai's response is clearly disingenuous: unless he has no knowledge of or connection to the software that's harvesting afw posts, he's trying to make it sound like a "rogue" incident rather than their modus operandi.

I also find it interesting that the website's DNS registration info is almost certainly bogus ("Mickey M"... hmmm...) The operation looks sleazy on every level.

Mark Lipton

Reply to
Mark Lipton

If the DNS registration is bogus, I believe there is a mechanism to force it to be corrected or have the site taken down. Unfortunately I do not know the mechanism for doing this. Some group that discusses such matters might be able to tell you who to contact and how.

Reply to
cwdjrxyz

Well, for some of the conversations here we are lucky that our real names are NOT used.

:-)

Reply to
Richard Neidich

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