jim_w - 7:11 pm on May 18, 2005 (gmt 0)

Jim;

>>But you lose your implicit 'ownership' of the contents

In our case it is more than that. They ‘hot link’ to our software after they scrape download.com. This costs us bandwidth and we have to constantly perform maintenance to keep them out, and time is money. So it is costing us X 2. I have even seen humans from these sites come in after a block, take the URL to the software, and then fix their web pages.

After banning referrals from scrapers-r-us.com from getting the downloads, I have seen them then hot link to directly to download.com. I told their ISP about it, and the ISP said that if we file a complaint about copyright, and if we were wrong, then we would have to pay attorney’s fees. So the ISP’s, apparently Google, and the scrapers themselves are the only people that support these unethical activities. I don’t have a clue why the ISP’s and G don’t do something about it. In the long term, they are indeed hurting themselves due to their lack of respect for the original content providers.