How can the leecher do this?

Question

The original website: http://www.vnedoc.com
The leecher's website: http://www.vipa1.com
As you can see they are completely the same except for the author (sangsang -> trangxinh) and the logo (v.v.v). How could the leacher do this? How can I prevent this?

Answer 1

There are many, many ways to copy web sites, and few ways to reliably and efficiently stop it.

You could look into the server access logs to see whether there are any obvious bots crawling the site. Possible patterns:

• Very quick successions of page requests (A human being will take at least several seconds to read a page, and click on a link, while a bot can fire dozens of requests per second)

• unusual USER_AGENT string;

• comes back exactly every x hours, or at the exactly same time every day

and block those IP addresses (See here how to do it in Apache; here in PHP). But this will be relatively easy for the offender to circumvent.

The best way to stop this is to get a lawyer. This is pretty certainly illegal.

Answer 2

You can issue a simple takedown notice against them. In fact, sometimes, warning them against this does the trick equally well and saves you a lot of running and clicking around. Basically, they are pulling in the HTTP response and parsing it through some custom code that does not bother changing much, other than the author name (as you said). That is why, even the SEO parameters have same values! Stupid copying methods.

Answer 3

The only guaranteed way to stop this sort of thing is by taking legal action.

• If the "leecher"'s website is hosted by an ISP who is subject to US law, then you can issue the ISP with a DMCA takedown notice; see here and here.

• Otherwise, you will need to take appropriate legal action in the jurisdiction of the leecher or their ISP. This could be difficult and expensive.

There are various technical steps that you could take to make it harder for the "leecher" to copy your site, but they can all be easily circumvented.

Of course, you could also take your site offline, or password protect all of your content. But that probably defeats the purpose of creating your website in the first place.