🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <i7aflrlecv.fsf@phoebe.math.albany.edu>, hammond@phoebe.albany.edu (William F. Hammond) wrote:

>
>Clarification sought:
>
>Is Daniel saying that DigiCom copied his pages in order to offer them
>through its own web site as if created by DigiCom?

They were an ~exact~ duplicate of the pages Dan Norton had up on his site.  
They even had a disclaimer at the bottom of the page stating that they were in 
no way affiliated with Dan Norton, which clearly indicates that they were well 
aware of his pages.  (This has since been removed and they have added some 
changes since then)

Since Dan Norton has been building those pages for over 2 years, and DigiCom 
has only registered their domain ~this~ year (March 20th, as a matter of 
fact), it's pretty clear which came first.


The URL is: <http://ww.digicomis.com/resources/>.  They do not appear to have 
access from their main site.  It also appears that they have been gradually 
changing the code.


>
>Could it have been that DigiCom was attempting to mirror those pages
>in order to reduce inter-provider network delays (which have at times
>been severe)?

No.way.  They are claiming copyright for the design of the page now.  It's 
quite clear that they do not acknowledge any contribution by Dan.

>
>If the latter, there should have been visible full attribution as to
>source.

The closest they came to that was a denial that they were affiliated with Dan 
in any way, which has since been removed.  Nice people, huh?

>
>If an author does not want pages mirrored, one way to make this clear
>is to insert an HTML comment at the top of each such page, e.g.,


IANAL, but my understanding is that it is still copyright infringement unless 
they have the ~WRITTEN~ permission of the originator of the material 
(otherwise it's a he said/she said situation). With websites, getting the 
"hits" on your site is a commodity, and mirroring a site without permission is 
stealing the value of the original site.   If Dan persues this, he may be able 
to obtain a portion of monies Digicom collects through advertisements signed 
up in the Capital Region as a result of using his work (a royalty).

At least they have good taste - Dan's site was THE best regional site in the 
state, IMHO. 

Sandy