JV Media Design Blog

We’ve just started to get out our new viral marketing campaign. We consult for and plan out similar viral and grass roots campaigns for our clients frequently, so we figured it was about time we did one of our own!

The series will feature the offical JV Media Design cat, Isis (as a kitten)! Isis was adopted by Sherry, the JVM Creative Director, when she was 8 weeks old (she’s now 7) and her YouTube.com debut is not her first public appearance. She is in scene in the Los Angeles electronic music documentary, “Concentric Beats”, she’s been PetCo.com’s “Pet of the Week”, and she’s even graced the pages of Cat Fancy (in the reader submissions, but hey, that’s still in there!).

Here is a direct link to the first video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsj0ygjoXks

Here’s a direct link to the second video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3l5SjgEycY

It’s become a bit of a game her at JVM. Every week I check out web stats to see if our website has been stolen and passed off as someone else’s work.

It’s really a disheartening trend as of late. Last night marks the third pirated website we’ve found of ours and we know a growing number of others who have had the same thing happen.

The very first time I discovered an impostor I was of course shocked. It prompted me to write the article, “Hijacked! What to Do When Your Website is Stolen“. This delves more into how to find out if this is happening to you and what to do about it if it is.

Since the writing of that article, I’ve done a lot more research on exactly how unscrupulous individuals are stealing entire websites. On the latest imposter’s site, I viewed the code and found this line at the bottom:

Mirrored from < a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" xhref=" http://www.jvmediadesign.com//" mce_href=" http://www.jvmediadesign.com//" >www.jvmediadesign.com/ by HTTrack Website Copier/3.x [ XR& #038;CO’2006 ], Mon, 26 Mar 2007 23:00:56 GMT

This is the website of the software that “copies” sites: http://www.httrack.com

Apparently, software such as this was created with researches in mind - to make it easy for them to download a site onto their machine to view offline. Well it doesn’t take long for people come along and pervert something into using it for dubious purposes. I also found out that these website copy programs can turn in to resource hogs on your server - because they do copy EVERYTHING on your website. This makes sense since we have been having problems with our web host claiming we have been getting increased traffic, but not being able to find anything installed on our site that would account of any of the increase.

So. What to do?

Well, this seems to be a growing problem. What I can theorize is that people are doing this for several potential reasons:

1. No-talent hacks steal a website and then sell it to some unsuspecting victim as an original work
2. Criminals are coping ecommerce websites in an attempt to lure unsuspecting victims into handing over all their credit card information
3. The spam crowd is getting bored with sending out emails for Viagra or stock tips and are now copying legit business websites just to cause trouble

There’s probably other ulterior motives, but those are my own top 3.

I recently stumbled upon another piece of software the alledges it will protect your webpage from aforementioned pieces of software. So I purchased a copy of HTML Protector, and plan to give it a workout on whether it really works as advertised and/or stops the copying. An update will follow …

And now for the fun part …

I found a website whose purpose is to expose impostors and thought that was a great idea! Check it out at: http://pirated-sites.com/vanilla/

And here’s some screen shots of our shanghid sites for your amusement.

And the second …

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, however I don’t think there’s anything sincere about copying ANY part of another person’s website and calling it your own.

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