Bitacle Update: Some Correspondence
These past few days have been seen a flurry of correspondence on the Bitacle scandal. Several of the major players involved wrote me regarding letters that I sent.
Here’s a quick rundown as to what each of them had to say.
Deranet
As reader Maria pointed out in her comments to the previous piece about Bitacle, the company Deranet appears in the DNS entries for Bitacle. Though I was suspicious as to whether or not they were the actual host, I decided to email them at the address provided.
Their letter back to me seems to confirm my suspicions. They say that they do not own the servers involved and can not control the content. They apologized for not being able to help.
There are two possibilities. First, they provide the bandwidth to Bitacle and not the servers, making Bitacle much more resilient to copyright complaints, or they are just providing DNS services. Either way, they are obviously unable to help.
Ono
Ono, the company I suspected of being the host, responded to my original email to have me redirect my email to their abuse account, which is abuse at ono dot com. I sent a copy of the letter that new account late Friday but am yet to hear back from them.
I’ll post further information when and if it becomes available.
Google Adsense
Finally, Adsense wrote me on the 20th to let me know that the situation with Bitacle, for their part, has been “remedied”. Though we had noticed the ads had been removed for quite some time, it was still nice to get the official notice from Google.
Special Thanks
A special thanks goes out to Maria for all of her help translating the emails between myself and the Spanish hosts and for creating the stock Spanish host contact.
Without her help, I doubt that these steps would have been possible.
Conclusions
In the end, there’s not a lot to say, these things sometimes move forward very slowly and much of this is uncharted waters. We will have to see how this turns out.
I will keep everyone posted on what happens.
Tags: Bitacle, Content Theft, Copyright, Copyright Infringement, Copyright Law, Plagiarism, Scraping, Spam Blogging, Splogging
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