Amiga "No Piracy" Campaign

What happens when you run into a pirate site? What makes a site legal and illegal? Well, here's some help for all of you out there that might be interested. What to do when you find a pirate site. Find the Provider and gather information Get the exact address of home page as well as any pertaining links for the pages/ftp sites that are being used to spread software or rom images. From the respective sites get the name of the host provider. (more on this later) Be secretive about it, the provider has to catch them in the act of this behavior. Let the authors of the software know of the situation so they can track down the same site. Also give them specifics of the providers and how to contact them, most of the time they do not have enough time to track them all down but if they have all the information they need, more power to them. Don't upload or download anything, everything on a pirated site has a high risk factor. Everything from sniffing your port and leeching files (highly unlikely but possible) to severely damaging your hard drive to a point where you can't even reformat. Make sure that the Provider is aware of how wrong these sites are. Generally the email address is open to the public like "abuse@provider.net". Email them about the situation and ask for a follow up citing the Acceptable Use Policies on the providers web site. Ask for support from fellow Amiga users against Piracy to do the same. Be polite and diplomatic about it. If you think you have enough starch to your messages, give them more. Don't overwhelm the provider with constant request. The provider needs to be convinced that the site is doing something both against the law and violating the AUP (Acceptable Use Policy). Make sure that the provider knows that the author of the program has been contacted and that they can contact them directly with either an email address or phone number. Locating the important information Use the tools that you were given with the registration of Miami or NetConnect. One of my favorites is MiamiTraceRoute combined with MiamiResolve. Using these two tools you can gather the full domain name and the IP address. From the IP address use the MiamiTraceRoute (or NetStat) to pull up the path to their site. From the list of servers that you hop to and from, look for the last #?.net on there. You might see something like psg-sig.provider.net, all that you need out of this is provider.net so that you can email them as mentioned above. When you find the provider of the site, go to their home page and look up the Acceptable Use Policy. In your email to the provider, make sure that you point out the specifics such as "hosting illegal files" or "mass mailing users to gain access" or other such mentions. Use a template style message like this one below

Violation of Acceptable Use Policy Site: www.lazarus.com IP: 127.127.0.1 Host: www.provider.net IP: 127.128.1.0 Violation occurred when: Piracy of #? software. Author of #? software: "Last, First" <email@location.com> Phone number: +01(800)555-1212 The software is still being licensed out by the author which is the one who is making a living doing this. I've provided a trace of the server paths giving me your information, see attached. Also carbon copied in my message is the author so that they are aware of the situation as well. Please be sure that the users site falls under the acceptable use policy as stated on your site, link below. http://www.provider.net/info/cgi-search=?acceptible+use+policy Points number four of paragraph three and number two of paragraph four should be brought to your attention. Please send me an update of the situation and I will be able to provide further information at your request when needed.

Using this type of template from one user is fairly strong in stating that a user is under violation of their policies. Also when carbon copying the author of the software they usually know you mean business. Then when the provider receives five, six, and sometime thirty of these, they generally pull the site down as soon as possible. These are the tricks that I have learned in taking sites down and they really work quite effective. If I could have stickers of the Amiga Anti-Piracy logo, I'd be a WWI flying Ace. Happy Hunting Kent Seaton lodosswar@bigfoot.com A3K, CSPPC 604/240 060/60, PicassoIV, Concierto, AriadneII ---------------------------------- 897Kkeys for the Amiga RC5 (Amiga RC5 Project)

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© 2000 Markus Nerding / H&P - http://www.amiga-planet.de/nopiracy/