How well does ThePlanet.com handle DMCA complaints?
Recently got shafted by a client for over $30K (3 months of work plus our own out of pocket expenses). To make matters worse, this crook took the PHP source code which my company offers as a hosted solution and installed it on a dedicated server at Theplanet.com.
I have sent DMCA take down notices to theplanet, following their procedure (which is the standard legal procedure) but they have not done anything to the perpetrator. He has managed to spring up 2 websites already, and is no doubt planning to launch more.
Not sure if anyone else has been in this type of situation but I need to get something done about this. I have no doubt in my mind that even if theplanet did shut his sites down, or at least wiped the infringing software from the disks, he would jump over to another host and do the same thing again. My company doesn't have time to waste chasing him around, however the software he has contains a lot of proprietary code that we created and was never intended to be public.
So far both of the domains that he is using have Network Solutions as the registrar. Does Netsol assist with this kind of thing? Hopefully someone with similar experience can chime in with some advice.
First off thank you WHT for providing these forums and please forgive me for my first post being a huge rant!
We have contacted ThePlanet multiple times with DMCA requests to have a website remove illegal copies of our software from their website. The website is (*****.com *removed link*), and ThePlanet hosts them.
This issue has been ongoing for over 10 days, our original DMCA from them was ignored.
We resent another on Tue June 2, 2009, that one was responded to. Either no one from ThePlanet bothered to visit the warez website or they encourage warez on their networks because the website is still up; they initially removed links to our software but added new ones hours later.
We contacted ThePlanet again hours later with our email again to be disregarded. We sent another reply last Friday, ThePlanet responded back that our email was not in proper DMCA format; but do not bother to see the entire website is nothing but warez. Do these guys just not care that warez is on their network? I didn't realize the economy has gotten so bad they now cater to warez websites.
Visit the website and see that is has full ISO copies of Windows and other software, has full dvdrip movies and copies of games, as well as crack patches and keygenerators.
Why is it that ThePlanet allows these websites to operate and that their AUP is a total joke? Obviously if you want to distribute warez ThePlanet seems like the best place to do it.
We also hosted our websites on ThePlanet but intend to cancel service with them due to this issue. I encourage anyone that is a software developer and uses ThePlanet to also dump their service.
I have several domains that offer newsletters through double opt-in and sometimes people forget they subscribed and make a spam complaint (especially aol users). This is causing me horrible grief with godaddy. Can anyone recommend a reasonably priced hosting company that won't totally freak out and lock up your domain because of these occasional spam complaints?
I am not talking floods of genuine complaints here or any real spam practices, just people who are too free with the "report spam" button just because they've become bored with my newsletter.
I have a customer that uses mailman to send out newsletters. For some reason he has a few users on that list at AOL that feel they need to report them as spam instead of simply unsubscribing or deleting. I'm on the AOL feedback loop, and receive these complaints each time he sends.
AOL removes (redacts) all traces that might make it possible to simply remove the complainer, instead making me have to go in and trace the mail. Ok, privacy and all that. Fine. Unfortunately, since he has a few hundred AOL addresses on that list, it's nearly impossible (AFAIK) to figure out who it is so I can remove that user (or three).
I've searched through the mail logs using the message ID and timestamp, as well as grepping for AOL in the results. This has narrowed it down to about 120 addresses. From here I'm stuck. Can anyone recommend something else to try in order to narrow it down further? What am I missing?
Here are the headers that came with the complaint, edited for privacy.
Quote:
Return-Path: <redacted-bounces@customerdomain.com> Received: from rly-dd06.mx.aol.com (rly-dd06.mail.aol.com [172.19.141.153]) by air-dd03.mail.aol.com (v120.9) with ESMTP id MAILINDD034-b804748865c294; Sat, 24 Nov 2007 15:15:39 -0400 Received: from neo.myserver.com (ns3.myserver.com [my.server.ip.addy]) by rly-dd06.mx.aol.com (v120.9) with ESMTP id MAILRELAYINDD062-b804748865c294; Sat, 24 Nov 2007 15:15:29 -0400 Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1] helo=neo.myserver.com) by neo.myserver.com with esmtp (Exim 4.68) (envelope-from <redacted-bounces@customerdomain.com>) id 1Iw1P8-0006og-3w; Sat, 24 Nov 2007 15:15:06 -0500 Received: from adsl-225-31-27.mia.bellsouth.net ([customer's.ip] helo=Home) by neo.myserver.com with esmtpa (Exim 4.68) (envelope-from <customer_email@customerdomain.com>) id 1Iw1P1-0006l0-Tc for redacted@customerdomain.com; Sat, 24 Nov 2007 15:15:00 -0500 Message-ID: <002d01c82ed6$b4485f20$210110ac@Home> From: <customer_email@customerdomain.com> To: redacted@customerdomain.com Date: Sat, 24 Nov 2007 15:15:05 -0500p
I contacted HostGator a few days ago in regards to a website being hosted on their network. The blog post had a link to a decompiler that would decompile applications written by a certain program. The responses I received from Richard F. (Network Security Administrator) of HostGator was not what I expected.
At first, Richard F. wants to see the EULA of the software that the decompiler is made for. So, I send him the URL and even quote the EULA. It states, "Neither you nor any third party may modify, adapt, decompile or reverse engineer the Games." In addition, I pointed Richard to the author's blog where the author is not happy about the decompiler as people can use it to steal and ripoff games and applications written with this software. Richard F. then defends the decompiler by stating the following:
"Well, this is a complicated situation. Having the decompiler available is in itself not any violation of the EULA. However, if someone uses it then it's a violation of that EULA. Making the decompiler available solely as a source of information is not in any way infractionary, this has been held up in court cases with companies such as Microsoft."
It seems he is trying to use some alleged loophole of having it available for "information purposes only" does not make it illegal or a violation of HostGators TOS/AUP. I then notify him that it is also a DMCA violation as the only reason for reverse engineering per the DMCA is if the software is no longer available nor the author available. Neither of these conditions are met as the software that is decompiled is still being made and the community that uses the software is active. Richard F. then makes the following illogical analogy:
"Yes it could be seen as a violation of the DMCA. However, again, as an informational source, it is not in any violation. If we wanted to go on a tangent and say that this tool was written in, say C#, we could then hold Microsoft liable for creating both the C# language and an IDE to allow someone to write this tool. But they're not liable for what is created with or done with their tools, they merely provide them. This is where we are in this situation. Simply providing the information is not illegal."
Firstly, no one ever went on any tangent. Next, his analogy makes no sense. The fact of the matter is that the website being hosted on HostGator's network is distributing a decompiler that circumvents security measures in a program. People that use this particular software to compile their games and applications can have their source code revealed by a person simply running this decompiler.
I guess Richard F. is not used to dealing with techniaclly adept people. Therefore, he pulls a bunch of technical BS out of his gator butt and expects me to believe it.
I have forwarded this issue to The Planet as well as to the author that made the software being decompiled. I have notified him of HostGator condoning the use and distribution of this decompiler. I think it's pretty sad when a hosting company starts to defend immoral and unethical activities. And to think, this joker is actually has the position of "Network Security Administrator." He sounds like some kid barely out of high school computer science class.
my host freaked up when getting a letter from a company about DMCA, and quickly shut my site down.
Does anyone know of a dedicated server hoster who does not jump the gun and shut down sites from a little Cease and Desist letter for around 299 EUR a month?
The site gets roughly in the thousands of hits per day.
I have sent a DMCA notice to softlayer because I saw warez forum thats abusing USA laws and they are giving away lots of hacked rapidshare accounts to its users. So I have made my complaint but I didnt said what infringed my copyrights. And softlayer can see the warez site and decide them selves.
So this what I got in reply after 2 weeks-
Quote:
Please review our DMCA procedures which follow the OCILLA. Also note, the sworn statements and all other information listed on our DMCA page are not only required but mandatory for any DMCA report. This will allow you to specifically identify the intellectual property that you own and is being infringed upon, which is required by law.
There are many verified third party DMCA/COPYRIGHT agencies who act on behalf of the intellectual property holders who can verify and submit these claims on behalf of the intellectual property owners. This will insure that legally, the intellectual property owner and the ISP is protected in the event of an account termination.
Softlayer DMCA information [url]
[url]
[url]
And they didnt took any actions against that site and what I see is that warez site is operating till now on softlayer servers. Looks like softlayer didnt warned the site admins too. 1 month passed after my complaint and its still operating.
We recently discovered another host had stole parts of our page and use it as theirs. Right now we are currently looking to contact it's service provider to submit the DMCA complain. However we have no success of contacting their provider XO. So now we are looking to contact their actual provider (reseller of XO) but we were unsuccessful in finding such info. If anybody here could give us a hand?
The site in question.[url]compare to ours[url] as you can see the table is identical.
Their IP- 209.31.114.36 XO Communications XOXO-BLK-11 (NET-209-31-0-0-1) 209.31.0.0 - 209.31.255.255 SECURE-24 XOXO-209-31-112-0 (NET-209-31-112-0-1) 209.31.112.0 - 209.31.115.255 # ARIN WHOIS database, last updated 2008-12-05 20:12 Have sent in a claim as instructed on this page [url], but havn't heard a reply yet.
I just had the pleasure of having my entire host containing multiple sites,being suspended by Godaddy because someone sent them a notice of infringement. Even though I had resolved the issue with the copyright holder 8 hours before Godaddy suspend the host.
Which brings me to my question, anyone know of a host that's reliable, well priced and not effected by the DMCA?
We run into DMCA problems (Windows Media Streaming) 3-4 times a year and most of these requests come for content that are not even governed by US laws.We currently have Ecatel and they have been good with DMCA but their quality has been a major drawback (Stream buffering big time, even for a dedicated server)
We are looking for a Windows server 2003 streaming server with at least 100Mbps dedicated unmetered connection (will upgrade to 500 or even 1Gbps dedicated if the quality is reasonable).
I just ordered a Dual Xeon 3.2, 4GB RAM, 2X 250GB SATA server from ThePlanet and it ...sucks. This damn thing doesn't even want to run a single UrbanTerror server ( which mind you is an 8 year old game that should be running like BUTTER on this system )every 5 minutes this thing lags out like you wouldn't believe, so it seems I'm wasting nearly 200 month on nothing but a web host now, which isn't something I need to do. ThePlanet of course doesn't support any of this, not that I asked them to, I just told them this box sucks and something is wrong, but they don't really care it seems, so I'm looking for another place, does anyone have any good recommendations ?
I've only ever had a shared hosting account with Hostgator, plus a few freebie hosts. However, I'm now pulling some heavy traffic and I'm concerned that Hostgator is going to suspend me soon.
My traffic on Saturday for example was ~2600 unique visitors and ~5000 page views. All of this traffic was from WordPress blogs and a small SMF forum. I've since converted one of the blogs to a static site to limit my CPU usage and I've setup caching for my other WordPress blogs. Advice I've heard on the Hostgator forums is that 7000 page views per day for a database driven site is around the time you should be upgrading and based on my traffic from Saturday (which admittedly was a bit of a spike) I could potentially be receiving 150,000 page views/month, so about 20x the point at which they recommend upgrading at.
Anyhows, in a nutshell I need to upgrade, or risk Hostgator throwing a tantrum at me ... but I don't have a lot of cash to pay for an upgrade Due to my lack of cashflow I've been considering moving to a VPS. The company which has interested me the most is HostV.com who offer a 256 MB (with 1000 MB 'burst' RAM) for only US$39.99 which seems quite reasonable to me.
They say that their 256 MB plan should be able to handle over 5000 page views per day for a WordPress run site, but I'm a little suspect. Do any of you know if this is a reasonable expectation from a 256 MB chunk of a virtual server? I have no idea and am always wary of believing the sales pitch of a random company across the other side of the world.
PHPAuction GPL Enhanced V2.51 Auction Software seems to be the perfect solution for my client, but the PHP requirements are very specific and the host we currently are using doesn't allow anyone to play with .htacess which is the usual workaround. Can anyone recommend a host that they know has the following setup?
Minimal server requirements are as follows: - Apache web server - PHP 4.0.6 or later (see below) with safe_mode=Off - register_globals=on - no open_basedir restriction - MySQL Database - 3.0 or higher - "Cookies" MUST be enabled on your computer!
Alternatively, does anyone know of any auction software that restricts sellers to only the admin?
I have dedicated server P4 3.2 Ghz with ThePlanet for 4 years now. Since I want to upgrade a server I started to think if it will be good idea to change to the Rackspace.
They offer AMD Opteron 246 for pretty much same price I am getting my P4 3.2 Ghz at ThePlanet. Is it faster processor? I do not need faster CPU, I want to upgrade Hard drive but if I am getting faster CPU it's good.
Several points here.
1. I can not complain about ThePlanet. Never had a problem. And whenever I had opened ticket they were answered in time I expected.
I am going to begin a social network and for the beginning I just need 100 gb hard disk, 2 ram, 200 TB monthly. I need a web hosting with potential for big traffic and scalability in the near future.
I have read what people from big social networks have said about both companies and they can handle big traffic, though mediatemple has better ranked costumers than the plannet according to Alexa (I checked one by one of their big clients in Alexa.)
My website is going to be about video streaming, webcam streaming and other common things in social networks.
What do you recommend? Do you have a better company in mind that can handle big traffic and scalability?
A few days ago my server started to receive a bunch of Input/Output errors. I scrambled all over Google to find out what the problem could be and most pointed to a failing hard drive.
I contacted ThePlanet roughly 4 hours after I first saw the problem and they recommended that run a few diagnostic programs on the hard drive to find out if there were any problems. I agreed and we picked a good 4 hour time frame to do the work.
Luckily for me this was the 2nd hdd on the server, but the downside was its a 200GB that I am using 165GB. So I tried to do backups and at about 35% done, the 2nd hdd became virtually unaccessible.
ThePlanet started the diagnostic at roughly 12:00pm PST and updated me nearly every 10 minutes on the progress. At 12:50 they indicated that the hdd diagnostic wasn't able to find any problems, then rebooted the server. I'm not sure what they did, but after the server came back up after roughly 5 minutes the 2nd hdd is working perfectly fine.
So i'd like to send out some praise as i'm very happy that the hdd is working again, and I'm happy with the updates and professionalism with ThePlanet.
I've had some rough times with ThePlanet, but the majority of my situations have been resolved in a timely and professional manner. Thanks again TP for saving my butt!
I have partners down in Dallas, Tx. that are deciding on whether or not they want to go with "ThePlanet" datacenter. But, we just want to know before purchasing any or keeping any servers there that the datacenter is fully equipped with 24/7 monitoring, fire safety, flood safety, backup generators, etc. We're thinking of leasing 2 servers there, and we just need to know some details before going on. Now, I know there's all that information on the website and I've done alot of research on them, but I want to know from WHT's first-hand experience of ThePlanet is any good.
So, if you've used ThePlanet datacenters, can you please help me out. I'm highly suggesting ThePlanet as one of the datacenters I might use. Because it's located in Dallas, TX. it would be alot easier to co-locate the server, or check up on it once and a while or sort out any problems, etc.
Please leave a message of your first-hand experience with this datacenter.
I have two dedicated linux servers with the planet and about an hour ago as I was testing a site on one I noticed it got terribly slow. I'm lazy sometimes and just assumed that I could fix the problem with a reboot so I went typed in the control panel address that ThePlanet.com uses for clients.
Behold, nothing. The site won't load and I noticed that theplanet.com won't load either. I am able to access my site still but its very slow, is anyone else noticing this? Is it a problem with my ISP?
several years ago I came here to find a webhosting reseller account, you helped me find hostgator, who I have been mostly happy with.
The only issue I had was that they suspended me for a CPU TOS violation and it took me over 24 hours to get my site back online.
Once this was resolved, I was also resolved to move my site to a new dedicated server, (My CPU, My TOS) - so I went with the planet. I was a little put off by their verification methods, they wanted a copy of my DL and credit card - once I contacted them, and voiced my concerns, they told me that the image could be redacted (only last 4 of CC and no DL#) - then they went to work.
My server went online, with CPANEL installed - well I happen to have a friend that is a Linux guru - so upon his recomendation, we did an OS reload to straight CentOS 5.2. The reload was amazing - the datacenter did exactly what we asked, and within 4 hours, we had a brand new Linux box, clean and shiny and ready to go. ThePlanet kept me informed of the progress the entire time, and set the root password to exactly what we wanted - it could not have gone smoother....
Then...I moved the primary site to the new server and our load average skyrocketed (36,37,42) etc.. Hostgator was definately justified as my site must have been just SLAMMING thier box. Once the primary site was up, we did a memory upgrade (once again theplanet did this within an hour or so) at our request, the box was rebooted and we found that it STILL wasn't enough - so today I ordered an upgrade...
Today before 12 noon eastern time I ordered the new server, same OS and as I type this, I can see the new box is up, running and ready to put the penguin to work.
The moral of the story - if your website is becoming large (mine is 40,000 articles +) and Google is always a crawling - it's time to move to a dedicated server. Granted, you will need to know Linux, and you need to have a REALLY good grasp of it - but the question that convinced me to change is this - if you are doing web hosting, web design - isn't it time to learn linux - I have moved to kubuntu, and can not stand windows any longer -
Get Linux, Get Hostgator then Get ThePlanet - and your company can Get Going!
