UBB.Developers Forums General Discussion Chit Chat What happens to pirates?

What does Infopop do with sites with pirated UBB's?

Makes them wash dishes to make up the $200 ? Just a thought.. heh

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Matt

They usually just close the site down, but it's certainly not worth taking the risk.

Just a thought

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http://www.iamcal.com

*cough*The following is what a FRIEND told me*cough*

Infopop sends out a email to the webmaster of the hosting company, and an email to whoever the board is being run by. The email states that they have reason to believe that the board is pirated. They ask you to reply to it if it isn't and order it shut down and all that jazzy stuff.

If you dont' do it, they have your hosting company take care of it cause technically they could be help responsible too.

Its not a fun experience.

PL

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X-Admin Of Gaming Update
Pioneer of Gamespecs.com

They put you in Pepsi Prison.

moving to chit-chat

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Peace Out,
DJLunacy
www.mp3.com/voi

They send you a mail asking for your license info. If its fine, they leave ya. If it isnt so fine, or you dont provide info, they send an interesting mail to your webhost and usually get shutdown

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UBBDEV Moderator
OCCUPATION: Programmer, webmaster.

Hack Developer of the Ultimate Bulletin Board. I am not an employee of Infopop

Due to time limitation, I do not offer support Via. E-mail. Please post on the forums.

Sincerely,
MasterMind

[email protected] right?

I know I or we don't go witchunting but while i was helping out a user he is a freshly hacked copy of 5.47 and he has some hacks installed. he has no users.

One would think it is not pirated he is just lazy but He happens to have pirated cgi scripts on his page he doesn't have ubb but he has easy board and some other commercial scripts which lends me to believe that its pirated.

to nail or not to nail that is the question.



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Peace Out,
DJLunacy
www.mp3.com/voi

If he has a license, infopop will have record of it. It cannot hurt to email infopop. Well, except to give brett more work...

Just a thought

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http://www.iamcal.com

well..
how can i notify infopop about the pirated UBB site?
I know one which has been translated into another language.

That doesn't nessacarily mean it's pirated, but [email protected]

Just a thought

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http://www.iamcal.com

I meant it is pirated AND translated into another language. The copyright notice has also been removed.. Which makes me wonder, Why DO people remove the copyright notice & why does infopop care about it so much??!

Because that's they're form of advertising for the product. They got so popular by having a good product that people used. When people liked it and wanted one for their site, they knew who made it and where to get it and went and bought one.

Also, Infopop does allow the copyright to be removed, but a license fee of (I Think) $750 is required. Wouldn't you be rather pissed off if someone was essentially stealing $750 from you? I would! That's a loss of $750, plus uncountable revenues (at $200 a pop) from other sales since the copyright is gone and people may not know where they can get a copy of that software.

Being in business is all about making money.



--mark

How much money do you think these 'companys' make by selling CGI scripts? Do you think these people live off of these things or have side jobs like working for corperations that need web sites?

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Ill see you on the darkside of the moon.

Infopop is a corporation, with a full time staff. Their income has soley been from UBB sales, and starting this year, OpenTopic.

Just because the scripts run via CGI, doesn't make them any less of a piece of software than other commercial programs that run on your PC.

--mark

I'm still interested to know how people can tell a pirated from non-pirated version. It's not like there's a license number harwired in or anything. Does it just come down to Infopop saying "Hey, what's your license number?" to any board they think is "suspicious"?

What language was it? They DO have French, Spanish, German, and sometimes it can be easily translated.

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UBBDEV Moderator
OCCUPATION: Programmer, webmaster.

Hack Developer of the Ultimate Bulletin Board. I am not an employee of Infopop

Due to time limitation, I do not offer support Via. E-mail. Please post on the forums.

Sincerely,
MasterMind

You can pretty much figure out a board is pirated by reading posts, by the appearance of it, and especially if it is on a free host(even more espeically if it is on a host that has banned ubb due to the high server processing).

Reading posts is always a dead give away. Alot of the time you can go strictly by an ugly board, most people who have paid the $200 license fee, really want to make their board the best they can.

PL

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X-Admin Of Gaming Update
Pioneer of Gamespecs.com

hehehe,

yours looks great PL!

hehe, I've seen entire sites fall due to license violations. it's pretty interesting to see a 8 year old site crumble cause they were too cheap to foot up some cash

Okay now we have gone through guessing what Infopop do, lets have a bash at what we think they should do.

My suggestion is for the admin of the pirated board to be hung, drawn, and quartered. Bit of Bravheart affair.

I have reported one or two, download sites which provide the board for illegal download to Infopop. In Yahoo Chat there are many people who post links to such sites.

~ Lee

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http://help.vemex.net - Help site for web designers and developers.

"Do not let your fears stand in the way of your dreams" - No Fear

This message has been edited by zombiefro on November 09, 2000 at 01:31 AM

they should be made to walk the plank cause there pirates, hehe, stupid joke i know

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My Freeware Board

Usually Brett calls their Mommy. That ends things right there in most cases. I've heard it. Ugly, real ugly. He has in the past called employers as well. Say goodbye to that job.

For instance:

He was referred to a warez site running a UBB download that was a subdomain of a fairly substantial corporation. They now have one less IT worker. They were paying big money for bandwidth thinking their website was generating that traffic.

He found another pirated UBB on the site of another substantial corporation. Turns out this employee had pocketed the purchase fee for every piece of software that corporation had ever "bought" and loaded a warez O/S and other software on every workstation in the corporation. Cost the company thousands to buy legit software. Think that guy still has a job?

He found a pirated UBB with the copyright removed on a website owned by a company who's offices are very high up in the Empire State Building. This company had paid a web development company to build a website and include a custom message board solution. Boy were they surprised to find out it was neither custom nor licensed. Cost them a grand to buy a license and remove the copyright and powered by legitimately. Yep, another head rolled.

So think about this. That middle instance had many many employees. How much do you think this corporation lost in terms of time and money when they had to go and purchase all of that software? These warez sites hurt the consumer many ways. Software manufacturers have to figure the loss into their prices. Corporations such as that have to go purchase software at today's prices, not the prices they would have paid had they purchased it legitimately when the software was installed. And who paid the loss on that? Not the dope they caught. He had no money to give, it was all gone. You did, the consumer.

Think about it.

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"There is no spoon" is gone.