As I mentioned in the Swingman's Duck thread, I've begun the process of making a DMCA piracy complaint against Simnetwork. I'm starting a new thread about this because the Duck thread is soon to be locked, if it hasn't been already.
For those who didn't follow the thread about the Duck, the short version is that the owner of Icarus Gold has been pressing bogus piracy complaints against Swingman's model of the J2F Duck, falsely claiming that it's a copy of the Icarus model. Simnetwork is owned and operated by the same person who owns and operates Icarus Gold, and Simnetwork is a notorious freeware pirate site. The complaint process follows the DMCA because the web host is located here in the US.
Out of curiosity I went to the Simnetworks site and a library search of my name brought up page after page of hits. I wrote to Simnetwork and asked that they delete the files, and was promptly banned from the site.
Thanks to Mike "Ears Hopin" P. (aka "Gigabyte") I was able to contact Simnetwork's web hosting service, and I started the complaint process.
The information required for a piracy complaint is straightforward enough, but compiling it might take more time and effort than it's worth. I have to provide the web hosting service with a list of the files I'm complaining about and a list of those files from a legitimate source. In practice, that's not as easy as it sounds.
Since I'm banned from the site, I can only access Simnetworks via a proxy server, and Simnetworks' primary search function, which gave me a list of files with my name in the descriptions, listed by file name, doesn't work through a proxy server. They have an alternate "legacy html" search function, but the hits come up as a list of URLs to the files with truncated descriptions that show my name, but there are no file names. To produce a list of file names it would be necessary to open each link, hundreds of links, to open a separate page for each file, and either copy and save each page, or compile a list of file names manually.
Producing a list from a legitimate site would be almost as much trouble. The two legitimate sites where my files have been released are this one and FlightSim. At both sites, the results pages show an enlarged thumbnail with a description, so only ten or so files fit on a page. At FlightSim I would have to copy and save page after page of the results list. Here, for some reason, when I search the library for my name, only a few files show up (even though I was hammered with hundreds of e-mails during the process of relocating the files to the new library.)
I've been corresponding with the web hosting service over the past few days. They were very helpful in letting me know what I needed to come up with to sustain a complaint Yesterday I wrote to explain what I just wrote about above, asking if they can make use of such cumbersome documentation.
If they can, I might need some help from someone who isn't banned from Simnetworks, who can use their main search function to produce results pages that list the files by name instead of by URLs.
I'll keep you posted.
Bookmarks