Restoring Content From The Wayback Machine
Seller: wwwbiz
A convenient way to restore an expired domain back to its former glory is to reinstate the content from the Wayback Machine. It's quick (quicker than writing the content to source the site yourself) and you retain the URLs that may have links.
The only problem is that it's illegal if you don't have the original owner's consent.
The holder of this auction has done this repeatedly. One would assume that he sees nothing wrong with stealing someone else's content and presenting it as his own. As long as he manages to sell the site to an unsuspecting buyer, the problem is quickly and conveniently transferred to them.
The domain may have been bought legally at auction, as he claims, but the content that used to exist is not part of the deal. If he publishes it without the original owner's consent, he is infringing their copyright. Imagine yourself putting a lot of hard work into creating some content and publishing it on your site. However, a couple of years down the line, your circumstances change and you let the domain expire. You forget about what you created on the site. However, somebody comes along and buys the domain quite legitimately at an auction. No problem. But then they manage to retrieve your content from the Wayback Machine and put it back on the site. This is your content. You wrote it and nobody but you has the right to use it without your permission. Now imagine if the content was actually of a personal nature!
I thought I would bring this up at a previous auction of his. Guess what happened to my comments? Look how he contrives his own comments to make it appear as if I haven't understood his auction description. Convincing, that. His response to a question that somebody else posed is this:
"Would the new owner have rights to the content?"
No, please read description.
"Does the previous owner have a problem with keeping the current content up?"
I don't know. But this content did not change within the years of existence. You can check it here: web.archive.org
So he knows that both he and the new owner of the site do not have rights to the content, but he publishes it nonetheless. And he doesn't have the luxury of ignorance by this point. But what the hell - he made $990 out of the sale and the problem is no longer his! Result!
He's. Obviously. Having. Success. With. This. Strategy.
Check out a thread on Sitepoint that discusses the question of who owns the content restored from the Wayback Machine.
Well spotted. It’s amazing how many ways people find to cheat when it comes to making money from selling websites!
Good find, we’ve taken down the listing and will chase this up.
That’s great Dave.
You might want to look ar his other listings.
Kinda funny when you think about it because chances are the (owners) content is not original and he has borrowed it from another source.
Be it background wallpaper/text fonts.etc and it’s very rare for a website to be completely original due to so many.
Luckily we have a thing called (Fair Use) though I do admit trying to milk money is taking it too far.
Continued:
In fact that’s low life scum and he should be forced to pay resitution.
Good example is if one bank robber robs a bank and then later gets his own money stolen by another armed robber so the first robber’s attempt was all for naught.