Yesterday, I described how IISP.HK – an ICANN accredited registrar and Internet service provider in Hong Kong, China – decided to cherry-pick content from domain blogs and reproduced it in whole, without any attributions to the sources.
In fact, IISP.HK went to the extremes of altering headlines to suit its readership and even changed references to other registrars, such as GoDaddy, to its own.
The act of stealing content alone, is deplorable, much more due to the function and footprint of the doer.
That being said, after emailing IISP.HK twice with the offending articles, I’m pleased to announce that all of the content stolen from DomainGang.com has been removed. They offered no explanation via email or otherwise, despite my asking to do so.
I’m speculating that the same IISP.HK employee that was responsible for copying and pasting select articles from bloggers, removed the content in a haste, in order to preserve his job.
However, the remaining 107 articles in the News section of IISP.HK contain material stolen verbatim from other sources, such as Domain Name Wire; for example, “Recruiter Harry Joiner strikes again with two more domain buys” that originates from Andrew Allemann’s article on DNW.
It seems, that the only non-copyrighted material are references and quotes written by IISP.HK about themselves; and their ICANN accreditation. It was those articles that increased my ire towards the incident, because those folks are not “mom and pop” amateurs stealing content, they are a large corporation in Asia.
It’s definitely refreshing seeing that they complied with my request; meanwhile, Chinese domain auction house 4.CN has failed twice to return my emails about trademark violations listed on their web site.
But that will be another story, soon.
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