Stop Piracy Now > History

What Sparked the Need for Stop Piracy Now

As most veterans of the Internet know, the nomenclature "World Wide Web" or "WWW" can be synonymous with "Wild Wild West." It can also translate into "World War Weird." Were the stakes not as high as they are, such clever banter and wordplay might be enjoyable. But just as there are casualties to any war, there have been many casualties to the wide open and largely unregulated environment that has become a mainstay to most people's daily lives, the Internet. There are those with integrity who never had a chance and those who never will know just how successful they might have become were it not for the unconscionable tactics employed by those with no regard for the law, for a sense of morality, or for fair play; they are the scourge of today's business landscape -- Internet pirates.

Ours is a story of a company that has always, and continues to this day, to fend off Internet piracy, no matter the cost. As an Internet company that began soaring with the dot com boom and survived the dot com bust, MetroGuide.com, Inc. ("MetroGuide"), has been doing business long enough and with enough prominence to have been attacked repeatedly by one form or another of internet piracy. To tell the history of "Stop Piracy Now" is to recount some of these early assaults and how MetroGuide chose to fight back.

Domain Name Theft

In the mid-1990's, just as the Internet was beginning to enter into the public consciousness, MetroGuide's founder established a website designed to serve as a portal to direct potential customers to one or more participating travel agencies. Visitors completed an on-line travel request form which was then routed to the travel agent able to fulfill the travel need. In the event the customer booked travel with the agent, the agent paid a modest fee for the successful lead. In some circumstances, the agent paid for traffic directed to webpages that had been designed to contain travel information and contact information intended to generate customers. Sounds like a pretty fair arrangement, especially back in the mid-1990's, doesn't it.

One agent, not happy with an arrangement that had been ongoing for years, decided that it not only should no longer have to pay for the traffic but could lay claim to the domain name. The matter went to court; the judge had no idea what the Internet was, what a domain name was, what it meant to host a web site, what Internet traffic was, and set about to solve a problem he could not begin to grasp. A large sum of money spent in attorneys' fees later, the domain name remained with its rightful owner, but the process of getting there was calamitous and filled with distasteful compromise. Thus germinated the seeds for what would become "Stop Piracy Now."

Domain Name Hijacking

MetroGuide has always been especially conscientious about protecting its intellectual property. As anyone who owns more than one domain name knows, finding the right domain name registrar is not an easy matter. After doing its due diligence MetroGuide found a preferred registrar and consolidated most of its domain name holdings. Due to an obscure gap in the registrar's on-line security, Internet pirates working out of Uzbekistan hacked their way into MetroGuide's secure domain name account and began the process of transferring away prize domain names by first changing the ownership and administrative contact information. Because the hacking efforts resulted in a change in the account password, the criminal act and trespass was caught before the domain names could be absconded with. Upon being notified of the breach, the registrar committed the programming efforts to close the hole and future disasters were averted. Had the transfers been successful, one could only imagine the time and costs associated with tracking down and reclaiming precious domain names, many in active service, from some phantom entity in Uzbekistan. At the time of the break in, state and federal criminal investigative and legal agencies were notified. While intentions were noble, much of the terminology was new, there was little appreciation of how to proceed, and at best the very early stages of a fact finding process began.

Content Theft

Sometimes reputation and quality are a curse. On the Internet this is so because reputation and quality are two attributes of web pages that search engines look to in ranking search results. You'd think that would be a good thing. And it is, until those very attributes make you the target of a freeloader who doesn't have the interest in engaging in good old hard work and intends to freeload of your site's link equity. MetroGuide, which has had that interest as far back as 1996, has brought several lawsuits against persons and entities who simply cut and pasted hundreds and, in one case, thousands of pages of original content, including its websites' look and feel. Despite the fact that it is obvious one should be held liable, both civilly and, in some cases criminally, for such conduct, the defendants MetroGuide sued didn't seem to care. The Court has issued permanent injunctions against all defendants to have been sued, and in many cases, the domain names used to host the infringing content have been turned over as damages to MetroGuide. All of these domain names are now hosting web pages that are part of the Stop Piracy Now Network.

Content Theft Redux

Unbelievably, more than one infringer who had a permanent injunction issued against it nonetheless chose to infringe again. In one case MetroGuide brought a second lawsuit which resulted in another permanent injunction and disgorgement of a domain name. In a second case, the infringer took responsibility immediately and removed the websites and content.

TypoSquatting

Some content infringers were not content simply to be violators of the copyright laws. They went further and sought to violate trademark laws as well. Notwithstanding that MetroGuide has been using many of its most famous service marks continuously for almost a decade, one defendant obtained domain names that incorporated the marks and did so in a manner that was especially confusing. By bringing legal action, MetroGuide was able to obtain ownership of the domain names that typosquatted on MetroGuide's intellectual property. These domain names also are now hosting web pages that are part of the Stop Piracy Now Network.

Scumware

Just when one might think the Internet was beginning to clean itself up, the loyal staff of MetroGuide woke up one day to find that all their hard work creating great content, graphic web pages, and quality travel services, was being forcibly hidden beneath a layer of advertisements directing MetroGuide customers off to third party competitor sites. And at present, there is nothing MetroGuide can do but join in the fight against companies that engage in such tactics and hope the legislature and courts eventually see fit to put an end to this reprehensible conduct.

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Stop Piracy Now > History