Awhile ago I wrote about how my friend Cathy Young had to go through some bizarre, false, plagiarism claims. Meanwhile Mark Morgan is very worried about the implications of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act — Mark uses his site to let people post stories and essays, but if someone should post a plagiarized story, the DMCA potentially exposes him to a rather large degree of liability.
All of which reminded me of a very strange situation I faced in the summer of 1998. One of the things I’m really interested in is libertarianism. At the time I was dissatisfied with the libertarian-oriented web directories — they either weren’t very complete or weren’t updated very often. So I decided to make my own and registered the LibertySearch.Com domain name.
Then out of the blue I started getting some nasty e-mail about the site. I turned out one of the libertarian link sites I had visited and been dissatisfied with was behind the e-mails. The woman who ran the site decided that even though her site was a directory of sites while mine was a directory to specific articles rather than sites, that I “stolen” her idea. She posted a wonderful notice on the front of her site linking to mine saying, “Does this site look familiar? It’s a damn good rip off of the old Freedom Finder. Too bad he doesn’t have a webcam diva fueling his traffic! People who copy things suck.”
She was annoying, but the problem was people believed her and the claim started showing up on other libertarian sites by people who thought I’d literally gone to her site and stolen everything and put it on my site (which would have been pointless because her site was pretty much useless since it listed very few resources).
It took me several months to clear up that mess. It’s a shame she was so petty because she let a pretty good domain name, freedomfinder.com, slip out of her hands and now it’s used by a registrar rather than for a libertarian site.