Time to...
Update the blogroll...
In a most unfortunate situation, summarized well by Dan Solove over at Concurring Opinions, popular U Chicago law student (and alum) blog Crescat Sententia has been hijacked by an SEO (just read the link!). The comments over at CO focus on possible legal courses of action (or the frustrating lack thereof -- a ton of IP, trademark, copyright and internet law issues apparently arise and fall. I leave the legal discussion to those here who are better informed than I on these areas of law. I wonder, however, if there might be a satisfying market (i.e. non-legal) approach to be taken here. Since these SEOs are essentially basing their business on abetting a fraud on the search engines (hijacking popular domain names with a certain number of hits, then reselling them to users who will likely introduce vastly different content), I wonder if the ever increasing victims of this practice might convince Google and other large search engines, in order to protect the integrity of their results, to set up some kind of office to "reset" their hit counting mechanisms (just as they might do in more conventional cases of "google bombing")? That would reduce the value of the hijacked site, thereby reducing the economic incentive for these predatory SEOs.
In any case, discuss away, and Armen, please update the blogroll to reflect the new address: www.crescatsententia.net!
In a most unfortunate situation, summarized well by Dan Solove over at Concurring Opinions, popular U Chicago law student (and alum) blog Crescat Sententia has been hijacked by an SEO (just read the link!). The comments over at CO focus on possible legal courses of action (or the frustrating lack thereof -- a ton of IP, trademark, copyright and internet law issues apparently arise and fall. I leave the legal discussion to those here who are better informed than I on these areas of law. I wonder, however, if there might be a satisfying market (i.e. non-legal) approach to be taken here. Since these SEOs are essentially basing their business on abetting a fraud on the search engines (hijacking popular domain names with a certain number of hits, then reselling them to users who will likely introduce vastly different content), I wonder if the ever increasing victims of this practice might convince Google and other large search engines, in order to protect the integrity of their results, to set up some kind of office to "reset" their hit counting mechanisms (just as they might do in more conventional cases of "google bombing")? That would reduce the value of the hijacked site, thereby reducing the economic incentive for these predatory SEOs.
In any case, discuss away, and Armen, please update the blogroll to reflect the new address: www.crescatsententia.net!
posted by Anonymous at 4:44 AM
2 Comments:
I'm holding out in the even www.crescatsentetia.org makes a comeback.
That this is a "hot IP topic" is why I'm staying far, far away from IP; sure, a lot of people care and it has important implications, bla, bla, bla, but seriously, does one who is hot and bothered to litigate this issue have a soul?
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