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Comment by hartator | Hacker News Reader

> But before deleting it, I copied the IP address so I could open a support ticket on DigitalOcean. I figured they would like to know that someone is illegally distributing content on one of their servers. Now that they know the IP address, they can shut it down.

It’s also possible you exposed a web service that wasn’t meant to be public.

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This. The article was interesting but the copyright knighthood put me off.

What if the person was simply serving those files for himself over the internet (I've done it countless times) and Google caught it because the author was careless with handling DNS entries? Now DO has an IP and an accusation, more power is given to the DMCA-strike-first-ask-later status quo, all for what? It's not child pornography we're talking about, it's books for Christ's sake. There's no harm, it does not affect your life, why go through the effort of bringing trouble to someone else because of your own lack of care with sensitive issues such as DNS entries?

Then the webserver admin should work out how to stop google crawling his site and stop his site responding as any DNS name.

Default Nginx and Apache configs serve all IPs. If you don't share your server IP, it's reasonable to think your content won't be indexed by Google.

Google seems to be very good at finding new never seen before content. If you don't want it public then put some kind of authentication on it.

But Google also always respects robots.txt. If you don't want your content to appear just put a deny all for all domains. You can easily set that up in nginx by returning static content, you don't even need to create a file in the right directories.

Unless directory listing is turned on, I can’t see how Google would be able to index these PDFs given that no external links point to them.

And presumably it doesn't guess PATHs because Larry Page isn't in jail.

> What if the person was simply serving those files for himself over the internet (I've done it countless times) and Google caught it because the author was careless with handling DNS entries?

Author here, I reached out to DO because as a fellow content creator I felt morally obligated to report this.

I wouldn't like someone pirating my content and the people who created those 390,000+ PDFs put a lot of their time into making their content.

> There's no harm, it does not affect your life, why go through the effort of bringing trouble to someone else because of your own lack of care with sensitive issues such as DNS entries?

It does affect my life. I noticed now that there has been a couple of copyright infringement notices submit towards my domain (because of this PDF incident).

When you run an online business and your website is your entire brand, something like that is a big deal.

Also if you Googled for my name before I removed the A record, that SSL subdomain was coming up which was competing with my actual site's content. Not good!

> Also if you Googled for my name before I removed the A record, that SSL subdomain was coming up which was competing with my actual site's content. Not good!

Maybe do 301 redirections from ssl.nickjanetakis.com to your homepage, it can help with SEO.

A personal library of 390,000 books? That's quite the collection. I wonder how much that person paid for those books?

There's something very /r/latestagecapitalism about this but I can't quite put my finger on it.

It's not clear how OP reached that number, though. If they went by the number of results reported by Google, that's only an rough estimation.

You guessed it. I based it on the Google search results.

I did go back dozens upon dozens of pages (just skipping around) to spot check it and there were a ton of pages.

It's a lot less results now because I wrote this article 6 days before I published it. At this point the A record has been removed for almost a week.

> What if the person was simply serving those files for himself over the internet

There are a couple of reasons to believe that this is not the case.

First, there were thousands of them. Someone having thousands of books is not unreasonable, of course, but both the breadth and depth of this collection is such that it is extremely unlikely it is someone's personal library.

Second, the PDFs aren't the actual books. They are just short blurbs describing the book and containing download deep links into bookfreenow.com. A couple examples [1] [2]. Clicking to create an account so you can start downloading redirects through some ad companies (and possibly some shady affiliate marketing companies), eventually reaching some download site (I think) that tells you no free slots are available and asks you to make an account.

(The bookfreenow.com pages for each book all seem to be the same template with just the book info substituted. Even the comments on the each page are from the same people, at the same times, and say the exact same things except they have the correct book title on each page. They aren't even trying to make it look like the comments are legit).

[1] http://bookfreenow.com/downloads/the-lm3900-a-new-current-di...

[2] http://bookfreenow.com/downloads/essential-orthopaedics-by-j...

Shady business tactics don't make it illegal, and doesn't warrant an hosting provider block. There is worst on the Internet.

The only thing "shady" going on here is this discussion's unquestioned acceptance of propaganda language -- "piracy"/"pirate" -- as a descriptive term for alleged copyright infringement; copyright infringement which nobody has proven occurred in the first place. See https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Piracy for more on how "piracy" is propaganda.

Sounds like my personal library actually.

Well that’s a lot harder to explain in charitable terms! So is this even piracy, or just some kind of scam based on the promise of piracy?

probably the second one. at some point in the signup process it will offer a free trial and require a credit card. not sure what happens next because I've never proceeded, but I'm pretty sure they don't actually have the books they claim to have

It's a scam. I was searching some ebook for free and there are many links like that. It's funny that scammers might be more successful saving paid books than copyright warriors :)

It's funny that scammers might be more successful saving paid books than copyright warriors

You'll never actually get the book, because they don't have it. It's a scam to try to trap people who are trying to find free downloads of ebooks rather than paying for them.

(It's also kind of a funny definition of "save" you have there. With all due respect, if you want to save paid books, you should -- crazy as this may sound -- pay for them.)

Saving is wrong word, I guess. I mean that someone who's trying to find a pirated book will just stop trying after few unsuccessful attempts. For example copyright owners are forcing Google to hide search results with pirated content. But may be polluting search results with fake content is better strategy.

You can find the same thing for movie piracy in video form on YouTube. And old Napster/Kazaa had it for music files. The medium is the scammessage :-)

I would agree with you in principle, but this is just another one of those spam sites that flood the search results with useless crap when you're looking for bookz; there's no copyright infringement here, just spam. They're easily distinguished from "real" PDFs of books because the text clearly doesn't make any sense.

Thus, in a "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" sort of way, I'm thankful for the OP for removing another fake ebook site from the Internet.

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