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Comment by textman | Hacker News Reader

OP here. thanks for the suggested links which I will try. I hope I don]t offend any open source folks here but this is commercial software with a EULA that clearly states the software may not be redistributed without written permission so it is a license violation and has cost me some $. I found out from a potential customer that alerted me to this and said he thought my software being on sleazy download sites creates a bad image for me. I am a tiny, 1 person bootstrapped operation so I really don't want to go the DMCA route if I can avoid it.

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In that case you are definitely in the right position legally. The DMCA is about as simple as it gets. No lawyer is needed, its just a form letter. Most likely they will just take it down, only if the uploader submitted a counter-notice would you have to take further legal action.

Agreed. A DMCA is the correct route, won't cost you anything, and will work. Be sure to send it to their upstream providers too.

> Be sure to send it to their upstream providers too.

Not immediately.

> we recommend that you submit a notification pursuant to the DMCA directly to the originating site. In order for a DMCA takedown notice to a system caching service provider to be effective under 17 U.S.C. 512(b), the notice provider must demonstrate either (a) that the content has already been removed from the originating site or (b) the notice provider has obtained a court order requiring the content be removed from the originating site or access to the content to be disabled.

https://www.fastly.com/acceptable-use/

I work in the web hosting industry. A lot of times people will only send dmca complaints to our upstream providers. Those upstream providers require us to take that information offline or else they'll actually cut off our access. It's a dirty tactic but it is effective.

> sleazy download sites

Shame. Download.cnet.com (and cnet itself) were pretty top-tier in the early public-Internet days (mid to late 90's). Guess it's a slum now

I myself have downloaded so many softwares from the cnet.com but now I don't trust it.

FWIW, I consider myself an open source person, but that doesn't mean that code that isn't open source should be freely redistributed with no regards for the original license.

I wonder how many people are still in the original "all software should be free" mindset.

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