What to do when someone clones your site? | Hacker News Reader

What to do when someone clones your site?

11 pointsaiagents_dir16 comments

Our AI Agents Directory had its entire website cloned at another domain. The cloner copied design and content with minor tweaks.

I reached out to them, but they plan do nothing with it.

I’ve noticed this is happening to other indie makers too—people are seeing their hard work copied and claimed by others with little effort. It seems like this issue is growing, especially with the rise of AI.

As indie creators, we put a lot of time and effort into creating unique content. But how do we protect our work from being copied? What can we do to ensure our original work isn’t taken and used by others?

Thanks for all your advice!

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Given how modern "AI" works, There is a certain irony in an AI focused company finding its content slurped up and spat back out with minor tweaks and then feeling blindsided. Do you vet all agents you advertise for how well they pay for all their training data?

Thank you. Agreed.

With the new rush of LLMs being everywhere, copying and pasting will be common practice.

Trying to protect something that is unprotected like open information while benefitting from this exact transaction is a great irony.

It's just a bad business idea. If OP wants to make a directory it would make much more sense to open-source it and accept it will be continuously churned by AI

Find out where the domain is registered with a whois command or goto who.is, then find their copyright/DMCA email and submit a complaint.

For example if it's Namecheap their details to complain are here - https://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx...

GoDaddy here - https://supportcenter.godaddy.com/ipclaims/copyright/infring...

They should take it down pretty quickly if it's a direct copy!

And DMCA takedowns to the webserver's hosting provider

I know it's frowned upon here, but there are commercial and open source[1] javascript obfuscators with domain locking functionalities. If your site is already a SPA, they can make it very painful to just lift it (not impossible, obviously, because everything is reverse-engineerable, but the point is to discourage the majority of thiefs). You can be creative: for example, if whoever cloned your site is located in China, you can redirect users to prohibited content if you catch them running your javascript on the wrong domain. If your site calls APIs, you can call them in the wrong way on purpose to get the cloned site banned. You can also triggers those side effects randomly in order to make it more frustrating and untenable to serve your cloned site. This obviously presupposes you're doing all the rendering from the client side.

[1] https://obfuscator.io/

Also, compiling part of your business / checking logic to various Web Assembly modules might make it even more difficult for the thieves to reverse engineer. Of course this would mean more maintenance on your side as well, so you need to choose a reasonable ratio of maintaining complexity vs. fucking with them.

this ia a good point that i need to consider going forward with engineering. thanks

If they’re using images you’re hosting you could always put in a rewrite rule to replace the images with goatse. I used to do this back in the day. It’s not going to solve the problem of cloning but it’ll give you so catharsis and get ‘em to stop it.

Replace images with ads to your own site.

No much we can do. Someone copied two my tools days ago, he didn't even change the UI. When I pointed out, he just said, everybody did this and I cannot judge him.

that's realy sad. at the end of the day there are a lot of bad actors but maybe at some point some techsolution might be created to prevent coping, or at least doing it with reference link

Minimal effort means something is trivial to copy.

Googling the concept of your website, I see dozens of options and they all look similar. It’s a relatively simple site concept.

I would suggest putting more effort into coming up with a more original idea. It will be harder to copy when your site has functionality that isn’t just “here is a list of AI agents.”

Cope. HTML and CSS is delivered client-side, for the past 10-odd years any so-inclined asshole dev could slurp up and reproduce your website instantly.

> But how do we protect our work from being copied? What can we do to ensure our original work isn’t taken and used by others?

Simply put; you keep it to yourself, and never share it with another living soul. Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

> Simply put; you keep it to yourself, and never share it with another living soul.

Server-side rendering and mandatory logins can go a long way toward making it painful for others to slurp up your IP.

If you build your products the way all the cool kids have been the last ~half decade (i.e., shipping the entire product & business logic to the client), then you may find this kind of frustration inevitable.

valid point. i will need to put more effort in security to minimaze impact of the cloning.

> Simply put; you keep it to yourself, and never share it with another living soul.

Hey, that's what I do. Also cuts down maintenance, complaints, cost, judgementalism, you name it.

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