Hacker News Reader

Comment by fweespeech | Hacker News Reader

This makes one wonder if its a bot sending out these IMAX letters/flagging things for IMAX to send letters to and their lawyer just blindly sends them out without much thought.

View on HN

It's absolutely automated. Whole companies specialize in it (Cyveillance is one - look them up) and routinely patrol the web looking for any use of trademarks and then automatically sending out threats.

I worked on a site selling second-hand goods and there were around a dozen robots patrolling the site every day, completely ignoring the robots.txt (but fetching it in order to specifically look at disallowed links first). They homed in on any trademarks and kept fetching the pages repeatedly.

They became such a bandwidth hog that I had to block their IPs (whole CIDR blocks) - if you blocked the user agent, they immediately re-fetch with a faked IE or Mozilla UA and then used that to trawl the site.

Once they have their 'evidence' of the mark use, they would post (regular snail mail) automated threats with the offending web pages printed and the TM terms highlighted. Typically demanded money (but not always) plus a promise never to use the TM ever again and destroy all computer records containing the TM.

Thankfully the shop owners just ignored them as, like the article points out, it's perfectly legitimate to use a trademark in context. Besides in the country concerned it was a trading description offence to incorrectly describe the goods (fines and loss of license to trade in second hand goods). (i.e. if it is a genuine Gucci handbag, you describe it as that but if it is a fake, you must not mention Gucci. Enforcement officers checked regularly that the rules were followed - surprisingly logical and sensible and trumps any nonsense from an automated TM enforcement bot).

There is no possible way that somebody actually sends out nastygrams to everyone who says "IMAX" on the Web, or even "Gucci" for that matter — otherwise HN would be getting threats any day now, since I just used both. More likely your site was targeted because it looked like a potential outlet for counterfeits or something.

> It's absolutely automated.

Is there really a bot smart enough to scan an article, then not only complain about the direct mention of IMAX (which is easy enough), but also be able to connect that mention of IMAX with a virtual reality system? I find that unlikely, unless the IMAX people had a specialized bot written just for them.

I'd certainly believe that an automated system found the article in the first place, but my instinct is that a human actually sent the letter.

I'd say they (or an outside company they contract with, more likely) probably have a bot that flags articles, but it's ultimately reviewed by a human. I'm sure it is possible though; the letter was completely generic and mentioned nothing specific about the article besides its title and author.

Sounds like exceeding authorized access to me. That's grounds for jailarity, nowadays.

robots.txt files are not mechanisms for authorizing access; they are guidelines designed to instruct user-agents on relevant resources. They essentially say to the user-agent "the content marked as 'disallow' should not be crawled for indexing purposes for unspecified reasons"

Adhering to a robots.txt file is not mandatory, though it does make you a good netizen/curries favour with server admins.

People have actually gotten into trouble for accessing subdirectories which aren't accessible via links from the site's index page. But I'm not sure if that extends to robots.txt, at least as it pertains to stuff which is intended for public consumption. Otherwise people who host sites containing illegal content would just put the entire site in robots.txt.

So is selling counterfeit goods, so I'd guess they figure it's mutually-assured-destruction. And of course it's a lot easier to prove that someone is selling counterfeit goods from your brand than for them to prove that you intentionally wrote a web crawler to exceed unauthorized access. And IIRC it's considered legal to exceed unauthorized access in order to report a crime (I think that's been the case a few times with people who've hacked into computers and then reported child porn they've found to the Feds, which is kinda moral hazard IMO because it'd be very easy for a hacker to frame someone that way).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com