So, I’m not going to link to the site, because I don’t want them to have a single link between me and them. But it appears that someone registered my old domain (which is my former legal name) and then scraped the wayback machine and reposted my old website so that they could sneak in some scammy links to places like essay selling sites and the like.
To say I’m pissed off about it is to undersell my feelings by the distance between the Earth and the Moon.
I’ve shot off emails to their domain name registrar (namesilo.com), filed complaints with Google, emailed the place supplying their whois privacy protection (privacyguardian.org), and I’m about to start hunting down their host and filing DMCA notices for every single page of mine they’ve got hosted.
That’ll be hundreds.
I absolutely hope they get their ass banned, and I’m going to do everything I can to make it happen.
It wouldn’t bother me nearly as much, but this site they took and reposted is a personal site of mine and it could very well harm my reputation to have their scammy links mixed in with my old content about writing and authorship. I had interviews with authors on it, and I had a lot of personal stuff there, because it was a personal domain based on my legal name.
Their scammy links are a stain on my reputation as a person and as a writer.
In fact, now that I think about it, I might also approach Writer Beware about this since this is a name connected to my writing, and the site itself is about writing. It could be a good warning to other authors to be wary of letting domains go, even if you know you’ll never use it again, if it’s possible someone could scrape up your former website and repost it.
It’s not that domain that I care about, it’s the stolen website that was put up on the domain, as if the site is still in existence. They’re infringing my copyright, and they’re doing it blatantly—as if registering a domain gives them the right to my copyrighted content.
Absolutely not.
Update: Seems Cloudflare is masking the IP address of their host, but I filed a DMCA there anyway.