Gah! Or, Dear Penthouse, I never thought this would happen to me...

[rivkat]

Tzikeh pointed out this site, which is offering various fan fiction stories for sale (along with what I presume are other, nonfannish stories published on the web, but I'm just guessing there). Imagine my surprise to find a story of mine listed on the XF page. I'm almost amused that they picked that story rather than, say, one of MustangSally's standalones, which gives you considerably more bang for your -- uh, 30 pence, apparently.

Highlander, Star Wars, Star Trek: TNG and XF were the main fandoms I saw -- Highlander is not explicitly listed, but it's the main entry under "slash." There also was some X-Men in there randomly. As for the XF, the selection principle was mysterious at best, though there were some good ones in there that I actually remembered.

I'm going to write and demand the removal of my story. Who knows what will happen next. Any UK folks out there willing to help a girl out with UK notice-and-takedown procedures? (Or perhaps general principles for getting the offer to sell withdrawn, since it's not clear the story is actually online.)

Comments

[cschick.livejournal.com]

I used whois to look up the domain. While the domain isn't registered via the host (it doesn't have to be), they're using webmasters.com domain/name servers.

Domain servers in listed order:

NS22.WEBMASTERS.COM 66.118.157.69
NS23.WEBMASTERS.COM 207.142.128.51

While they could be simply using name services at webmaster.com, it's a pretty good bet that they're hosted there (if they were just using name services, the setup would probably be different). Even if they're only using webmaster.com name services, webmasters.com can still take them off the web by refusing to serve the domain.

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

The technical problem is that they're not hosting the files, but offering them for sale on CD-ROM, so the web hosting company may well be less willing to help out, but I may go that route too.

Thanks!

[cschick.livejournal.com]

Yeah. But there's a couple of different ways you might be able to attack this (I haven't had the time to track down their TOS but I might later).

Most of the non-adult web hosts not only forbid hosting adult material but listing adult material for sale. Whether or not they consider written material to be adult material (talk about a quagmire; we've had to get written statements from our commercial hosts stating that written material is not equal to adult material), he's listing it as adult material.

Many hosts will also forbid the listing for sale of infringing materials as well as the hosting of infringing materials.

I have a meeting in 18 minutes that I have to prepare for, but I'll check into this for you later.

[cschick.livejournal.com]

Here's what I found:

http://www.webmasters.com/policy.htm

Prohibited Use

Although we do not have content restrictions, all content must be obtained legally and used in a legal manner. Below are examples of what we consider to be illegal content, and therefore prohibited use of service:

...

2. Utilize the service to misappropriate or infringe the patents, copyrights, trademarks or other intellectual property rights of any third party;

You could make the argument that listing infringing material for sale is utilizing the service to infringe the copyrights of a third party.

Their other reference to copyright:

2. WEBMASTERS.COM's facilities may only be used for lawful purposes. Transmission, distribution, or storage of any information, data or material in violation of United States or state regulation or law, or by the common law, is prohibited. This includes, but is not limited to, material protected by copyright, trademark, trade secret, or any other statute. WEBMASTERS.COM reserves the right to remove such illegal material from its servers.

may or may not be helpful . . .

Having investigated a wee bit further: I'm pretty much convinced that they're hosted by webmasters.com (and not just using name services). The IP address of a1fl.com is within the webmasters.com IP block (in fact, it's just one number off from their primary name server; IP blocks are distributed in sets of eight).

Of course, the guy can simply move on--the web site has been at that address since May 2001, according to web.archive.org (although, I didn't want to go into the archive of the site from work so I don't know if the XF stuff has been there the full time) and he directly owns the domain. ICANN and/or bulkregister are probably not going to be willing to suspend the domain for this usage.

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the additional information. I will contact Webmasters if I don't get a satisfactory response from the site directly.

[cschick.livejournal.com]

*hugs*

Given this, and the Buffy/Smallville/Dark Angel/etc author who was plagiarizing XF authors for four years and about a hundred fics and nobody noticed . . . I want to go pound my head against something nice and hard. It might feel better.