[Biggy]

i want to relate a personal story to all of this, one where this is the first time im publicly stating these facts. i manage the melissa midwest affiliate program, not sure if many people here knew that.

a few months ago, someone was ripping off our content and using melissa in advertisiements for their live cam/chat affiliate program. we sent them a nice email to remove it, your standard email where most people cooperate or ignore it until we contact their host. But not this time, this time we got back a very interesting response. They sent us back an email claiming melissa works for them and they had an agreement with her. how laughable that is. we created a thread on the biggest adult webmaster board "so and so company is a bunch of thieving content scammers." this program buys ad space on webmaster boards and exhibits at major shows, although they are not a huge company. what we posted was 100% truthful, and we had a fucked up email from them to prove it. they then responded publicly and eventually apologized, made some bullshit claims about how our photos aren't copyrighted and how they can use them, but nonetheless agreed to take it down and apologized. this is where the story gets interesting..

in the background of all this, they then emailed the owner of the board demanding to take our thread down, that they were paid sponsors of the board and some of their webmaster shows. they responded nicely and said they wouldnt, that we have provided sufficient evidence that backed up our claims. Later in that thread, some new usernames surfaced bashing us, calling melissa all sorts of names and doing whatever they could to defame us and have it sound realistic - personal insults and whatnot. A little ip referencing, and guess what - the ips of the new usernames matched the ips of the email sent to the board by the program and the username where they apologized in public on the board.

this is not an isolated incident, and will be a problem into the future as the internet expands and as message boards expands. it clearly is a problem already claimed by many. lets not forget all the forums out there that rip off people's content, trade passwords, credit card information, and all the other illegal activity which message boards help facilitate. this a law i feel pretty strongly for, the benefits outweigh the costs IMO. people will need to think twice about what they post when they make accusatory statements. if you experience downtime with a host, complaining about it will be fine. if sales suck with a sponsor, that as well. this law wont eliminate any of that.