Is it legal to redirect banned IPs to gay websites?

londonTiger

I have a situation with an ex business partner, he's visiting my website and copying it. We had a disagreement and I pulled out from the partnership, website was mine we didn't formalise the business relationship. He tried to screw me over by withholding my money. I decided to split and take my website and marketing resources with me.

Now he's got his employees rto clone my site. I blocked their IPs and forwarded to a gay website. (they're very conservative, homophobic type). The actually website was very unscrupulous, basically locks you onto the website with 1000+ promtss that you have to 'OK' and is right in the middle of a porno.

The next day after setting it up, I got a really angry call from one of his employees. The employee should not have my private phone number, the business owner gave my phone number to the employee without getting permission, he is the kid that will leak my home address to his employee [read: henchmen]. He basically threatened to "come down with boys and beat me up". I didn't take the threats too seriously, but now that I think about it they might just do it. I want to report it to the police in case anytging does happen in future then the police will have a solid record of this incident.

I'd like to know if I've broken the law by redirecting them to the gay website. You REALY REALLY SHould NOT visit the website. But if you really must know what website is it its

url removed - probably best as some people who can't help themselves will visit the website and then complain to mods. If you must know google meatspin

I'm going to go asnd report it to a police station and some point, but if I've broken the law in the first place it changes things

Guardsman

You boys should just kiss and make up.

johnnyboyrebel

Firstly, a very clever move. I have heard all about the google hammer thing and a very good trick to play on someone who is either harrassing or just !!!!ing you off!

I can't see how you have broken the law other than if your ex partner has legal rights over the website. It sounds like you may have nothing in writing saying this then sure you're fine. So have you forwarded any visitor of the site onto the gay site or just specifically for their IP's? Just wanted to make sure you weren't forwarding on everyone to it!

T_T_2

Let's put it in list form and shall we?

Stealing Intellectual Property - Not allowed, but not something for the police to deal with
Redirecting someone who visits based on their IP - Gray area but either way, not a matter for the police
Storing someone's IP so as to redirect them - Data Protection Issue, again not a matter for police
Threats of violence - The only thing that the police could get involved in, but can you prove it?

What you should have done in the first instance was to retain a solicitor and have him send a cease and desist letter asking them to stop stealing your intellectual property as this is prohibited by the terms of use of your website (which you will now write if you don't have any).

You shouldn't have antagonised this guy so you are hardly blameless in the matter.

londonTiger

T_T wrote: »

Stealing Intellectual Property - Not allowed, but not something for the police to deal with
Redirecting someone who visits based on their IP - Gray area but either way, not a matter for the police
Storing someone's IP so as to redirect them - Data Protection Issue, again not a matter for police
Threats of violence - The only thing that the police could get involved in, but can you prove it?

sorry to clarify, they're not cloning my website, they're copying my site but not 1:1, basically reqriting the content in their own words, but they've used a lot of the same stock images that I have on my website which I don't think they paid the license for. But it would be petty to complain to the stock image unless it was getty images which have a large legal department.

storing ips. Ips came from the site analytic, i didn't steal their ip address. they visit my website 10 times a day, and often search on google directly for my company name. I only blacklisted one ip and it clearly was the "correct" one. From a web marketers point of view, it's very easy to tell which are legitimate visitors and which are staff etc. Also which are just competitors brown nosing the site.

I can also tell from analytics who they hired to copy my website for instance. I got several visitors from vworker.com and I went onto voworker and looked up ex-business partners website and sure enough there was a project pitching for proposals for "copying another website".

johnnyboyrebel

Looks like the other poster has better advice on the legalities than me but from a tech point of view it may be worthwhile re-creating the site and using a robots.txt file to prevent the site being cloned again. Sure this may mean a re-design to make yours unique again but it prevents your ex partner doing the same thing.

johnnyboyrebel

londonTiger wrote: »

sorry to clarify, they're not cloning my website, they're copying my site but not 1:1, basically reqriting the content in their own words, but they've used a lot of the same stock images that I have on my website which I don't think they paid the license for. But it would be petty to complain to the stock image unless it was getty images which have a large legal department.

storing ips. Ips came from the site analytic, i didn't steal their ip address. they visit my website 10 times a day, and often search on google directly for my company name. I only blacklisted one ip and it clearly was the "correct" one. From a web marketers point of view, it's very easy to tell which are legitimate visitors and which are staff etc. Also which are just competitors brown nosing the site.

I can also tell from analytics who they hired to copy my website for instance. I got several visitors from vworker.com and I went onto voworker and looked up ex-business partners website and sure enough there was a project pitching for proposals for "copying another website".

Ignore my other post about preventing cloning with robots.txt then as I misunderstood

SnowTiger

londonTiger wrote: »

I'd like to know if I've broken the law by redirecting them to the gay website. You REALY REALLY SHould NOT visit the website. But if you really must know what website is it its

url removed - probably best as some people who can't help themselves will visit the website and then complain to mods. If you must know google meatspin

I'm going to go asnd report it to a police station and some point, but if I've broken the law in the first place it changes things

Redirecting visitors to your website elsewhere is not illegal. That's (partly) how the Interweb works.

If the content you're redirecting to is illegal (or, perhaps, inappropriate for the your website's target audience), you may have a few problems. :rotfl:

You're fortunate that your ex-business partner is using a fixed IP address. Most home users and some business users don't.

There are also several ways to avoid IP blocking. I'm guessing your ex-business partner isn't aware of them. :j

macman

I suggest that you take some proper legal advice to dissolve your (ex) business relationship in a sensible manner.

debitcardmayhem

Oops i read

Is it legal to redirect banned IPs to gay websites?

as banned MPs, I'll get me coat

londonTiger

macman wrote: »

I suggest that you take some proper legal advice to dissolve your (ex) business relationship in a sensible manner.

there was no formal agreement, so there is not need to dissolve anything.

Some background
he's got 3 reports about him on ripoffreport.com from customers because he takes money from people and takes forever supplying goods/paying loans back.

When we were working together I asked him to form a ltd company and sort out the share ownerships and everything, but he kept pushing it back. His mistake!

Lousy with debts

He then borrowed £1200 for a short term loan and took forever paying it back, it got ridiculous to the point that I had to phone him 2-3 times a week to ask him to pay, each time made a dumb scuse to delay paying. In the end I was at the end of my tether and just pulled out from the business deal. I got some money back but not all. He's now trying to compete with me the OP is part of the long seriess of issues with him (something that I should have expected, and it's not like him to take the defeat and move along, so he's needlessly going to try and copy me).

Blacklisted
he's also blacklisted from getting a payment terminal as it was revoked 2 times, and other issues.

i'm a marketer primarily not a businessman. The plan was that I do all the marketing, hire designers and programmers and work on getting traffic to the website, and he fund the business and hire staff to run it day to day.

but I ended up doing almost all of these things myself which cost me time and money. I was then looking at the prospect of opening a merchant account and terminal, then I realised that if I sign up under my name and then hand him control over the terminal he's going to do so lousy transactions and get me blacklisted as well.

In the end I decided it's best of I go at it alone. It's too much risk working with him and he's bringing very little to the table.

Poor deal, not giving 50% ownership when they bring so little to the business
The only thing he was doing was answering the telephone calls and dealing with b2b enquiries which is basically 3 calls a day max. he was talking to me like I betrayed him so bad and ripped him off and took advantager of his time etc.

The fact of the matter was he his name is dotted all over the web for not providing goods, he's blacklisted and has poor credit history, and he's a liability.

There is no point going down the legal route, it will just benefit the solicitors and get him a fat comission and nothing will come of it. Him repolicating my website is no threat what so ever, he doesn't have the marketing skills to get the customers that I can. If anyything he's wasting his time developing the websites and stuff so waste of resources for him.

I should add, he was the financiar so he bought all the business equipment and paid for suppliers, I am happy to let him keep it (even if I wasn't, I have no legal rights over them)