Gold Alert (goldalert.com) & Copyright Theft
Gold Alert br media gregory robin (goldalert.com) of san francisco, CA, USA is yet another dishonest dealer who has used our copyright images without permission.
Copyright Theft is Dishonest - Can You Trust This Dealer?
Using other people's copyright images is illegal, it is dishonest, and it is unethical. Using the hard work of a fellow dealer to sell the same goods in competition with him demonstrates an extremely low standard of ethics. We would not recommend anybody to transact business with this person or company.
Gold Alert's "Home or Index" Page
Who would have thought such honest (although they do not claim this) respectable
people would resort to stealing images from their competitors?
What's Wrong?
Using the work of other people to pass off as your own is dishonest. We can identify at least one of the photos on
Gold Alert's "Gold Price Falls to $1,120 – Canada’s Gold Miners Drop" (January 13th, 2010 - 11:57 am | by GoldAlert
) page as using our photograph. This is the Canadian One Ounce Gold Maple Coin Reverse.
Our Opinion
Copyright - Innocent Infringement?
There is apparently such a thing as "innocent copyright infringement), however we believe that it is extremely rare. If people do not realise it is wrong, this is possibly because they prefer and choose to remain ignorant.
In any case, this particular infringer has a copyright notice on each page of his website stating "Copyright © 2009 Gold Alert"!
Anonymous!
As often happens with this type of low quality website, there is no "About Us" page, and no clue as to the owner or author. We think sites like this should be avoided.
To find more, we performed a domain search:
Registration Service Provided By: Namemedia, Inc.
Contact:
Domain name: goldalert.com
Administrative Contact:
br media
gregory robin ()
grerobin@gmail.com
+1.2125187205
Fax:
2246 francisco
san francisco, 94123
US
Technical Contact:
br media
gregory robin grerobin@gmail.com
+1.2125187205
Fax:
2246 francisco
san francisco, 94123
US
Registrant Contact:
br media
gregory robin ()
Fax:
2246 francisco
san francisco, 94123
US
Status: Active
Name Servers:
DNS1.STABLETRANSIT.COM
DNS2.STABLETRANSIT.COM
Creation date: 10 Mar 2004 19:42:00
Expiration date: 10 Mar 2019 19:42:00
"br media" owns about 14 other domains
Malware Virus
When we tried to access one page on goldalert.com which was showing a copy of our gold maple leaf coin, we saw a Malware Alert.
We are still trying to investigate this further, but are being cautious because of the nature of any potential threat to our computer security.
According to Google Image Search, the copy of our images was actually hosted at:
http://tomgrad.com/cvf.php?q=canada-maple-leaf-gold-coin
Although right-clicking and looking at "Properties" shows it to be at:
http://www.goldalert.com/_layouts/images/articles/Canadian_Maple_Leaf_Gold_Coin.png
Clearly there is something very fishy about one or both of these sites, we have yet to figure out what.
Copyright Notice
Please see our "Copyright" page for further information.
Copyright Infringements Remedies
Our suggested draft remedies for copyright abusers dependent on category - competitors, bloggers, pseudo-expert & advice sites acting as eBay & Google portals, eBay & other auction site sellers.
Other Copyright Abuse
Buying Gold Coins & Bars on eBay
Selling Gold Coins & Bars on eBay
Copyright Thieves on eBay
We already have a page naming and shaming dealers using our images without permission. It's time we did the same for eBay, although if we include them all, this could be a very long page.
Alphabetical Listing of Other Copyright Theft Sites
Other Scams
Other Web Sites
All comments about copyright also cover content of all our other websites including, but not limited to:-
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