US judge orders hundreds of sites "de-indexed" from Google, Facebook

1. Set up OSCommerce or Magento site with design roughly copied from legit rights owner. 2. Get local 'middleman' to donate paypal account in return for small cut 3. Buy a bucket load of adwords 4. Run massive scale xrumer / scrapebox / etc 'SEO' campaign 5. Repeat thousands of times over

Getting domains de-indexed via the DMCA process on Google, never mind taking after-the-fact legal action, is just treating the symptoms.

Given that Paypal and Google are at the forefront of this issue, they are where the responsibility lies in terms of preventing the sites from transacting: by denying them a payment method and heaps of traffic respectively. I am sure that both companies are working hard on this issue, but having looked at the problem over the past couple of years, it hasn't always seemed to be that much of a priority.

Beyond that it is basically a question of international trade treaties and better local law enforcement in the territories where the offenders operate (predominately China) - i.e. NOT an easy fix.

You can understand the frustration of rights owners who are obviously going to take every opportunity to use legal action domestically. If they get a fairly tech illiterate decision in their favour that has potential dangerous consequences for the internet at large, then this is as much because they are just swinging at everything (back to those moles) than any great desire on their part to restrict legitimate rights and freedoms.

Finally, it is important to realise that this is not a victimless crime. What brought this home to me was a few years back when I overheard a nurse in the neonatal unit my son was being looked after in at the time excitedly talking about a pair of brand name boots she'd bought on the internet.

I realised that she had absolutely no clue they were fake because why should she? She had found the legitimate-looking site on the first page of Google and had paid with Paypal.

This was not a transaction carried out 'out the back of a van', where caveat emptor might more readily apply. A lot (majority?) of consumers don't realise that for all the brand loyality they might have in respect of Google and Paypal, etc^, they are services that are easily misused by unrelated third parties and so should not be taken as any sort of 'trust mark' in they way that shopping in large well-known department store does.

^Amazon and eBay deserve honourable mentions as being popular conduits for counterfeit scams too (although eBay in particular deserves a lot of credit for taking the subject more seriously than most).

Independent thinker.

Note that in each of your uses of the terms L & C, you had to qualify them with a specific context. In each of those contexts, there's someone else who might use the term differently but sensibly. E.g., "radical conservatism", "contemporary liberalism".

My point being that the terms L & C are not by themselves sufficient to communicate intelligently, so when you hear them used without supporting context, the speaker is often not working from a solid logical basis.

- Brokenness of patents causing anti-competitive behavior

- Absurd copyright laws preventing the building of an untold number of innovative products

- The emergence of true competition in the wireless space.

I could go on. We're very good at making end runs around corporations, big and small, but mostly because they can't kick your door down in the middle of the night.