Breaking the Law to Drive Web Traffic

By Deborah Radcliff

February 22, 2002 12:00 PM ET

Computerworld - There's a Web site on which you can view the smiling face of Britney Spears atop a naked model. The site offers similar pictures of Pamela Anderson, Whitney Houston, Katie Holmes and a few dozen others "caught in the act."

Another raw porn site bears the name of Bruce Schneier, a renowned information security expert.

"This is copyright infringement," says Chris Brandon, an Internet investigator. "These Web site operators are using famous names to drive traffic to their sites. I just picked up three cases like these" in a recent week.

Schneier, founder of CounterPane Systems Inc. in San Jose, says there's not much he can do about the porn site that's using his name. Contacting InterNIC, the Internet domain naming system, is useless, he says. And a legal battle would drain him of resources he'd rather use elsewhere.

According to Brandon, the most expedient resolution to such a problem is complaining to the Internet service provider or hosting service that supports such a site. Chances are, the hosting service or service provider will dump its client for violating their terms-of-use agreement.

But when use of a corporate name or logo links your company to a fraud, it's time to pursue stronger channels. For example, when Unisys Corp. recently caught wind of spam mail that was peddling stolen credit cards with a header that read "U_ni_sys," the company's security director called the FBI.

"We forwarded that to the FBI because it involved credit card fraud, interstate commerce and issues which we thought would be better off handled by the FBI instead of us going through a trademark infringement suit," says Kerry Ruhl, director of information security at the Blue Bell, Pa.-based IT services firm.

Over the past year and a half, Ruhl says, he has had to take action in about seven such copyright infringement cases.

Copyright cases are an annoyance, Ruhl says, but they're only a drop in the bucket compared with the rest of his workload. "We still spend most of our time trying to keep hackers out of our network," he says.

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