looking for opinions

Here's the deal, I have a situation with a complete moron in charge of a site and he has asked for my help cleaning it up. We went over design issues and while checking out the site I noticed that almost all content is stolen from other sites. In some cases he's hotlinking and in other cases he's just copying entire articles from wikipedia.

The site is for a car club and he has pictures of other people's cars that are not in the club. Pictures are from google searches. Videos are from other people's youtube channels that he uses without their permission or knowledge.

I made the efforts to remove all the stolen content, legitimately, as I am a moderator at the site with limited permission. I had ALL of the content removed. Everything that the site has no claim to was gone. I started working on writing articles to post so we had some content.

Seems that in the last few hours the idiot put ALL the same stolen content back on the site.

I'm pretty pissed that the idiot is hell bent on stealing and that he didn't even have the balls to say something.

What I'm asking here is for OPINIONS on how to deal with him. I am NOT asking anyone to do anything. I just want some ideas on how most people would deal with him. Honestly, I want to slam him in the face repeatedly with a ms natural keyboard, but that's because I'm pissed.

So, what would you do?

Personally, I'd just not have anything to do with the site anymore. I would leave him a message telling him I was leaving and letting him know I don't like how he runs his site. If he has to steal everything for his site, I doubt it will last long anyway.

I agree. I would the guy that what he is doing is not only dumb but against Intellectual Property rights and illegal and that if he gets caught he is gonna be screwed.I would also tell him you want no part of that… just my advice as a post grad law student who sstudies IT and IP law

I would explain to him how simply copying material like that is very, very bad practice because it destroys credits to other people's work and makes his site look worse. On the other hand, it might be good to then try and compromise with him by explaining that many sites to make use of linking or posting other people's content, but always give credit to the original source. If he's as much of an idiot as he sounds like, he might not understand the full depth of the copying he is doing and explaining to him what is happening nicely would always be the first thing to try.

Since when does the hacker community suddenly respect IP?

ranma wrote: Since when does the hacker community suddenly respect IP?

Since it allows for an easy moral-upper hand position.

ranma wrote: Since when does the hacker community suddenly respect IP?

Not IP; But giving credit to the original owner/designer/developer should always be done.

stealth- wrote: [quote]ranma wrote: Since when does the hacker community suddenly respect IP?

Not IP; But giving credit to the original owner/designer/developer should always be done.[/quote]

Hear, hear!