Guest Posted March 3, 2006 Posted March 3, 2006 Thieves! You copied their entire website and concept!
Guest Posted March 3, 2006 Posted March 3, 2006 oh yeah...don't forget, copyright 2006! i guess whogotin's copyright ran out last year!
meridionale Posted March 3, 2006 Posted March 3, 2006 oh yeah...don't forget, copyright 2006! i guess whogotin's copyright ran out last year! I will give you $1 for every result you find on my website that was taken from whogotin.com.
Guest Posted March 3, 2006 Posted March 3, 2006 It's not about the results, the results aren't owned by you, the results are facts which are public domain. On the other hand, the website and survey concept which whogotin did is what you copied. Admit it, you are a thief!
meridionale Posted March 3, 2006 Posted March 3, 2006 It's not about the results, the results aren't owned by you, the results are facts which are public domain. On the other hand, the website and survey concept which whogotin did is what you copied. Admit it, you are a thief! I don't understand what you are trying to prove. I've said it before on this forum that the concept came from whogotin.com. It is no longer in service though, and people wanted a place to go. It wouldn't be that big of deal if yuster just credited me for taking my results. Also, I can see IP addresses for guests, so you can pretend to be multiple people all you want. You can get a little more creative with guests names, can't you?
Guest Posted March 3, 2006 Posted March 3, 2006 You are a thief and you whine. Just because they are no longer a service, does not mean you can copy their website. That's like saying because an author decided to stop publishing his book, it gives you the right to violate his or her copyright. Stop stealing!
meridionale Posted March 3, 2006 Posted March 3, 2006 You are a thief and you whine. Just because they are no longer a service, does not mean you can copy their website. That's like saying because an author decided to stop publishing his book, it gives you the right to violate his or her copyright. Stop stealing! Okay, you win. I am nothing but a thief. I'm not going to argue with you because this is childish.
Guest Posted March 3, 2006 Posted March 3, 2006 Not only are you a thief, you are a thief that wants to claim copyright on something a website you copied, and you want to copyright the facts that applicants are submitting to your site. You wrote a on this thread how yuster is making money from google, and then you put up a paid search box from Google. You complain to applicants who ask you to verify information. Quit your bitching and moaning. Provide a better service. Don't assert copyright on things you copied and things you don't own. You are the worst kind of thief, a whiny, hypocritical thief.
meridionale Posted March 3, 2006 Posted March 3, 2006 A paid google search box? No sir. You can get a paid search box which is part of their adsense program, but you can also just put it on your site for kicks. What I used: http://www.google.com/searchcode.html Paid version I didn't use: https://www.google.com/adsense/ws-overview
Guest Posted March 3, 2006 Posted March 3, 2006 right....sure, i trust you. after you stole whogotin's website, you sure do have a lot of credibility. and the paypal donations...i guess those are for the children? How about we donate you money so you can go prosecute the coffee cup manufacturers who make cups that look a lot like your logo? seriously, that design is actually copyrightable.... © 2006 anonymous creator inspired by meridionale, but do not use because I will get angry and try to sue you…..
meridionale Posted March 3, 2006 Posted March 3, 2006 You know, you can sit here and insult me all you want to, but it's not very classy to insult a good cause that I would like to contribute money to. My mother and other family members lost their homes to Katrina. Top that off with the rest of my friends from college, and it is a grim situation. I would never ever take advantage of people by asking for donations for something that devistated my state and use them on myself. So, you can keep up with this whogotin.com thief crap, but seriously, don't start accusing me in that area. And the cup is free clipart located on a site that says "FREE CLIPART." You keep trying to get the best of me, like I am going to slip up and expose myself as this thief you want to make me out to be. The truth is, I made this survey for applyingtograd, it blew up, and yuster created an automatic survey. I thought okay, well that is much more efficient, so I can just close my survey. Someone saw where I said that and sent me an IM to do all the php for an automatic survey of my own, and since I had already paid for a month, I thought what the heck. But it is something him and I have worked hard on, and I have the right to get annoyed when yuster.com took all my results. I mean really, what is this all about anyways? You and me arguing is completely stupid, and we both should feel emberrassed. I don't mind that yuster has a site like this one, I just wish he would earn his results on his own merit. I'm not taking credit for the idea one bit, and I never have. But like you are saying to give credit where credit is due, shouldn't yuster.com do that as well? I think it's fair.
Guest Posted March 3, 2006 Posted March 3, 2006 Let's take a look at what you are saying here. The bottom line from all of this is that you copied whogotin's web site (without clear attribution) You rolled out automatic survey after you saw Yuster do it (without clear attribution), and you never gave any credit to either them or whogotin. And you complain about not getting clear attribution for the data facts being imported. By the way, I love how you kept painting a one sided story. You have proven that you are a hypocrite, and a liar. And we all know, once a liar, always a liar. meridionale: You know, you can sit here and insult me all you want to, but it's not very classy to insult a good cause that I would like to contribute money to. My mother and other family members lost their homes to Katrina. Top that off with the rest of my friends from college, and it is a grim situation. I would never ever take advantage of people by asking for donations for something that devistated my state and use them on myself. So, you can keep up with this whogotin.com thief crap, but seriously, don't start accusing me in that area. And the cup is free clipart located on a site that says "FREE CLIPART." You keep trying to get the best of me, like I am going to slip up and expose myself as this thief you want to make me out to be. The truth is, I made this survey for applyingtograd, it blew up, and yuster created an automatic survey. I thought okay, well that is much more efficient, so I can just close my survey. Someone saw where I said that and sent me an IM to do all the php for an automatic survey of my own, and since I had already paid for a month, I thought what the heck. But it is something him and I have worked hard on, and I have the right to get annoyed when yuster.com took all my results. I mean really, what is this all about anyways? You and me arguing is completely stupid, and we both should feel emberrassed. I don't mind that yuster has a site like this one, I just wish he would earn his results on his own merit. I'm not taking credit for the idea one bit, and I never have. But like you are saying to give credit where credit is due, shouldn't yuster.com do that as well? I think it's fair.
meridionale Posted March 3, 2006 Posted March 3, 2006 Alright, well I have nothing else for you. I've tried to make peace, but you keep pushing. I don't really have anything else to tell you besides you win, so congratulations. What would you like for me to do now?
Guest Posted March 3, 2006 Posted March 3, 2006 All the poor guy wants you to do is shut up and stop whining. I can't believe you actually complained about yuster when they rolled out an auotmated survey, like that was copyright violation of your manual email survey. Some people......!
meridionale Posted March 3, 2006 Posted March 3, 2006 All the poor guy wants you to do is shut up and stop whining. I can't believe you actually complained about yuster when they rolled out an auotmated survey, like that was copyright violation of your manual email survey. Some people......! Woops! Looks like you forgot to change your IP address before posting again. Why are you pretending to be multiple people?
Guest Posted March 3, 2006 Posted March 3, 2006 Sorry...posted in the wrong one. Remember, IP © Meridionale 2006. IP is hard to configure manually, and I did it myself...so I can copyright it.
Guest Posted March 3, 2006 Posted March 3, 2006 Oh watch out...I might copyright your IP too! Because if you use my site, and I see your IP, I will assert copyright.... Note: Please ignore the fact that ip is not copyrightable, and please excuse my ethical lapse in stealing the ip reading software from someone else without any attribution. Remember, © Meridionale 2006.
Guest Posted March 3, 2006 Posted March 3, 2006 Right, that's a great argument for stealing from whogotin. Diversion from the core issue - the stealing that you've done - is a tactic, but you can't get away with it. Please remember argument © Meridionale 2006.
oceanelement Posted March 3, 2006 Posted March 3, 2006 to whoever guest is in this thread, you're a sick puppy bro. clean up your act and go bug yourself. meridionale, whatever this person says, in the negative connotation, you can always count on my opinions against his/hers. all of us who visit your site meridionale, really appreciate your help and efforts. without it i would a blind bat in the months before grad school. keep up the great work meridionale, we're with you. oceanelement
judith Posted March 3, 2006 Posted March 3, 2006 Dear Meridionale, Yuster and other grad students: Lets brew a fresh new pot of coffee - - my treat. To Yuster: Meridionale is a great barista, treating her clientele well. She doesn't sell her coffeebeans, she likes to brew good cups of espresso and latte for grad students. If you think it tastes bitter, you can go drink coffee somewhere else and simply keep brewing your own. Judith
koko Posted March 3, 2006 Posted March 3, 2006 Copying Results? If thegradcafe had not collected the results, how would yuster have obtained the results in that period. Yuster was up after thegradcafe and, remember, you can't go back in time. How would you get a hold of those posters? Not all people posted their results to both thegradcafe and yuster. Suppose thegradcafe never existed and yuster was the only website of this kind, how could you be sure that all of these people (who posted on thegradcafe) would have posted their results on yuster. People find out about these websites in different ways and there are chances that they only came across thegradcafe but not yuster. My opinion on yuster copying thegradcafe's results: Lame Copying Website Idea? If whogotin didn't exist, would there never ever be a website for tracking admissions results? You never know. Someone has to start it at some point in time. My opinion on the guest accusing thegradcafe of stealing whogotin's idea: Not reasonable
bittergrrl Posted March 3, 2006 Posted March 3, 2006 Another issue is that since this site is similar to whogotin, but not the same. 1. It took no data from last year's site. 2. It took no code from last year's site. Since the functionality of the application is different it's not stealing a site, it's utilizing an idea that is not being used. As for gradcafe only putting up an automated system after yuster did.....I can tell you that the effort that was going in to maintaining the results in a usable format was hell. It was only a matter of time before somebody volunteered to do that for our lovely barista. Yuster's claim on their Web site that they "index" results is a load of crap. Indexing is not what they have done. If you "index" you are simply providing a centralized means of searching and acquiring the data, not taking the data and putting it into your own database. And the data fails to be useful when there are duplicates which arise from people posting their results in multiple places, so really the "indexing" isn't a useful technical model anyway. Finally, if yuster meant to be a benevolent "indexer", what other source besides gradcafe and his own was he "indexing"? Did he go to the Who got in livejournal and catalog all of the results there? Did he try the Princeton Review site to "index" the posts people put there? The answer is no. He took the data from gradcafe because it was easy. This whole thing is such crap. I find it hard to believe that the antagonistic "guest" user here is applying to grad school. I would hope that my fellow grad students, with whom I will be matriculating, will be able to act like the adults they are rather than stoop to the level of this child.
linguisticsguy Posted March 3, 2006 Posted March 3, 2006 a) The concept for the survey was indeed from whogotin.com. It seemed to me that the creator of whogotin (rocksee) had no problem with this, as she is aware of all the new sites using the concept. There is a big difference between stealing an idea (and, as I said, in this case the idea was taken but it does not seem to me it was in anyway "stolen") and stealing a site (i.e. the actual HTML).. it's abundantly clear that meridionale didn't steal the site since gradcafe doesn't look anything like whogotin and the automated part of the survey was done from scratch by a volunteer. c) While it's true that facts, like those we're entering into this site, are not copyrightable, what whoever is behind yuster did is still in very bad form. They may not have broken the law, but they did take data from this site when it was clear that yuster was less popular. The fact that they have pay ads does make one think they did this for their own profit, rather than for the benefit of those applying to grad school. d) Not really relevant to this argument, but in my opinion Yuster made their site a lot worse when they started taking data from thegradcafe. The page for my discipline now has at least 1 duplicate for most of the entries, in some cases 3, which makes it much less useful to look at. I used to look at both sites but now I see no point in looking at yuster so I only check thegradcafe. So IMO yuster brought their unpopularity upon themselves and now they're just bitter that people are coming here instead.
thomasf Posted March 3, 2006 Posted March 3, 2006 Here is an illustrative example: FAIR: I like the graphs on yuster, I think we should have graphs here too. LAME: I Like the graphs on yuster, I think we should copy and paste the image to our server every day and claim them as our own. Better yet, let's just hotlink them! Meri falls into the first category, yuster and the guest (most likely Mr. Yuster or a lackey) clearly falls into the second. Ethics is all about particulars, and while no universal ethical formula has yet been devised, any human being not crippled by neurosis or prejudice can see this is the case.
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