"What about the rights of that business that went offline, and suddenly their address and telephone numbers are still being published next to a flood of Google ads is a sleazy non professional manner?

A good business practice is to hold on to your domain name long after you've killed off a web site, but how many people know that, and how many people can afford to do that for unlimited years."

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Why would a defunct business care, and why would it be good practice for someone to protect a domain name after they're gone?

I mean, sure, there are copyrights that still belong to the business if it is not dissolved, but who cares if someone else is making adsense dollars on a site they intentionally abandoned? (Unintentional loss is a different matter of course)

Old websites can also carry some good info even if the underlying biz is defunct.

Not to be argumentative, I'm just curious why you think this is a major issue.

If somebody takes over your site and steals your old content, you can assert your rights as copyright holder. If you do not, how do you expect Google to know that the new use is not authorized?

RonS:
>Why would a defunct business care

Not all offline business web sites belong to defunct businesses, and even if the company closed down, do they still want to receive calls? Just put yourself in the shoes of the business owner for a minute, also it is a disservice and unethical to trick visitors into believing the company is still operational and even now making money via AdSense ads.

>who cares if someone else is making adsense dollars

See above, it is unethical and sleazy grave robbing and not in the best interest of visitors landing on those pages.

>Old websites can also carry some good

I am talking about business sites, but if you want to discuss evergreen content, those rarely go offline, even if they do, No One has the right to dig them up and use the content and design but their original owner.

hyperkik:
> how do you expect Google to know that the new use is not authorized?

If Google deems this content not fit for the serps, even though most of them still carry back links, then they sure know well they are zombie sites, as mentioned above the profile is easy to detect:

1- One Pub ID, many sites in a short span of time, most of them are of the business type with information & logo, and even address and contact info in many countries, Google does have an algo that detects type of site.
2- Google is a registrar and can trace a domain history, when hundreds of domains from all around the globe expire and are within days owned by one person, the pattern is not hard to detect.
3- Google keeps historical cache and can verify that the same content has been reinserted after expiry and domain ownership change.

So basically, you think Google should guess and penalize sites that may exploit somebody else's intellectual property, whether or not that's the case, rather than relying upon the owners of that intellectual property to submit a DMCA notification.

No,
I am saying Google already knows these sites are out of circulation and have them off their search engine, why is Google allowing those domains to run AdSense?

A defunct business wouldn't be answering the phone. You are right that a non-defunct biz could be annoyed, and in that case I would suggest they enforce their copyright, just as if their site had been scraped.

AdSense and Google aren't the internet police and what you are asking for would seem to take a lot of effort to acomplish with or without collateral damage.

Rons,
You would be right if I was asking for Google to pull those pages off their hosting. Again, what I am saying is that Google should not help monetize stolen content, plain and simple, they have the means to know that those domains are mass stolen as outlined above with no margin of error if they go after the single pub IDs with thousands of zombie xBusiness domains each.

they have the means to know that those domains are

Ah, Hobbs, you old optimist!

Of course DOES Google know, but they do not care, because any business is good business. They could, for example, also know which ads lead to a parked page (hosted with the known providers). They could, but do they? Nope. I am still seeing lots of parked pages being advertised.

Google could know a lot of things about their ads and their advertisers, but still they do not act upon.

It won't be too long before every MFA owner and his neighbor's dog start taking to it, it's like thriller all over again!

Google is not the Internet police.

If enough copyright holders make an issue of their copyrighted material being purloined then maybe G will shut them down.

The content could very well be abandoned.

Anyway, why's this got you going? Someone snap up a domain you lost or something? With all the issues we face, why this one?

Just wondering as it seems like it is personal to you.

Never lost a domain Rons, you really think parasites spawning zombie domains to monetize them via AdSense should be left alone because it is neither our business nor Google's?

Google is not the Internet police.

If a web site has adsense ads, sure, they can decide to ban their account based on their policies. And that's a good thing.

Anyway, why's this got you going?

Why would you defend crooks? What's it to you?

Mind you, I am a (former) MFA-er, and even I am victim of these site-reapers. After Googles 2007 crackdown on arbitrage sites, I closed down most of my MFA-sites because they just didn't make me money anymore (and because I didn't wat to get booted from the program). Now I see that even worse scoundrels than myself obtained my domains and pasted copies of my content on these zombie sites.
Besides the matter of copy-rights, I just wonder: can these people make money out of a project that I thought was completely lost?

[edited by: MFKaHB at 5:04 pm (utc) on May 4, 2008]

Koan, what I meant was that G doesn't need to expend efforts to track down perpetrators of perhaps victimless crimes and take actions that without further very expensive due diligence might negatively effect innocent bystanders. I said if someone complains it's a different matter, and who the heck defended anyone?

I'm just wondering why someone is worried about someone else profiting from someone else's abandoned content, almost as much as I am wondering why I am spending my time responding any further here. If the abandoning biz is worried about impact of their sites, let'em lock them up for 10 years for $100 or less and stick AdSense on them to try to recoup their registration fees. If G Search doesn't index them and nobody finds them who cares if it's old or outdated info? Half of the "non-zombie" net might fall into that category already.

If I abandon a site (and I have before and I am about to drop a couple more and I've NEVER gone back to look at them) what the heck do I care if someone else is finding a way to make them profitable? I couldn't care less and I've moved on. Wanna buy'em? Probably not, right? Why? Because they are worthless to me and to you.

If I cared about the content I wrote, and I don't, I'd file a DMCA takedown notice to the site's webhost if US based, and to Google Search and to AdSense. How hard is that? After the first one, it's less than 10 minutes for each set, max. I know, I've done them to protect my materials before.

I'd worry more about what's between the covers of my own sites and let G decide what is in the best interests of their program, as they will anyway.

But that's just me. That's my explanation of why I am wondering why you feel it is so important. Maybe you feel insulted or injured for me, but please don't tilt at the windmills on my behalf. ;)

_______________ . ________________

RonS, I think it's not that complicated. If I abandon my shop, and someone else is continuing a shop at the same spot, with the same name, the same lay-out, the same products, the same slogans, etcetera, but without my permission, he is violating my copy-rights. The fact that I abandon my shop doesn't mean I lose my copy-rights.
Perhaps I was planning to continue my concept at an other time and place.