Copying An Old Site In The Website Archives?

12 replies
I know about a website owner who had a site that used to get a lot of traffic and he would manually service his clients.

But a couple of years ago, he took down his site and ripped off a bunch of clients in the process as he did not fulfill their orders so I doubt very much if he will bring the business back.

The site has not been up in two years so all the one hundred pages of the site are not indexed anymore.

I just found that site in the Way Back Machine: Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free Books, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine

Knowing the guy is a cheat and will probably not bring his business back, I was thinking of reusing his past website material that obviously has been abandoned by him. I could do this by uploading it to a different domain name and different business name from what he had of course.

I know of a couple of affiliate programs I could place onto the site and the massive traffic I would eventually get could be serviced passively by the affiliate programs.

QUESTION:

Using someone from the Philippines to help me:

Is it possible to copy the skin and framework of a site so it can be easily uploaded to another domain? What tools would be used to copy all the framework, skin, and images of the site from the archives?

If it is possible to do the above then the pages could also be easily copied and uploaded to another domain also.

Thanks for helping....
#archives #copying #site #website
  • Profile picture of the author KingArthur
    This is probably a question that would be best asked in a forum full of techies.
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  • Profile picture of the author BrianMcLeod
    So basically, this guy - he was allegedly a scumbag...

    ...does that make it ok for you to steal his intellectual property...

    ...since he's not using it anymore and probably won't come after you?

    NO.
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    • Profile picture of the author Unity96387
      Originally Posted by BrianMcLeod View Post

      ...does that make it ok for you to steal his intellectual property...
      I think he gave up his property when he took his site down two years ago. Now it is community property on the archives site mentioned above. I would never take and use it if he had not given up his website and abdicated his property two years ago. Does that make sense or am I missing something?
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      • Profile picture of the author JohnMcCabe
        Originally Posted by Unity96387 View Post

        I think he gave up his property when he took his site down two years ago. Now it is community property on the archives site mentioned above. I would never take and use it if he had not given up his website and abdicated his property two years ago. Does that make sense or am I missing something?
        You are missing something.

        Just because you found something on the Internet does not make it "community property".

        The fact that he doesn't currently have the content posted makes no difference. He still owns it, and taking it to use as your own is stealing, pure and simple.

        The fact that the site came down due to a scandal also makes no difference whatsoever.

        Of course, you've already made up your mind to steal this guy's site. All you want to know is how to steal all of it, not just the content.:rolleyes:
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    • Profile picture of the author vedremo
      Banned
      Originally Posted by BrianMcLeod View Post

      So basically, this guy - he was allegedly a scumbag...

      ...does that make it ok for you to steal his intellectual property...

      ...since he's not using it anymore and probably won't come after you?

      NO.
      I completely agree. People have done this to me in the past - I had my lawyer send them a DMCA Takedown Notice and then got the site de-indexed by Google. Absolute parasites.

      Unity - Good on you for not going ahead with the idea. Think longterm.
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  • Unity,

    In answer to your question about copying the skin of the site, all you could really do is look at an image of the archived page. Unless for some reason there is a cached cop and you can get access to the source code.

    As mentioned by Brian, you should probably stay away from stealing others intellectual property. It could come back to bite you.

    Best,

    Shawn
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    Outsource to the experts...

    We customize your Blog, eBook, Press Release and Sale Copy content with your message.

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  • Profile picture of the author DeborahDera
    You can't steal someone's content, whether you think he's using it or not.

    Besides, why would you want to use the content a "scammer" used?

    Originally Posted by Unity96387 View Post

    I know about a website owner who had a site that used to get a lot of traffic and he would manually service his clients.

    But a couple of years ago, he took down his site and ripped off a bunch of clients in the process as he did not fulfill their orders so I doubt very much if he will bring the business back.

    The site has not been up in two years so all the one hundred pages of the site are not indexed anymore.

    I just found that site in the Way Back Machine: Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free Books, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine

    Knowing the guy is a cheat and will probably not bring his business back, I was thinking of reusing his past website material that obviously has been abandoned by him. I could do this by uploading it to a different domain name and different business name from what he had of course.

    I know of a couple of affiliate programs I could place onto the site and the massive traffic I would eventually get could be serviced passively by the affiliate programs.

    QUESTION:

    Using someone from the Philippines to help me:

    Is it possible to copy the skin and framework of a site so it can be easily uploaded to another domain? What tools would be used to copy all the framework, skin, and images of the site from the archives?

    If it is possible to do the above then the pages could also be easily copied and uploaded to another domain also.

    Thanks for helping....
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    • Profile picture of the author Unity96387
      Thanks for the replies. Because of your feedback I will not be proceeding with what I was only contemplating and not planning on doing.

      It is good to bounce things off of people to see what their thoughts are before you come to a decision.

      Thanks to the people who posted here.
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  • Profile picture of the author Jtraits
    copying the skin and framework is not that hard nowadays... wordpress, cms like joomla and that kind of stuff provide so many themes that it can be modified to what you want and in result get something better.. no need to make it exact the same
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  • Profile picture of the author apeee
    Is it okay to upload the old content of the website from archieve.org? Because I have a domain which used to get a lot of hits in the past and had great content. Its content is still available in archieve.org but I am not sure if I should use it or not.
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    • Profile picture of the author JohnMcCabe
      Originally Posted by apeee View Post

      Is it okay to upload the old content of the website from archieve.org? Because I have a domain which used to get a lot of hits in the past and had great content. Its content is still available in archieve.org but I am not sure if I should use it or not.
      I'm not sure if you are being serious or not.

      On the off chance you are serious, I'll type this really slowly so it's easy to understand.

      NO. Do not use it unless it was yours to begin with.
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  • Profile picture of the author orlly
    Well you could use a site copier like HTTrack which will copy the site but I think that Archive.org changes the URL's so although it may work locally it wouldn't be very pretty.

    I think there is a program called Warrick that is supposed to use various sources including Archive.org to recreate sites with their original link structure. Unfortunately, the program in only available in Python / Perl.
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