zahnster

Being a hosting reseller has been a pretty uneventful experience so far. I’ve been dabbling in the field since my college days, nothing ever too serious, but I do offer some of my MediaTemple DV space to a small number of clients to help offset the cost of dedicated server ownership.

However, yesterday marked a milestone in my hosting experience, albeit not a good one. I received notification from MediaTemple that a DMCA suit was thrown at me, for an instance of vBulletin running on one of my clients domains. A chill ran down my spine; DMCA suits are serious, scary business.

Long investigative story short, it turns out that my client was mistakenly in possession of a yearly license, and technically in the wrong. However, my client was misinformed when the site was built into thinking they had a permanent license, so the mistake was innocent enough.

What wasn’t innocent enough were the harsh tactics used by the vBulletin service to inform us of this error. One of my core values is the golden rule, to treat others like you would want to be treated. The fact that vBulletin’s first thought of action at discovering this expired license was to throw a *lawsuit* on us? WTF.

Contacting my client directly to solve the issue would have been easy enough. Not only is there contact information throughout their site, but a simple ‘whois’ lookup would have also provided vBulletin with easy methods to reach out, like dignified human beings, to inform them of the error and give them the means to correct it.

It probably would have been a hell of a lot cheaper for vBulletin as well. I’m sure some lawyer was paid to serve that DMCA suit.

If vBulletin had simply reached out to us like mutually respected individuals, there’s no doubt in my mind that my client would have fixed the oversight without a blink. $180 is not a lot of money, all things considered.

Instead, their harsh, intimidating methods alienated not only my client, but myself as well as the server owner. We’re at a point now where the last thing we want to do is fund the people who’ve been harassing us. Not when we can move over to a better, fresher forum software called Vanilla, for absolutely no cost at all (yay open-source).

So, I know piracy sucks, and dealing with piracy is a huge issue that companies face, but when investigating possible cases, remember that people are innocent until proven guilty. We weren’t some shop with 100 unlicensed versions of Windows XP. We were running one recently expired version of vBulletin’s $180 software. It’s not worth a DMCA suit, and it’s definitelt not worth alienating your customer base.