UPDATE: As of 10 PM tonight, just four short hours since my rant below, the owner of the site in question has removed the content in question. Three cheers for truth and justice. Thank you to all who wrote and sent me good wishes! I thank you all for your good work.
There is a thief among us. And it is my hope that this posting will embarrass them to the point that they do the right thing. Or at least, get a good volume of you to write them to help me in my cause.
Since 1997, I have been trying to purchase the URL lizzieborden.com. Unfortunately, it is owned by one Tom O’Brien. He sat on this web address for five years, never building a web site or having a web presence. I wrote him repeatedly, asking him if I could purchase the domain address since he wasn’t doing anything with it. He never replied.
Squatting on a web address, by the way, is illegal. You cannot just buy up a domain and not do anything with it. You have to show you mean to build a presence or people can appeal to have your ownership revoked. I never went anywhere near that idea, but each year, as the domain registration was due for renewal, I would sit and wait for Mr. O’Brien to forget to pay the fee or decide he didn’t want it anymore so I could purchase it fair and square. But alas, that day never came.
If you go to the waybackmachine at the Internet Archives site, you will see that in 2002, Mr. O’Brien finally decided to post a “coming soon” page, that stayed a “coming soon” page all the way until September of that year.
Then came a sort of outline of a website that was mostly there for sales purposes. It contained only links to empty pages and lots and lots of links to Lizzie books for sale on Amazon.com and his golf sales business.
In January of 2003, O’Brien stated on his site that his was “The Original Lizzie Borden Website”—how that can ever be true is beyond me! But still no significant content. Still lots of empty “coming soon” pages and ads.
The site stayed that way, unchanged in any specific way, until late last year (2007). At that time, Mr. O’Brien did add some content to his website. Loaded it up with images and text. Problem was, all of it was swiped from my site, LizzieAndrewBorden.com.
He took lots of things that didn’t belong to him, including my layout, photos submitted by friends of mine for my site, and perhaps worst of all, used the Edward Radin description of the case that I use and attribute to Radin, but took Radin’s name off, as if Mr. O’Brien wrote it himself.
This type of plagiarism must not be allowed to continue. It is one thing to take content, it is quite another to steal words.
So I wrote Mr. O’Brien about his site and he assured me that it was the designer’s mistake, that he only meant the content as a placeholder, and he would have it taken away immediately. He said the site belonged to his dear old dad who is a Lizzie Borden aficionado.
Well, that was in mid October of 2007. Let’s see, by my calculation, that is three months ago. Well, as you probably guessed, the content has not been removed, even after I again wrote Mr. O’Brien at the end of last year asking him once again to do so. No reply from him at all this time. Zip.
So here is what you can do for me, dear reader. You can write Mr. O’Brien at his address and demand he do the right thing.
Here is his email address: [email protected]
Here is his snail mail address:
Golf Link, Inc.
Tom O’Brien
17 Angel Rd.
New Paltz, NY 12561
His other domains are:
ArchitectsGolfClub.com
AuroTekInc.com
CentennialGolf.com
CoastalGolfAway.com
DoubleEagle.com
Gldesign.net
GolfLink.com
GolfLinkCommunities.com
GolfLinkCourses.com
GolfLinkDesign.com
GolfLinkProShop.com
GolfLinkTravel.net
GolfOnTv.com
JulesAlexander.com
LegacyPinehurst.com
Newpaltzgolf.com
Newpaltzgolf.net
Online-Golf-Clubs.com
PineHillsGolf.com
SwingsTheThing.com
TravelPinehurst.com
UsGolfArchitects.com
WitchGolf.com
Does it sound like he give a hoot about Lizzie Borden?
