Cheat Code Central Cheating You?
March 29 2004 @ 07:13:36 PM // posted by: Joshua Woodcock
As many of you may know, Cheat Code Central has been stealing many people's copyrighted FAQ's in order to further their own profits. Here is a letter from Nick Wilson, a former writer of Game Bunker:
"Look here's the deal. A lot of people argue for one side or another that there are no ethics in the world anymore. Everyone has been in that discussion at one time or another; whether they were talking about downloading music, what we see on TV today, movies with religious sub-texts or even violent videogames we always hear about the ethical downfall of our society. Well despite all that; there are some sects where this is not a problem.
Writing FAQs for many gamers has been the sort of act that allowed them to give to the rest of the gaming community; give advice to your friends and allies that you might never meet face to face by writing a detailed guide of your own design from -you-, the person who understands this stuff best. And that has worked for a long time; this practice has been fostered, bolstered, and even popularized by Jeff 'CJayC' Veasey of GameFAQs.com
If you select a popular FAQ from GameFAQs, and then a random line of text from it to search on Google you will only find one site on the internet that is profiting (and heavily) from the work these authors do for free. That is CheatCC or CheatCodeCentral by Dave Allison. This site makes repeated efforts to rob GameFAQs and most likely IGN and Neoseeker of their FAQ content, and they do it oh so well. Dave and his cronies (or thugs, bastards, donkey****s?) have continued to ask permission to use work from GameFAQs, then regardless of the thumbs up or thumbs down; take the workc change its writing to include CheatCC in the allowed sites and then post it.
Dave claims to have over 250,000 unique visitors a year. If only 1,000 people are platinum subscribers, that means that he makes $30,000 a year for nothing more than the stealing of FAQs and his hosting space from those fees alone. His site is ridden with ads that he certainly is getting money from. It goes without saying that he is easily making much more money than I predict and at the expense of people who just want to have fun. This is a new low. We have one guy on the entire internet that's doing this, and he's making a killing. What in God's name is going on here?! Can no one do anything about him? I'm trying to, and I'll be damned if on the day I die I can't remember the day that the gaming community buried Dave Allison's website.
But then again maybe you want to explain to me how stealing my work and profiting from it isn't wrong. Feel free to contact me about that; my email is: how****ing@stupidru.com"
I have looked into it myself, and can verify that CheatCC did indeed steal FAQ's, Nick Wilson's included. See for yourself:
A PSO guide written by Nick in 2002:
The guide, as written by Nick.
http://db.gamefaqs.com/console/gamec...nline_ep12.txt
Look at the list of sites Nick allows to use his guide.
Now, here's CheatCC's altered version:
http://www.cheatcc.com/gc/sg/phantas...nline_ep12.txt
CheatCC's Guide for PSO Looks familiar, doesn't it?
With the internet, it's easy for people to take advantage of others like this. However, we shouldn't stand for it. Feel free to email CheatCC about it if you think it's wrong:
dave@cheatcc.com. I'm sure he'll love to hear from you all.
Credit: Gamebunker.com
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