Help with vbulletin license problem, urgent!

[cache]

I bought a vbulletin license from our NP board member Phill11. It took
a long time for him to act (started the
discussion and paid him in July). He kept saying that the vbulletin sent me
a notice to transfer, but I have never received. He asked me just use his
license number and the number would just transfer. So I have downloaded
the vbulletin and installed on my site. However vbulletin sent DMCA Takedown Notification to my dreamhost hosting. Without any warning dreamhost simply
shut down my site.

I just called vbulletin's phone, but the lady who answered
this 24-hour phone line said that there is no one at vbulletin at this time.
I had left my email and phone number, but no one has called back yet.

So the question is: what can I do to speed up to bring the site back
online? This site is very important to me.

Help!!!

 

[stscac]

Moving this to legal.

-Steve

 

[liquidcherry]

Hi Cache,

The fastest thing to do, regardless of the thing you have going on is to buy a new license, install it and use it (IMHO)

And afterwards clean up the mess


Hope this helps

Cheers,

Frank

 

[AzN]

He is correct, in order to complete a transfer, vBulletin will send you an email to confirm the transfer. Once confirmed, they will provide you with your personal logins to members.vbulletin.com where you can set the domain of the forum to prevent any DMCA notices.

Good luck,
AzN

 

[cache]

thanks for the replies.
I can login, and I have confirmed the transfer. My site is entered in their
vbulletin.com as record. However vbulletin still refuses to inform the hosting company. The problem now is that someone else is also using this license even I own it.


=================
"Also if the old owner continues to use this copy of
vBulletin and this license is being used on more than
one site, this may result in the license being
revoked."
=========================================

this is really not fair, nobody should ever buy vbulletin. I hate vbulletin.com, I hate
dreamhost.com, neither one bother to warn me and to give me at least one hour
to respond.

Don't buy vbulletin, don't use dreamhost !!!!!

 

[labrocca]

This is really your doing. Why did you use a license that wasn't in your possession first? Seems to be an error on your part and you want to blame others.

 

[Dave_Z]

I hate vbulletin.com, I hate
dreamhost.com, neither one bother to warn me and to give me at least one hour
to respond.

Don't buy vbulletin, don't use dreamhost !!!!!

Now doesn't it feel good to blame others for your misfortune, especially those
who have no obligations to you whatsoever except the seller? You could've at
least done your homework and possibly thought twice before doing this, right?

Life's unfair, and you learned a few hard lessons the hard way. Now deal with
it.

 

[cache]

Your guys have never had the experience when your site went down.
To be fair, the seller had a lot to blame. However is it normal both vb and dreamhost
can shut down your site without notice? If I had some notice ahead of the time,
I can prevent this from happening.

vbulletin finally sent dreamhost clearing the legal action. However my urgent
ticket at DH is still not answered after couple of hours. They can shut your site
faster than you can blink, but they will slow to answer your ticket...

as I write this, the site is back online. I need to go to bed and have a rest, what a Sunday!

In business it is simply the basic practice to notify people before
terminating the service. As IT support, the most damaging action is to
unplug the network without notice (which happened to me today).

Those people tried to explained to me about the law and asked me to lobby
the government if I don't like the law. But I think something is wrong here, I mean the
business practice. Let me start with a form letter so that those busy people
can copy it so that other people don't fall into victim again:

Dear Mr. XXX,
You have 1 business hour to prove that you own the vbulletin license, otherwise
your site will be shut down. You are warned.

Yours xxxx.

The above two lines are what I badly needed today. Peace.

 

[neroux]

This is really your doing. Why did you use a license that wasn't in your possession first? Seems to be an error on your part and you want to blame others.

Now doesn't it feel good to blame others for your misfortune, especially those
who have no obligations to you whatsoever except the seller? You could've at
least done your homework and possibly thought twice before doing this, right?

I cant really agree here. Given his reply

I can login, and I have confirmed the transfer. My site is entered in their
vbulletin.com as record. However vbulletin still refuses to inform the hosting company. The problem now is that someone else is also using this license even I own it.

it seems Jelsoft was actually aware of the transferred ownership and should have gone after the previous owner and not the new one.

Life's unfair, and you learned a few hard lessons the hard way. Now deal with
it.

Considering this statement it should be perfectly and morally fine to use a pirated copy of vbulletin - after all "life's unfair"!

Here we are talking about a business and not a private relationship. If something is unfair you can take legal actions.

Lets take a look at the facts, someone sold his vbulletin license, Jelsoft agreed to the transfer, however the previous owner did not take offline his copy, which led Jelsoft to take legal actions against the new rightful owner, who actually paid for the software.

 

[DNQuest.com]

For clarification,this situation is not business one, it is a legal one. A company saw 2 licenses being used, they went the legal route, they do not have to notify you in advance, they do not have to be nice. It is unfortunate this happened, but impatience will cause us to cuts corners and not wait for clearance. I am glad it eventuatlly worked out and you got your site back online.

 

[neroux]

For clarification,this situation is not business one, it is a legal one. A company saw 2 licenses being used, they went the legal route, they do not have to notify you in advance, they do not have to be nice. It is unfortunate this happened, but impatience will cause us to cuts corners and not wait for clearance. I am glad it eventuatlly worked out and you got your site back online.

It is certainly a legal one, but also definitely a business one as there is a paid and legally obtained script involved.

There were two licenses, one legally used, one illegally. The script's author was apparently aware of the transfer and hence was only allowed to request the script's removal from the previous owner but not - as presented here - from the new owner.

 

[IAmAllanShore]

Perhaps bad business on the part of vBulletin's crew - but a better lesson on using anything but the "best" when it comes to things that you absolutely positively need to work correctly ("Don't buy used software for a key site").
-Allan :gl:

 

[neroux]

Perhaps bad business on the part of vBulletin's crew

As far as I can see it is definitely bad business on their side.

- but a better lesson on using anything but the "best" when it comes to things that you absolutely positively need to work correctly ("Don't buy used software for a key site").
-Allan :gl:

That might be in practice true, but its nonetheless no excuse for jelsoft. Its disappointing to see a company that is usually considered as professional acting this way.

 

[Ronald Regging]

vBulletin employs Howard G Spinks from PirateReports.com to manage their piracy detection and enforcement. I've dealt with him in a situation pertaining to PHPFox (who he also works for). You have to understand that these companies merely provide him a list of valid licenses, and then it is his job to track down and stop illegal usage. And he doesn't have time to email 300 people a day and wait for responses from each person and try to determine each case individually... He goes in with an immediate DMCA takedown notice and in most cases hosting companies comply, because they don't want legal risk.

It's not bad business to protect your property. When you have tons of pirates trying to use your software illegally, you can't afford not to take action. Occasionally some rightful owners get caught in the cross-fire and it can be infuriating. But at the end of the day, would you rather have a product that is well done, because the developers ensure they are getting paid... Or a half-assed product that 70% of the site using it are illegal, leaving the developers with little money to ensure quality?

Anyway... The lesson here is that quality costs money and that the best way to avoid problems is to buy direct