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I apologize if this is off-topic here. Such reports perhaps should be made elsewhere (see below), and one can find posts of this nature being closed as duplicates on StackExchange network-wide meta. In other words, it seems there's not much point in making a post about it over there.

At the same time, MathOverflow being a unique site with special agreement with the SE network, I imagine some users here might have an interest in this.BTW, I'm not cross-posting.


I just stumbled upon a site that seems to be ripping off the complete content of a good number of sites of StackExchange without proper attribution (as far as I can tell).

In particular, pertaining to MathOverflow (renamed as category "mathematician"), for example, this page about strange measure comes from this, and this regarding classification of surfaces is this.

I just reported this via the official channel following the instructions here.

However, while I was filling out the form, it occurred to me that I actually have already reported this exact same site tutel.me like 2 or 3 years ago.

Back then, if I recall correctly, there was an automatic one-time message (webpage after the submission) saying to the effect of "... thanks for reporting, but you will not receive any follow-up due to legal reasons, and this kind of process takes a long time."

Now 2 years later, this tutel.me still stands, so either

  1. It is not a rip-off (and I'm mistaken)
  2. There's no real legal recourse (and one should move on)
  3. The process is still on-going
  4. My previous report didn't go through

This time around, I got an automatic reply email (a "ticket"). Nonetheless, I have no clue if the report I just made actually went through. Namely, it is the 4th possibility that both last time and this time that somehow my reports weren't submitted correctly.

My questions:
Is the tutel.me site a rip-off? If it is, how can I be certain that my report(s) actually went through? (I've encountered before Stack Overflow "official" pages that are outdated or just dysfunct for no apparent reasons)

It's not clear to me whether the disarray in recent years (esp. since last October) makes this issue (content rip-off) less relevant or more relevant to the community.

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    $\begingroup$ It may be possible that a moderator here can investigate independently and raise the priority level of this issue. From your posting above, I am not seeing anything wrong with the approach you took. Gerhard "Unsure Of The Legal Issues" Paseman, 2020.02.24. $\endgroup$ Commented Feb 24, 2020 at 23:26
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    $\begingroup$ This answer mentions the same site: Is it legal to copy Stack Overflow questions and answers? $\endgroup$ Commented Feb 25, 2020 at 12:11
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    $\begingroup$ I think the answer on this question may also answer yours: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/343404/… . $\endgroup$ Commented Feb 25, 2020 at 15:06
  • $\begingroup$ Thank you all for the responses. (Forgive me that I'm not going to pin individually) $\endgroup$ Commented Feb 25, 2020 at 15:18
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    $\begingroup$ Just a tangential comment: it is not clear to me why any sane webmaster would want to rip off content like that, when it would have been sufficient to add one sentence in the footer to be legally in the clear. $\endgroup$ Commented Feb 26, 2020 at 12:24

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Your report did come through, yes. And you did report it correctly, yes.

The reply you got back, while canned, isn't automated. So someone did look at the report — in this case, it appears to be a proxy, so we forwarded the request to our SRE team. As the message notes, though, we can't offer an ETA for when the action will be taken. You can also read here about how many of these reports end up not needing any action from our part.

I'd like to point you to this answer, as the official guidance, since you linked to a more obscure source.

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    $\begingroup$ glossary: SRE = Site Reliability Engineering; ETA = Estimate Time of Arrival $\endgroup$
    – YCor
    Commented Feb 26, 2020 at 21:12

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