They have been on my radar for a while and today I finally had enough from Attributor’s stealth bot activities and decided to opt out from their visits by adding their 64.41.145.0/24 address range to my firewall. In their own words Attributor describe their service as pulling content from billions of websites they monitor in order to toss it into a database and check back with their customers, whether they are able to find any signs of content duplication. If there is a match, they send out notifications on the copyright owner’s behalf and ask for linking back to the original site (mind you, this is only restricted to customers who pay for their content police services). In case those requests remain unanswered, they finally pull the DMCA take down notice card, which sounds scary at first but should have little bearing on everyone outside of the USA.

Principally I welcome their endeavours and even wished they would nail down the hordes of scrapers who steal content as botbait for their spam pages. But, and here comes the part I object to their activities, what is the point in monitoring resources outside of their jurisdiction? My hosting company, registrar and I myself are located in Germany and anyone with half a brain and capable of searching the web for “whois” can find out this sensational news within minutes. Furthermore, why would I care about a bot dressed up as IE6.0 on WinXP and doing nothing but stealing my bandwidth without any benefits in return? Their bot does not really want to know anything about robots.txt (this would defeat its purpose as “sneaky” monitoring tool) and its crawling behaviour leaves a thing or two to be desired, too.

I do not want to go too much into details like wondering why the company is hiding behind some P.O. box in California, uses a private (!) registration shield despite being a corporation (exhibit A ) and owns a netblock that is just about three weeks old (exhibit B). Perhaps they have legitimate reasons to conceal their identities, like protecting themselves from angry scrapers. Perhaps they used to reside somewhere else or are forced to move around pretty often to circumvent being blocked by concerned webmasters. Whatever it is, I do not know and I do not really want to find out, as the only thing that matters to me is whether a bot behaves nicely, is to my or at least the public’s benefit and clearly announces itself as bot including a responsible owner (working website or email address). Everything else might turn out as sneaky spammer or scraper (more or less interchangeable terms) as “references” or “success stories” can easily be fabricated.

Their only address range, according to ARIN, is:

Attributor Corporation SAVV-S600611-2 (NET-64-41-145-0-1)
                                  64.41.145.0 - 64.41.145.255

For denying access I recommend either the gentleman (or woman) method using httpd.conf or .htaccess:

Deny from 64.41.145.0/24

or the BOfH method using iptables:

~# iptables -A INPUT -s 64.41.145.0/24 -i eth0 -p tcp -j DROP

Update 03/02/08:

As Mark pointed out in the comment section, there is another range of Attributor on Abovenet:

Abovenet Communications, Inc NETBLK-ABOVENET-3 (NET-209-133-0-0-1)
                                  209.133.0.0 - 209.133.127.255
Attributor Corp ABOV-I241-209-133-94-0-24 (NET-209-133-94-0-1)
                                  209.133.94.0 - 209.133.94.255

Or as CIDR notation: 209.133.94.0/24
Block as you see fit for it.