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The San Francisco’s leading online daily SFGate reported that a federal jury in California has found two web hosting companies and their owner liable for contributing to trademark and copyright infringement for hosting sites selling counterfeit Louis Vuitton goods. The jury assessed damages totaling more than $32 million against web hosts Akanoc Solutions Inc., Managed Solutions Group Inc., and Steven Chen, the owner of the two companies.

In awarding the damages, the jury agreed with Louis Vuitton Malletier S.A.’s claims that the defendants knowingly allowed several websites they hosted to sell products that infringed Louis Vuitton’s copyrights and trademarks.

The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California is expected to issue a permanent injunction banning the web hosting providers from hosting websites which selling fake Louis Vuitton goods in the future.

California Based Court Paved A Way Web Hosts To Be Sued For Their Customers Conducting Illegal Activities

Attorneys of the Louis Vuitton said that the case is the first successful application on the Internet of the theory of contributory liability for trademark infringement. Under this theory, any companies that know, or should know, that they are enabling illegal activities have an obligation to remedy the situation. Web hosts that fail to do so can be held legally responsible for contributing to the illegal activities.

Lawyers of Mr. Chen, the owner of both web hosting providers had argued that Akanoc Solutions, a company that enable Chinese citizens to launch enterprises in United States and Managed Solutions were protected under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act‘s (DMCA). This is a law that limits the liability of ISPs for activities by its customers that might constitute copyright infringements. The defense lawyers said that Steven Chen and web hosting providers could not be held liable for the actions of websites they hosted but did not directly own or operate.

However the Louis Vuitton lawyers claimed that Steven Chen’s web hosting companies were contributing to the illegal activities conducted by their customers by providing the infrastructure that enabled the sale of counterfeit goods. They further said that web hosting providers had been informed of the activity by Louis Vuitton but refused to implement a policy for removing the offending sites, which was their responsibility.

A New Standard For Trademark Infridgements

The verdict “establishes a standard” for trademark infringement complaints on the Internet. In an interview with Computerworld today Andy Coombs, Louis Vuitton’s counsel said the verdict shows why it’s important for web hosting providers and ISPs to enforce acceptable use policies. “It’s one thing to have these policies, but you’ve got to implement them when given notice of abuse,” said the LV lawyer.

In the above described case, Louis Vuitton showed that it had sent numerous notices to the web hosting companies, but they were ignored or the companies didn’t acte upon expeditiously.

Reactions

The verdict drew mixed reactions. A forums poster who signed the comment as Bret Clark said in a discussion thread among network engineers in the NANOG website, that ISPs and web hosts shall not being held responsible for “policing its customers. “I’m constantly getting called up from scammers trying to [offer] me bogus warranty insurance for cars I don’t own. Does that mean I can sue Verizon because they are letting scammers use their network?”, said the poster.

“Jamie”, another user of the forum said that web hosts cannot ignore notification about one of its customers indulging in possibly illegal activities.

“It’s the first one in an Internet case where a web hosting provider was found liable for trademark infringement for failing to shut down a website after being given notice” of trademark infringing activities, said David Johnson, a lawyer specializing in digital media law in Los Angeles. He called the verdict precedent setting.

Under existing precedent a claimant who is seeking to prove a trademark infringement needs to prove that a defendant intentionally and knowingly enabled another to infringe a trademark. In the above described case, the court was convinced by the evidence presented by Louis Vuitton that the web hosting providers knew about the infringing activity.

The most stupid question in web hosting industry probably is the one like “Which Are Top 10 Shared Hosting Providers?”. It is so stupid, that actually there is no answer. But thousands of money-making chasers give a birth “Top Hosting Directory” every single day. And that’s why there are a bunch of top or best web hosting site and directories out there. Some of them even receive high ranking in search engine result pages and bring thousands of dollars to their owners.

B10WH was there 4 years ago. But we decided to change the concept. At the same time we still pay attention to those who spend a loft of time to build the next top web hosting list. Today in “Have You Say” we will target your attention to a discussion in web hosting talk titled “Top 10 Shared Hosting Providers – What Are Your Thoughts”.

“Hello. I am new to WHT and a grad student at University of Texas. My purpose for joining is to gain research for a thesis I am doing titled “Internet – Where it all begins?” My focus is on the hosting provider side of the industry considering it is a $19 Billion dollar industry” says the WHT user “HostingResearcher” in a thread. He explains that the research that he found has lead him many different directions.

“There are many sites to tell you who the top 10 providers are within the industry, however they provide no background data on why”.

“It seems there are many website that tell you who the Top 10 providers are within the industry, however they provide no background data on why”, says the forum member. He also explains that there are some sights that provide user reviews, “however small sample data”. “This need for data brings me to you all” posts HostingResearcher and asks the questions “Who is the best shared hosting company?”, and “What makes them the best?”.

He also asks Web Hosting Talk members to help him to gather this data by responding via this quick survey. HostingResearcher calls WHT members to rate between 1 and 5 the web hosts’ – Service Offerings, Pricing, Customer Service, Market Perception, Experience, Quality.

What have you said?

“There are no “best” hosts. The top sites are mostly affiliate payout sites, pretty worthless what’s best for me may be terrible for you and vice versa – it all depends on what you find best and how the host works with you and/or for you”, wrote “njoker555”.

“There must be some consistency from one provider to the next. It seems that most of the shared hosting providers offer similar packages for space, control panel, bandwidth, support, and pricing. If you had to purchase a shared hosting package today, then who would you look at first?”, responds the “HostingResearcher”.

Another WHT member “SoftsysHosting-Rick” says that most of the top 10 that you’ll be looking at will be the hosts who pay good sum of $$ for getting up in the list. “However, as njoker mentioned, it all depends on your usage and it will be really difficult for you to come up with a list of say top 10 or top 20 hosts – the reason is simply that top 10 hosts differ from requirements to requirements”. ads the forum member.

“Hence, what I’d suggest you to do is to first gather different kind of requirements amongst customers and thereafter come up with top 10/20 hosts for each specific requirements. These requirements can be in terms of platform of hosting (Linux/Windows), type of hosting (shared/reseller/vps/dedicated), kind of hosting (website hosting/database hosting/email hosting/backup/all), etc. I believe, you will need to do quite a good amount of research and thereafter come up with your requirements after which you should be looking at customer inputs for their best host matching specific requirements. Fortunately, you are at the right place and you will get good amount of data/help from folks here”,  explains “SoftsysHosting-Rick”.

“CodyRo” a forum member with 478 posts (at the time when they joined the conversation) said that it’s going to be very tough to make a conclusive list.

“For instance you have some smaller companies that people are very happy with, but their customer base is not nearly as far reaching as the larger hosts. As a result it’s going to be very difficult to get a consistent answer – especially on forums such as these where the small / medium sized hosts often have a decent following. Also things such as quality are merely perceptions and opinion. It’s going to be difficult to gather enough hard data based on that criteria”, explains CodyRo.

Ldcdc (Dan of WHReviews), on of the most fanatical WHT members with status “Community Liaison 2.0” who has 17,997 posts in Web Hosting Talk said it would be quite fantastic indeed and commented that anyone who wants to categorize the top share hosting providers needs may have to do their own research using the forum and some of the so called “top web hosting directories”. “How accurate it will all be, would end up being an endless debate. I know it for a fact that on one of them, some of the reviews were planted by the host itself, so the defense systems of these sites (those that actually have such) are not perfect. Then again, what is perfect in this world”, writes Ldcdc.

The next poster “NetDistrict” adds that he doesn’t think that people would need to look at how large a any web hosting company is. “This is less important to what the hosting company can offer the customer the quality, support options and prices of the hosting company”, posts NetDistrict.

The last in the line Host Color posts that they think that the price of web hosting services should be explained and the prospective customers must know what they pay for.

“There are companies that sell cheap, but don’t use redundant network or even a SLA. Others are very stable in terms of network and facilities but their support is not that good. From my point of view the quality of customer service is crucial in our industry. The communication with customers must be well organized and automated. However a high level of automatization is not just about buying software. It depends of how any web host manages different processes”, ads HostColor.

Thread is still open – http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=873969. You may join but, following the discussion and posting meaningful is a must

The morality and fair play is a corner-stone of each business. Anyone who has been in business long enough can tell you than contracts does not worth even a dime without honesty. when we take a look at today’s web hosting industry however, we will see that it is all about money. It is all about making a few more bugs. Greed is one of the worst things in todays hosting market. It drives one of the most negative trends – “unlimited”! I though that there are a very few people who think this way. Of course I might be wrong, I don’t know actually how many are they, but here is one of them!

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This is not an article that aims to explain consumers “How to choose a web host”. “How to choose?” is a different topic. B10WH editorial team bravely decided to offer our readers even better advice – “Who to choose?”.

Most hosting guides say that it is “critical decision” to pick up web host. Of course this is not true. There are many awful web hosting providers. Some of them respond to your support tickets a day or two after you have invited some of your tech savvy friends at home for the weekend party and they sold your problem with FTP, POP 3 Mail or any other feature.

The truth however is that web hosting, especially in its Shared Class (Shared Hosting) is a pretty standardized service. Most providers power your hosting plan with cPanel, Plesk, Ensim, DirectAdmin or any other web hosting automation software (Control panel in hosting jargon), which usually is in service in thousands of hosting providers. Of course there are some companies (we think the more innovative ones) that power customer acconts with their own proprietary software.

It will not be a mistake if I say most Shared Hosting companies, especially those you most often see in the ads offer similar features. I must admit that if you are inexperienced customer you should will be a real sleuth to distinguish one shared web host, from another. Here comes my first advice!

Don’t Get Unlimited!

Today most Shared Hosting companies offer plans that cost 5 bucks per month (payable up front on annual basis) and when it comes to disc space and bandwidth quotas most of they claim to offer “unlimited”. Although B10WH has featured some hosting companies that offer “unlimited”, and I can assure you that any of them is a reliable provider, but it is still much better decision to find buy web hosting from someone that those not oversell and dosn’t sell “unlimited”.

When you search for web hosting and you are about to get impressed by any hosting company, just go to Google and place its name in the search bar. It is important to see what the search results say about this company. Try to find whether it is socialized and open to the public, does it produce news, content, how often it upgrades its products and services.

It is a good idea to compare a few web hosting providers, but do not do this within “TOP HOSTING” sites, that you can find around. There are tons of them on the web and any single of them wants to make you to click on its ads. Many others are affiliated with any web hosting company. So be careful! B10WH also profits from selling advertising and referring customers to web hosting companies, but we state this very clear on our website and never mislead our readers.

So, the best you can do is to make a comparison chart, to make a fact-check and to compare the services of a few hosting companies by yourself. As a part of your mini hosting survey, you can also try to collect multiple opinions about the picked web hosting companies. If you feel lazy got to WebHostingTalk.com, and search for consumer reviews about web host you are about to sign up.

Our advice to any host seeker is to check whether the company they think might work for them answers promptly to support tickets and email messages. Phone support is also important. Never go with a web hosting company that does not provide phone support. No matter if it is tool-free or not the phone support is important. There are many situations when you will really need someone to answer your phone call.

Another thing to do once you have already chosen a hosting provider is to read its TOS. Make sure there are no hidden terms and limitations that apply to the usage of the service. Be very careful with the “unlimited offerings”. Some hosts say that they offer unlimited, but your website is always restricted in usage of services.