Reed College Seeks to Stop Copycat Web Site

February 24, 2011, 6:43 pm

A Reed College professor made an unusual discovery in October when searching for himself on Google. A Web site for an unaccredited college called the University of Redwood appeared to have repurposed much of the material from Reed’s Web site. For example, the list of faculty Web sites on Redwood’s site is identical to the list of faculty Web sites on Reed’s site.

Officials at the Portland, Ore., college say their investigation into the Web site leads them to suspect that its purpose could be to solicit application fees from foreign students seeking to study in the United States. The site’s authors could not be reached for comment.

But the site says, on an “About Redwood” page, that it is a liberal-arts college founded in 1908 (the same year Reed was founded) that offers “a world class intellectually rigorous academic program” and has a “huge team of 135 faculty members.” It says it is named after “the Oregon pioneers Simeon and Amanda Redwood.” (Reed is named for the Oregon pioneers Simeon and Amanda Reed.)

“Social life at Redwood,” the site says, “is promising, it has a lot of opportunity for students and teachers to involve in music, theatre, lectures, movies, and sports through which one can continue with personal interest and get an opportunity to socialize.”

After the site was discovered in October, Reed officials sent a notice of copyright violation to the company that hosts the site, following policies specified by the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. The company, Wild West Domains, a subsidiary of Go Daddy, took the site down within a few days. But Reed officials discovered that it was back up again in January, and Martin Ringle, Reed’s chief technology officer, says college officials will most likely send another takedown notice soon.

The Web-domain company says it disabled the website in November, but reinstated it after the offending material was removed. The company says it has not heard from Reed since.

The University of Redwood site lists a Torrance, Calif., address that is a box at the mail-forwarding service Shipito. That company says it has not been contacted by Reed but suspended the Redwood account pending an investigation. The company did not say when or why the account had been suspended or who controls it.

Mr. Ringle says he is not sure why the creators for the University of Redwood site targeted Reed. “We can only speculate that they thought our site was nice,” he says.

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http://www.facebook.com/people/Jeff-Wanser/58601049 Jeff Wanser

One possible way for Reed to fight back would be for the faculty to contact Redwood about owing them back pay for all their hard work at the college.
haohtt

Copying a legitimate university’s website is a technique that has been used by several diploma mills in the past. It certainly saves time and effort, not to mention the hassle of having to create made-up names for one’s made-up faculty. Redwood’s effort is so inept that a number of pages on its site still say “Reed” instead of “Redwood.” Give it up guys, you’ve been outed nationally!
drjeff

This is a great illustration of the sincerest form of flattery. Obviously they thought Reed’s site “was nice.”
chriskox

This is better prosecuted as a state crime, fraud, than copyright. Unfortunately, the capacity to rob with device has grown exponentially, often perpetrated by those very cleverest of students we invested in, and supported by others likewise trained in legal wrangling. Beware of “in app” sales made on vapor products and services to companies established by the geniuses in Silicon Valley, and their expensive legal cohorts. Fraud is fraud.
rentedname

Actually, here’s what Reed should do. 1) Perfect the copyright by paying the fee to the Feds. Protect the entire website’s content in this manner. This simple act will allow Reed to collect damages per instance of copyright violation; these should be up to $100K per violation. 2) just WAIT until the miscreant does it again. Then use an archiving tool, with good witnesses, to document the act. 3) Go git ‘em. Consider: Each page view might be argued to be an act of copyright infrigement, each worth $100K. In addition, if GoDaddy has already been notified, and if they continue to serve the pages, then they should be liable as well. Reed might make millions out of this.
drgarysgoodman

Have we ruled out the possibility the Reed faculty are moonlighting?
kakerino

The site is still up. And yes, some of it is quite inept. But there are always fools who will be tools.
22280998

Unfortunately, you can not collect if you can not find them. Whatever application fees and diploma fees they get are probablly transfered to the cayman islands (or similar sites) immediately.
vandoesborgh

I love how they’ve taken a statement that was fine and messed it up:

REDWOOD (Why the bad grammar?):
“Redwood students have been regularly win Fulbright, Watson, National Science foundation, and other fellowships. Very recently, one of Redwood senior won a coveted Churchill Scholarship for theoretical physics at the Cambridge University.”

REED (Original):
“Students regularly win Fulbright, Watson, National Science Foundation, and other fellowships. Recently, a Reed senior won a coveted Churchill Scholarship for study of theoretical physics at Cambridge University.”
http://www.writessay.com Essay Writer

Copycats should be stopped. Hope they will clear it out with the other party. http://www.writessay.com
austinbarry

The site is still up. I love the navigation! Links point back to the parent page, and some links are just plain haphazard. Interestingly the few links which might be useful for obtaining sensitive information (bookstore, admissions, computer center) go nowhere. I guess web design is not one of the colleges strong points.
janders3

The “.com” domain should give it away to anyone, I hope!
mueller14776

Eine sehr schöne Idee mit einem schönen Design! Hier noch mein Tipp zum Wochenende: http://www.bringmirbio.de/
cordelia

Yes, it’s all about the numbers. I teach at an institution that has long prided itself on a low faculty-student ratio, but that is becoming a thing of the past as the economy shrinks and the only apparent way to raise revenue (in a state where the governor proposed a 54% budget cut for the university system) is to increase admissions. As the required GPA and SAT scores drop dramatically, we will be teaching more students who are in need of more of our time.

But what can you expect when your chancellor claims that studies have shown that you can teach a class of 100 as effectively as a class of 25?

Try that in a freshman writing class . . .

Not to mention, however, that if you have any hope of promotion, you’d better be churning out a book every three years and lots of articles and conference papers in between–even with four courses, three preps, and up to 150 students each semester.
polargrid

“Engineers make alot more than philosophy majors simply because strong math/quantitative skills are much rarer among new graduates than the skills taught in the humanities curriculum.”

That’s only part of the picture. Knowledge of ancient Sumerian is very rare as well, but employers aren’t lining up to hire folks with this capability. An engineering or science degree means specific quantitative and hands-on problem-solving skills in addition to critical thinking and reasoning, and this combination is indeed very useful to employers.
_perplexed_

“That is why we need the IRS to provide us average earnings data by college to help evaluate the differential rate of return on investments in the various colleges in the U.S.”

Why do you expect the IRS to do your data collection for you? It would be easy enough to collect a resonably good convenience sample of a few thousand adults and inquire about income and education (level and institution) and begin to get a grip on the answer to the question.

Why do economists believe that they shouldn’t have to collect their own data?
harveyking

Actually, although it is statistically difficult, it is possible to verify ” if those in the college going population had NOT gone to college, they
would have earned more than those others who did not go on”. James Heckman won a Nobel prize in Economics for coming up with a mechanism for correcting for self-selection bias (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heckman_correction).
One classic way of looking at this issue for schooling has involved following self-employed individuals, and seeing how much education they get relative to their income levels. They tend to get less schooling for the same level of income, an indication that part of the return to education is signaling your quality, not just learning. (Self-employed people do not need to signal their quality to themselves.)
That said, in research in Canada (where I am) and in every other country that I have ever seen research on, the income return to PSE is positive, even for non-completers (e.g. each year of PSE raises your annual income by a statistically significant amount that more than makes up for the cost of the schooling in tuition and lost wages), but even more so for those who finish a degree.
Income is not the only benefit to individuals or society from schooling, but it is a big part. I think that have a clear and truthful discussion of this is a good idea (what Vedder is calling for), but given the overwhelming research over the years (see any second year Labour Economics textbook) I would be surprised to see anything but a positive value to university degrees, measured in terms of higher income, lower unemployment, better health, better working conditions, etc.
11245928

I would first ask myself very honestly if the department is serving it’s students and the institution well and efficiently. Many departments believe that they are, but they rationalize away inefficiencies. Do all the tenured faculty teach a T-Th schedule? How many majors does the department have, etc.?Think like an administrator, make the department a well oiled machine, and then you may have the right to defend your department with all the tricks that have been mentioned above. If you do it for an inefficient department, you risk more cuts than you may deserve.
nybound

“Berkeley planned to borrow the $300-million it needed to improve the stadium, then use the interest gained from its expanded endowment to pay back the debt on the stadium.”
- It sounds like the university hired some unemployed former derivative-swap salesman from Lehman Brothers to run their finances.
banlaptops

When I hear ‘Berkeley,’ football never comes to mind but good grad programs do. What were those athletic director/planner types thinking with their scheme? It is just too depressing to continue to see this stuff continue and even in schools such as Berkeley. Just too much.