Are the defenders of copyright visiting your web site?

[Toon Town Dave]

So I have a web site for my live 365 station where (eventually) I'll post set list and such. Being a web geek, I often look in my server logs to see what kind/how much traffic I'm getting. Often I've noticed clusters of requests for pages that normal people don't want to read (privacy policy for example).

I just happened to note that this "visitor" hit every page on my site in the space of a few seconds. I also noted that it reported it was MSIE 6 on "Windows XP". For those of you not in the geek extreme category, a real XP system will report itself as WinNT 5.1. Curious about who was doing this I investigated and found it was a well known bot coming from a company called Cyveillance.

Cyveillance appears to have some big name clients for whom they look for things from subversive comments to copyright infringement. In the case of my site (for Toon Town Swing Radio), I can safely assume they are looking for pirated music or nasty comments about the RIAA. This itself doesn't really bother me but their approach does.

1) Their bot behaves in a very hostile manner, it tries to masquerade as a real person, it doesn't even look for "robots.txt" and it can (on a large site) create a lot of traffic as it downloads EVERYTHING it can find links to on a server.

2) There are reports that individuals have received nastygrams from the Cyveillance legal team simply because their site happened to contain words that were part of a trademark on their site in a completely unrelated context. More importantly the words didn't even appear together.

They apparently masquerade themselves as different user agents but always seem to come from the same netblock (63.148.99.224 - 63.148.99.255). Has anyone else seen this on their site?

Becasue of their hostile bandwidth wasting behavior, I've started unconditionally rejecting their traffic at the firewall.

Here is a good synopsis of the bot:
http://www.gulker.com/music_industry/cy ... cebot.html