Content, Writing and Copyright Forum

Please do keep us informed... I love a good story.

As far as I know you can submit a DMCA filing... If it doesn't apply in the UK it shouldn't matter..... if the physical server location is in the USA then that is what law is applied to it.

For info, I get lots of copyright problems. Last week I had a similar situation where someone in China had been copying my stuff and had refused to remove it. His website was hosted in the USA. I had kept all the evidence and forwarded this to the hosting company who acted very swiftly to close him down. This gave me a lot of satisfaction ;)

We have a very similar issue to you right now... persistant and blatant copyright infringement.

I suggest you contact an IP laywer and get them to do a standard letter (About £500) that they send to the individual, plus the hoster and any other useful parties e.g. [ispa.org.uk...]

However get your timing right:

Submit DMCA to google / google adsense, Yahoo, MSN etc by fax (see [webmasterworld.com ] for links to relevant DMCA pages) but it will take a few weeks and the problem is the content has to be live on Google etc for them to act (they don't seem to be able to use th cache?!)

Then once you have heard back from them (i have now received 3 emails after about 3-4 weeks) then you can file the copyright infringement from the lawyer.

Also take the time to read through this great collection of articles [webmasterworld.com ]

Blast this bas**** for all it's worth - scum like this take up time and resources and until they are stopped will get worse cos they think they are above the law in the UK.

Now, if you file a false claim, then you are in big trouble -- The other party can sue your pants off for interfering with their business, etc.

What evidence might be relevant to a DMCA claim review? Site quality and age -- comparing your site against the alleged copier's site. If his site contains bits of material apparently scraped from hundreds of widget sites, but seems to provide only snippets of information surrounded by tons of pay-per-click ads, and your site contains what appears to be a lot of unique material about the widgets that you sell, it might be fairly obvious which site is legitimate and which is not. A quick look at the Internet Archive's "Wayback Machine" to see which site published the page first can be telling as well. These are just examples; For more information on this point, do a search on DMCA to dig up all the details.

If you register a copyright, then a copyright infringer is liable for punitive damages in addition to actual damages. But even if you do not register your copyright, it still exists (as a result of your act of creating the work, it is copyrighted). However, if your copyright is not registered, an infringer is liable only for actual --that is, provable-- damages.

The DMCA claim is only a first step to addressing a copyright infringement. After the DMCA claim, you can get an attorney involved, and file suit to recover actual damages, or actual plus punitive damages if you registered your copyright. But in creating the DMCA, the U.S. Congress realized that it might in fact be the *only* step you can afford to take, so it has some teeth of its own, even without an attorney being involved.

Before filing a DMCA claim, however, be sure to actually read everything in it and about it. If you file a false claim it means big trouble, whether the claim is intentionally false or accidentally (technically) false. So, it's not to be done lightly. But it's certainly a big stick --even in the absence of a follow-on suit-- and should make content thieves think twice about copying stuff from Webmasters in countries that are signatories of the WIPO treaty (The DMCA is the U.S. implementation of this global treaty, and you need not be a U.S. citizen to file a DMCA claim).

Be aware also that a DMCA claim, once filed, becomes part of the public record, and is posted on a well-known Web site for all to see.

I am not an attorney, but it would seem this type of thing is just one big lawsuit waiting to happen. I know some cases it would probably be easy to prove content was yours, but I can imagine a whole host of scenarios where you couldn't and lawsuits would be exploding everywhere. It would seem if I claim something is mine, no matter if I am right or not, that the other person could simply file a lawsuit and now I have the unpleasant choice of paying an attorney big bucks to defend myself and prove the content is mine or simply giving up and dropping my DMCA claim. This scenario is known as a legal shakedown, not totally unlike what Tony Soprano does to someone that he feels owes him some money.

I am thinking if I have good content that it would be easier to simply file a copyright on it for $30 and eliminate any and all doubt that I was the creator of said content and makes filing these DMCA claims a lot less hazardous.

Yes, in your case I think you are standing on very solid ground with your past emails and such. My comment was just more general in nature about the DMCA concept and how that might work on a continued basis.

By the way I appreciate your listing the archive.org site. I checked this out for my own site and it was very helpful resource. I had never heard of this site before, but I have bookmarked it now.

It said that I had not clearly identified the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed and the material that is claimed to be infringing. There was not enough information to permit them to locate the material.

This is nonsense. I clearly indicated the content on the infringers sites and the equivalent content on mine. I also pointed them to my material on archive.org before the other site existed. Either they cannot read or perhaps it's me?

Every business has to deal with jerks: there are obnoxious customers, clients, suppliers, and complete parasites. One place I used to work would get phone calls from people who would try to reach the average office workers and use false pretenses to coax out information on what type of printer or copier they worked with. If they found out, they would send bogus invoices for supplies they never delivered, hoping that someone in accounting would pay. They educated the employees so they would not give this information out, scrutinized all office supply invoices, and the problem was contained. Sad, but that's the way the world is.

Make sure it's not in the cache on your pc, or that it's not in the cache with your own service provider.