mistah - 6:26 pm on Oct 20, 2003 (gmt 0)

I sell special widgets on my website. As a service to users of my special widgets, I have downloadable product information sheets posted on my website in pdf format.

One of my competitors has launched a product that looks like my special widgets, but has a number of shortcomings (to try and get round patent issues). It is not as environmentally friendly, is of lower quality, and does not perform as well, but sells for a lower price. This I can live with. Many companies have to put up with low-quality, cheap imitations of their products.

What has really annoyed me is that the competitor has copied the text from my datasheet and used it on his own downloadable datasheet. I would say 80% of the text is identical. All that has changed is:

1) The brand name.
2) Certain sentences have been changed where the imitation product can not match the performance claims made for my own product.

Stupidly, I now realise that I did not put a copyright notice on the datasheet. However, I feel that I must have certain rights to protect against this plagerism.