Going after infringers in other countries

How do I do it?

[beren]

My biggest client is in the US and his best website does pretty well for a competitive term. The rise of Google's AdSense program has caused an upsurge in other sites copying. These are not marginal or questionable cases of infringement; they are wholesale copies. Because the search engines can't distinguish between old and new sites, these copies put my client's site in danger of being dinged for duplicate content.

Normally, I identify the website, find out the domain owner and have my client send him a threatening letter. This usually works.

However, the client is reluctant to go after sites outside the United States. He feels these are not really competitors to his core business (which is true) because they are overseas, so does not see them as a threat. He doesn't fully understand the risk that a copied site poses to his search engine rankings. Also, he feels it would be difficult to follow up in a court against these sleazeballs.

Is there any way that anyone knows of to put some fear into domain owners when they are copying your site?

[rogerd]

It's worth at least making the attempt to go after overseas infringers. Try contacting everyone in the domain registry, the host, any advertisers, etc. You can also file DMCA complaints with the major search engines.

While actually hiring legal representation in those markets would be costly, you can evaluate that on a case by case basis. In most situations, you can probably get results without that step. For important trademark or copyright infringement cases, though, you should aggressively pursue the infringers. I just read about a firm in our US community that has an offshore company using their trademark and even their graphics to create lookalike products that end up all over the world; it has impacted their sales, caused product quality complaints, and run up enormous legal bills. Better to nip these things in the bud if possible.

[Dynamoo]

I have had some limited success with filing a DMCA complaint with Google. Neither myself nor the infringer are based in the US, but Google pulled the pages from its index any way.

However, I have further outstanding DMCA complaints still being processed from October. Sometimes it can take a while I guess.

Also remember that the US is a popular place for non-US websites to be hosted, and that many (or at least *some*) other hosts have strict TOSes that forbid copyright theft.