Someone Stole My Site

what to do?

[4string]

Someone copied the entire site for my business and only changed some of the content to reflect their business name and location. They also opened right down the street from us with a business name one word different from ours. The owner is also a former employee of ours.

Is the structure of my site copyrighted? Can I report that as a DMCA violation? The design, page titles, link text, everything is the same or similar!

I am MAD!

Please advise.

[BigDave]

The structure is probably not copyrighted, but the text is.

[rogerd]

Here's a good link from the library: Copied Content [webmasterworld.com].

[4string]

Thanks for the input. It doesn't look like there's a whole lot I can do since the body text is not copied verbatim. Luckily they added and removed a bunch of things that will negatively impact their rankings. They should be sandboxed for a while.

Who invited these guys to the internet party anyway?

[BigDave]

It doesn't have to be copied verbatim to be infringing. If they copied enough that a reasonable person would say that they copied from you, then you just might have a case.

That is where having the same structure would play in your favor. It would support that they copied the whole site, even if they changed a few words around.

Now if they actually rewrote the content, just using your site as a reference, then you are probably out of luck.

[4string]

I spoke with an Intellectual Property attorney today. He told me you need to be able to prove damages such as losing business or people confusing the sites. None of which has occured yet. He also said if you wish to pursue it in the courts it would cost $100K at the minimum. So whether I have a case or not, do I want to spend that much?

He did say there are some cases where the look and feel of a site are under copyright. However, the law is much more vague and it is harder to make a case. Having hard text would be easier.

Also, he warned of threatening lawsuits as the other party could throw a lawsuit back at you very quickly deciding the jurisdiction and other aspects of the case. So be committed if you're going to threaten legal action.

[BigDave]

I spoke with an Intellectual Property attorney today. He told me you need to be able to prove damages such as losing business or people confusing the sites.

That is for trademark, not copyright. (at least in the US)

What he might be saying is that he would not take the case unless there were provable damages so that he could claim a chunk of it.

[4string]

Actually, you are right BigDAVE. You can get damages for copyright infringement even if you can prove none. I think I may have misunderstood what the lawyer said on that. He did say something to that effect. I actually have a huge team of free legal resources, but I don't want to bug them too much at this point.

Everyone says the look and feel are uncanny. I have some legit and effective ideas up my sleeve. Perhaps I can use their own motions against them. I am way smarter than these people (and I ain't that smart).

[albo]

What does it take: what does it cost, and where does one apply, to get e.g. copyright for code/trademark for logo? I was told by <i>some</i> that it is okay to use copyright sign as a generality without having acquired same officially. I'd like to protect "intellectual property" of code techniques but all I've done is e.g external javascript/css.

[PaulPer]

Hi,

I just recently posted a similar topic. Although in my case, the otehr person has not copied my site in terms of 'similarity' - they have literally loaded the whole of my site into something like FRontpage and uploaded it to their hosted domain... so that all the text is an exact replica, all images are exact replicas, and all directory structure and page names are identical. the only difference is the domain name. Surely this needs little effort in proving that they stole the site, as when you load them side by side, they are identital copies of one another. What's the first point of call for me in rectifying this situation? - DMCA of google has put me off notifying them because they mention about 100k costs ect. Im at a loss. Can i email anyone on here the URL's privately so you can see what im talking about?
Paul.

[PaulPer]

Sorry, i should have added that i tried emailing the person directly but they are in China. Their email address didnt seems to be valid, and when i went to their host (listed in their whois, under the DNS entry) to complain about them.. it was all in chinese characters, so i wasn't able to. Help.