Copyright Infringement by Canadian Website

Does US copyright law have any teeth in Canada?

[bboyce]

I maintain an website for our business and in the process have written several original articles pertaining to our field for content.

Today I realized that our website has been taken out of Google completely (we have always enjoyed a #1 rank for several very relevant keyword combinations and thusly a large amount of traffic for this). In the process of investigating (using CopyScape.com) I found a Canadian website (our's is in the US) that has very obviously copied verbatim a couple of paragraphs from one of these articles and edited/added a few words in its midst to call it their own. The offending page exists for the purpose of an affiliate clickthrough program to sell a third party e-book.

I sent the site owner a very polite but also firm email requesting that he remove the offending paragraphs. I also CC'd this email to the guy who runs the affiliate program that he is participating in. Instead of him putting forth the minor effort required to rectify the situation, he sent back an email completely denying the infringement as well as calling my email "spam" and "phishing" (HAH! WHAT?!?!?).

I have several questions:

1. Does the DMCA apply in this case where the offender is in Canada?

2. He runs his own host (and I am naive about how all that works) -- who can I talk to about having the site removed if it comes to that? Would he have an ISP that I could appeal to? How do I find out who that would be? What about a domain registrar?

3. Could something this small really be the reason that our site was removed from Google? I have always had a very clean white-hat site, I can't imagine why else we would be removed.

4. Would it be stupid pride to pursue this with my attorney or would I be better off swallowing my price and just changing my paragraph so that it doesn't appear to be dupe?

Any help appreciated.. thanks...

[bboyce]

Posting the chain of emails just for amusement.. here is my initial email:
----------------
CC: XXXXXXXXXX, registered owner of XXXX(Affiliate Program)XXXX.com

Mr. XXXXXXXXXXXX,

It has recently come to my attention that you operate a website at the domain XXXXXXXXXX.com which contains plagiarized material from our website at XXXXXXXXXX.net. This information was plagiarized to promote sales through an affiliate program that you participate in involving Mr. XXXXXXX of XXXXXX, XXXXXXX in the sale of his XXXXXXXXX e-Book under the affiliate ID "XXXXXXXX". Information pertaining to this material is included below.

Offending page on XXXXXXXXX.com:
(URL REMOVED)

Page that content was taken from:
(URL REMOVED)

Overview of offending material by CopyScape.com (plagiarized material is highlighted):
(URL REMOVED)

I've also attached a JPEG screenshot of the two websites side-by-side with the offending section highlighted.

As a result of this plagiarism, Google has penalized our website by removing us from it's index for duplicate content. Previous to removal of our website from Google's index, we were ranked #1 for several lucrative keyword combinations and enjoyed heavy traffic from these rankings. As you may well imagine, a business such as our's is impacted heavily by the loss of traffic and marketing exposure in situations such as this.

We request that you remove the offending paragraphs from your website immediately. As you will note, at the bottom of the website that you took this content from there is a link to our Terms of Use which reads:

" The content and materials of this website, as well as the organization and layout of this site, are protected by worldwide copyright laws and provisions. You may access and print materials from this website for your personal and non-commercial use. Unless otherwise specified, you may not copy, modify, distribute, transmit, display, publish, license, transfer or sell any information obtained from this website without express written permission of XXXXXXXXXXXX. "

We request your cooperation and immediate resolution of this issue within 3 days of receipt of this message. Please notify me at [e-mail] as soon as the offending material has been removed.

Sincerely,

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

[bboyce]

And the response:
--------------------------
Mr. XXXXXXXXXX,

We can understand your concern over the loss of relationship with Google,
as they are an invaluable resource for helping people find what they want.

Your website's removal, however, has nothing to do with any other
websites, and in fact, we were not aware of your website's existence until
receiving your misdirected email, which at this point is considered spam.

As a service to our visitors, we include thousands of great ebooks,
software, etc., in our XXXXXXXX, and in doing so, we need to
summarize what these products are about. There are indeed words that are
very similar between yours, XXXXXXs, XXXXXXXXXs.., and THOUSANDS of other
websites online that have AND have not yet been found by the search
engines. If you were to provide a complete list of websites that you
claim copied your site, you would realize exactly how rediculous this
sounds, appears, and actually is.

As for helping XXXXXXX promote his services; we would imagine that websites
that drive favorable customers his way would be welcome. If indeed your
concern is to help XXXXXXXX and not yourself, you would agree.

To put some more perspective on this issue, if you look up - XXXX(Company Name)XXXX - in Google, there are 30.1 million other webpages that
compete in the search engines using these terms. That may be where you
should start misdirecting your concerns.

If Google has removed your website from its' listings, you should be
looking at YOUR website and not at others.

Best Regards,

Administration
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.com

PS: Now that you have directed our attention your way as possibly
phishing, you may want to educate yourself by reading some of our
Internet Security section. We take attacking introductions like yours
very seriously and will have to proceed with our own appropriate steps to
insure misunderstandings like this are not repeated at ourselves or any of
our security partners and readers.

[stapel]

bboyce said:

Does the DMCA apply in this case where the offender is in Canada?

I don't think so, since the DMCA is American law. But other copyright laws apply, and the DMCA does apply if the hosting is provided in the US. Have you determined who his server host is?

bboyce said:

Would he have an ISP that I could appeal to? How do I find out who that would be? What about a domain registrar?

Have you pinged his site to determine his IP address? This could lead to his server host or ISP, whose terms of use he has likely disobeyed.

I'm not aware of any action that could be taken with or against his domain-name registrar, since this is not a domain-name issue.

bboyce said:

Could something this small really be the reason that our site was removed from Google?

I don't know. I don't know if anybody knows.

bboyce said:

Would it be stupid pride to pursue this with my attorney or would I be better off swallowing my price and just changing my paragraph so that it doesn't appear to be dupe?

"Stupid"? I don't know. Pointless or fruitless? Maybe. But I'd try to find his IP address and his host first. And if he's duplicating you and is listed in Google, then I'm pretty sure you can file notification with Google. At the very least, you can get him de-listed, too.

Good luck.

Eliz.