Plagiarism

content theft

[ghosttownbabe]

Yet another complaint about plagiarism and I'm trying to find the best way to handle this.

Another site owner has plagiarized over 60 pages of text from our site. He's very aggressive and the number is growing daily.

We're all Canadian residents. Filing charges is not an option here. Recently he moved his web hosting to Germany. Our site is hosted in Canada.

Suing him is out of the question. It'll cost thousands and from all accounts this creep is a deadbeat and loser. We'll probably win but it will be a hollow victory at best because we'll never see a nickle. Both sites are non profit information sites only.

Cease and desist messages have elicited nothing but vulgar replies.

If there are other Canucks out there that have had similar problems, any other or additional suggestions would be most welcome.

[stapel]

I don't know if the following resource might be helpful...?

German Copyright Law (Urheberrechtsgesetz, UrhG) [iuscomp.org]

Asking a thief please to be nice isn't usually terribly successful, in my experience. So have you attempted to contact his host directly?

Good luck!

Eliz.

[KenB]

You can still go after the site via the webhosting provider as Germany does enforce international copyrights. If you you handle the web host in the correct manner they may very well shut down the site. Although it would help if you had someone who spoke German help you out.

[Bewenched]

We had someone doing that to us last year and we still combat site content scrapers... seems like a never ending battle.

I've even written complaint letters to their hosting company and one host actually kicked them off their servers, but for every one that we defeat there is always another to take his place.

Good luck.

[BigDave]

You can make his copying rather ineffective by the simple fact that Google, Yahoo and MSN are all based in the United States and are subject to the DMCA.

Send a DMCA takedown notice to the major search engines. There is a reasonably good chance that with enough pages listed, they will just remove the entire offending site.

[sun818]

How does one go about proving that you are actually the content owner and they stole the content from you instead of vice versa? We take descriptions from manufacturer for blue widgets and sometimes revise the entire paragraphs. Then someone comes along and decides our copy is better than the manufacturer's. Would a DMCA work in this instance? What kind of proof would we need? Would a dated certified unopened letter from the post office displaying the revised description work?

[loner]

Rather than fooling with a 'Poor Man's' Copyright, just register your work with the U.S. Copyright office. Anything else you're just kidding yourself.

With a registered copyright you have some juice and can go after punitive as well as actual damages.