Forum Moderators: not2easy
Send them a cease and desist email with a timescale (make it reasonable - 7 days usually works very well, because of law) and make sure that you threaten with a lawyer and you will be claiming for solicitors fee from them, loss of business and for your time, if it goes as far as getting a solicitor.
It is often helpful to find some local lawyers and find out their approximate fees and then include one that you feel comfortable with in the letter, usually the full name and address shows that you are serious.
It is unlikely that it will be up in 7 days time, but possible, and you must be prepared to take it to court.
Avoid making explicit references to solicitors fees, lost profits, etc. I think the strongly worded letter should indicate that the content be removed within a set time period, otherwise you will use all possible means to take the matter further. Make sure you state that since the infringement, you have evidence that your profits and visitors have been reduced (this is the kind of easy evidence you get from referrer statistics), to make it clear to them that the infringement is having a real impact on your business every single day until the issue is rectified. When you eventually succeed: this may help your award of damages, because you've explicitly made it clear to them initially that there is an economic cost of the action. It may also motivate them to make redress sooner rather than later.
The UK has a very good copyright protection, and the legal system is accessible as a result of the woolf reforms: meaning you could bring a small claims action at little cost if you can't afford a lawyer. If you can afford a lawyer, go and do that right now. Let us know about your outcome.
You could try their hosting company as they may have backups with the files on them. On the other hand, they may not disclose that information for confidentiality.
Other possibilities include some search engines which are slow to update - sometimes they have a last updated date.
View the source code for the pages to see if there is a clue in there - some people put dates on there.
Sometimes, depending upon the server involved, you can get into the subdirectories and see the date the subdirectory was created.
There's a few ideas for you to try.
Do you have some ballpark idea about when the infringement occurred (when did you start losing traffic from google hits?, do you have access logs that show a UA extracting the content from your site?) to know whether they are being reasonably truthful.
Of course, if you think that they are being unreasonable, then don't agree to the settlement and head to legal action - seems as though you have a stronger position, and in real legal action the burden of proof (and the consequences for contempt) are higher, so more likely that they would not try to be dishonest. Although coming to settlment is not an admission of guilt (because it can be for other reasons), it smells very strongly of it!
AFAIK the web archive has a few months delay to it - content takes a while to appear. Check if they have previous content in the web archive, and if so, when it was last updated. You may just be a month or two away from seeing it appear.
There are strange other beasts that roam the net and cache bits of websites too (e.g. whois, alexa [associated with the web archive]).
Score one for the good guy with the pit bull solicitor!
In the down and dirty world of thieves it sometimes never ends.....
Have you written an article about this for your website or is it part of the agreement that you don't take such action? You might keep the article in general terms not suggesting who the offender is. Telling your story to your visitors might send out some warnings to other competitors with "smart ideas".
And have you been contacted by journalists who want to interview you? This is a good story that ought to be interesting for web society in general.
