Someone copied my site slightly modified my logo, company name, etc.

What should I do?

[irock]

Hi, I just found out a site on Yahoo that got all my content except this guy slightly modified my logo and changed my site name to his.

Do you think my first step is to send the hosting company a cease & desist letter or a copyright compliant?

Also, where do I get a sample of cease & desist letter?

Kinda frustrated... pls help.

[BarHopper]

My personal opinion on this matter is that I would not attack the owners of that site. I would kindly ask them if they could review who their web master is or the person in charge of the site and review it with your site. I would then suggest to them a time line in which they have to remove the content because it is infact copyright and you can prove that their code is duplicated by yours. The fact of the matter is its not going to be worth your time, or money to try and sue them unless they are a multi million dollar corporation. So the best you can do is try to throw some fear into them. As for duplication of your site google should already see that your site is the original content being that it got indexed first, so you should be ok..send a message to google telling them about this site, or any other major search engines that have indexed your site first and they will most likely put a penalty on the site that duplicated yours. Hope these options helped you out. Good luck

BarHopper

[irock]

Thanks BarHopper.

I have already sent a copyright infringement letter to the duplicated site's hosting company.

As for duplicated listings on Google, the infringed site is so new that it nearly reaches two-week old. But the site already rank on Yahoo. Lame... :(

[alika]

Google's DCMA page has a sample of cease-and-desist. Or you can google for it. I think I used and modified the one sent by the Record Association etc.

This happened to us last month, with the thief replacing our name with theirs, our logo with theirs, but everything else including the text are ours. We sent the DCMA letter to Adsense (person was running adsense), Google, and their web host. The web host acted swiftly and within 48 hours removed the offending site. The person emailed us - after ignoring our emails requesting him to cease and desist using our content and website design -- begging to drop our complaint.

Good luck