Stolen content

What to do?

[zoltan]

We are running a large B2B site with close to 100,000 members growing every day.
Recently, one of our members informed us about something really strange. The information they posted to our website (exact phrases and product description) also appear on another B2B website -that claim to have 600,000 members- but under a different company name and even a different country! After further checking the website in question we noticed that they have copied product title, product photo and company details + contact information of tens (or a lot more) of our members. But how?

Just 1 simple example:
My Site:
- Company1, Country: Italy, Italian contact details
- Product Name: Red Widget
- Product Description: Many details about Red Widget... Red Widget, etc.

Their Site (the above product with the same description but different contact details and even totally unrelated product name!):
- Product Description: Many details about Red Widget... Red Widget, etc.
- Company2, Country: Austria, Austrian contact details
- Product Name: Something totally unrelated...

So, they are copying products and companies from our website and post it on theirs but mess up the information. I guess they are doing this only to "feed" their database even more... at a first glance, I hardly believe their 600,000 members are all real....

What should I do in this case? What is the general procedure I should follow?

Any advice is highly appreciated.

[stapel]

Have you figured out where they're hosted? (Just because their offices are in Austria or wherever, doesn't mean their hosting service is.)

Are they in the Google AdSense program, that you could contact Google about their account?

Eliz.

[netchicken1]

I encountered that on a website that I am a member of. There was a russian website that was feeding off our DB taking the threads and posts.

I am not sure of the outcome but the idea seemed to be to create immediate content for the website for google indexing.

The site has gone now, it was also indexing other sites as well.

[rogerd]

Past threads in the Library:

Guide to Protecting Your Content [webmasterworld.com]

Stolen Content: What to Do First [webmasterworld.com]

[zoltan]

The website is registered by somebody from Hong Kong, will check where it is hosted.
In my opinion, the main idea of the stolen content is to get more pages indexed and to look like a bigger database. Yes, they also have AdSense on these pages.

Any further suggestion is welcome.