stealing content from our site

is there anything we can do about it

[wigsy_1]

Hi all,

We have a mobility website and it has an "about us" section describing us and our services.

A company has apperared just today and seems to have taken most of our text from this page and put it in their site.

There are 387 words in total on their page of which 286 are on ours. 74% of it is copied from us.

The format of the page is identical.

Is there anything that can be done about this?

Any help is appreciated

Wigsy_1

[Matt Probert]

In theory, yes. In reality. No.

In theory you can pursue them under copyright laws, in reality if they put up a fight it's down to who has the better lawyers and deeper pockets.

Matt

[photon]

Check out this thread from the forum library [webmasterworld.com]:

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

[SkyDog]

In theory, yes. In reality. No.

In theory you can pursue them under copyright laws, in reality if they put up a fight it's down to who has the better lawyers and deeper pockets.

Matt

Not true in all circumstances. Contact the site owner and if they don't remove the infringing material -- send a DMCA takedown request to their ISP, Google and Yahoo.

[BigDave]

Before sending a takedown, you should get an opinion about that 74% of the words being copyrightable.

With that much repeated, I'm betting that the finding would be in your favor, but without seeing it, who knows.

If it is mostly simple generic sentences and paragraphs, then it will be a much tougher sell to a jury. And you say that 74% of the words are yours, but are they all in the same place? Even moving the sentences around a little bit helps them out.

And you may not like the results of sending a takedown when you do not have a good enough case to win.

At the very least, you should ask a few people that are not involved if they could look at those two and consider them to be substantally similar, and see how fast they come back with a response. Remember, you have to convince a jury with a skilled attorney arguing the other side.

[ownerrim]

I recently dealt with a theft issue. Just days ago, really. I tracked down the hosting company, called them (took many many attempts before I actually found a usable number within this hosting service's hierarchy), informed them that one of their hosted sites had stolen word for word one of my pages (that took god knows how many weeks to do the research for). They faxed me a complaint form and I filled it out supplying the url for my page and for the thief's page. Within two days, I received an apology from the host and the offender was kaput.

Good outcome. But I am sure it will happen again. Anyone have experience using copy*(ape?
(replace the * with s and the( with c)

I have considered using them to root out theives but I am concerned that using something that utilizes google's API might be a TOS violation in google's eyes.

This theft issue unnerves me, almost as much as the idea of 302 redirects to hijack a site

[pmac]

>This theft issue unnerves me, almost as much as the idea of 302 redirects to hijack a site <

And it should. I Just had a site die the slow death from what I am assuming is a complete word for word ripoff.

[BigDave]

It is not "theft", it is "infringement".

[ratebeer]

I second the idea to go after the hosts before you try to nail these guys in court. The other thing you should do is simply register your copyright -- it costs about $30.

[ownerrim]

register your copyright -- it costs about $30.

How do you do that exactly?

[ownerrim]

"I Just had a site die the slow death from what I am assuming is a complete word for word ripoff."

What happened?

[pmac]

Had a site that scored well vanish from the serps. Pages in question had url only, no title, description or cache.

Found a another site that had ripped the content word for word including the design.

That, along with a couple of other things leads me to believe it was the duplicates that caused my site to get nuked.