Forum Moderators: phranque
If you have found the hosting company and they happen to be in the US, send them an official DMCA copyright violation request. Many hosting companies in other companies will also accept DMCA requests, although legally they are not required to do so.
[webmasterworld.com...]
He and i live in 2 different U.S. states, can i go to my city court to sue him (i found his address)? And, is it possible to ask the judge to punish this guy by giving him 40 hrs community service in addition to any financial damage that he caused?
Thank you for your advice.
Like here in Massachusetts:
[ago.state.ma.us...]
or Minnesota
[ag.state.mn.us...]
Or check out wikipedia for your state:
[en.wikipedia.org...]
the time you're wasting filing court papers, he's probably ruining your rank in the search engines
If not, you lose.
In a court room you will have to prove that you created the content from scratch and not from a book, reference site, etc. If any of these can be proven, you will lose.
The web hosting company is the best bet, but will decide which of you had it up first.
Good luck,
Jim Catanich
What do you think about this step?
I think you should back up a step, then take the first step which BananaFish stated as
File a DMCA with Google, Yahoo, MSN and their ISP
There are probably as many ways to steal your site as there are to prevent the theft, or recover from it. Personally I wouldn't involve the courts system unless there was a tangible loss. Javascript is easier and often more effective.
Going to small claims court will be an absolute waste of time. They will not be able to shut his site down or even collect a judgement. You will be on your own for that. So you will just be wasting time.
Get him to take the site down, that is the important thing. Depending on your resources you could hire a lawyer and take him to "Big" claims court :), but small claims court would not be of any benefit. It would unlikely intimidate him into doing anything, and would not allow you to do much as a result, even if you got a default judgement.
[copyright.gov...]
If you don't have a registered copyright, you will only recover actual damages ( which is generally hard to prove ).
Hit him in the pocket
You can make someone's entire life fall apart using that type of info.
Another little-used technique with miscreants when you find them is to tell their Mom what they have been up to. It doesn't matter how experienced the villan, they really hate that :)
this may be a little off topic, but how on earth did he get all your 1500 html files? Did you leave your ftp account open to anoymous users?
Any halfway decent website download software will crawl the site and download all the files automatically - if they're accessible via HTTP and linked, they're downloadable.
If not, you lose.
Thats a wrong statement, some of the tools like archive.org will help you prove it was your site. Your host should also be able to verify that the website is yours and when it was created and this would be enough proof to go to the spammers host with.
First off, did you have a copyright notice on the web page? Second, did you have a copyright notice on the HTML portion of the page If not, you lose.
that is patently FALSE information and, in the context of someone being stressed out about losing their site, unhelpful.
...did you have a copyright notice on the HTML portion of the page...
This could be really useful. If they have ripped your website you can go over and check the code, if you have this in your pages (in the source) then you can clearly prove the website is yours.
Any halfway decent website download software will crawl the site and download all the files automatically - if they're accessible via HTTP and linked, they're downloadable.
Ok, sounds fair enough. I don't see why any company or person would be interested in making applications that copy entire websites though. Sure, I read some people use them for offline surfing, and saving entire websites on cd's. But what about the legal issues if you put in the website disclaimer that copying/saving content is prohibited?
There has to be a way you can protect your websites against that kind of software. I guess making the website dynamic would help, loading everything from a database would make it harder to copy the actual content.
Any other suggestions?
[edited by: ThreeD at 1:00 pm (utc) on Aug. 8, 2006]
whether a site is dynamic or not does not make any difference when it comes to stopping site scrapers. However a dynamic site can have various protection mechanisms to differentiate between human users, genuine search engine bots, and scrapers. There is no perfect protection though; if it's accessible, it's downloadable.
Call the hosting company inform them he is breaking their rules of conduct find it on their site copy them and request the site be taken down now.
Follow up with an email to the correct area not support find out who the hosting company will, tell them you are holding them responsible for any penalities incurred from traffic etc. loss of income etc. I have been forced to do this I have had it done several times. Sites were down in hours.
Then do all the legal stuff but get this guy wacked first,,
