advice wanted

thieves stole from my site

[DanJohnson]

This site: <snip> have blatantly stolen a large amount of copy and graphics from my site. (the entire useful tips section, accessible from the bottom left of the homepage, which is a replication of the HowTo guides that are accessible from the top right of my homepage (see profile)

What should I do? The format is not 100% the same, as on my site I have broken the long pages into smaller ones, whereas they have bundled pages together. All the graphics for titles and subtitles are the same, which I painstakingly put together myself.

Do I just send a strongly worded e-mail? Is it worth trying to get money out of them as a license fee?

[henki]

When it happens to me I just send them a mail. If that is not enough, my lawyer sends a stronger mail.

Donīt kill your self over it. Take it as a compliment, send the mail and that should be it.

The only winner of a law suit is the lawyer.

[FreeBee]

One good public response on how to handle this sort of thing can be found here [bruceclay.com].

[Marcia]

DanJohnson, we've got a thread here in the Google forum where site plagiarism was discussed at length:

[webmasterworld.com...]

[DanJohnson]

Thanks everyone, that's really helpful.
Normally I'm far too nice, but this time, they've really p*ssed me off. It has been a massively uphill struggle to get my site off the ground without funding, and the work that they have been passing off as their own is the culmination of a couple of months worth of planning, research, writing and page building. They have had it on their site for 2 months, complete with banners etc and appear to be making money. One of their staff was very rude to me and told me that "anyone can copy anything and post it on the Internet, innit? You should read up on English Law mate". So I did.

I have spoken to a solicitor who says I have a concrete case for sueing them, so I am going to threaten them with legal action, as well as the poossibility of using my many press contacts (bluff), posting news articles on my site (65,000 unique users), sending an email to our large database of their potential customers, contacting the search engines with whom they have registered and of course, their ISP. That should put the wind up them!

(edited by: Marcia at 8:11 am (gmt) on July 6, 2001

[Marcia]

Dan, glad we could help with some information for you. Good luck, keep us posted.

[Bob1986]

sue them.. now all i need is someone to take my codes... hehe :)

[Bolotomus]

This happened to me. In fact, no less than 5 sites stole material from my company's site.

I shot off some angry emails and got 3 of them to take the pages offline. One of them simply ignores my letters. And one of them had the gall to say "I don't think it's important because those pages don't get traffic, and I don't have the time to do anything about it right now."

So here's what I did. I put their crimes on display for the world to see, without even telling them. (I would have told him, but I don't have the time right now...) I predict that when they get tired of us exposing their crimes to the world, they'll take the pages offline.

[2020tech.com...]

Bolotomus

[Larvef The Wanderer]

The same thing happened to me a few days ago.
I have a web-site which features a certain city. I have put it together over the last 2,5 years. A few days ago I received an e-mail inviting me to a certain web-site and proposing me to advertise my web-site there for money :). I go to that web-site and lo - they have taken my design (changing colors) and pictures. Moreover they state that their web-site is the official web-site of the city, which isn't true.

Well, I have taken all this as a compliment, at least I try to. Suiting them will be useless. The site is non-commercial, so I don't get any revenue from it. I just think that the plagiarist web-site will disappear over the time :)