Hello all. I could really use some advice on what to do in the situation I am in. My wife owns a business selling downloadable adult material that she lives off of from her website. The niche she is in is a small one, but she does very well within it. A few months ago a site has opened up that gives away almost 80% of her work as well as the work of others within this niche for free. They provide links to the stolen material through free webhosts (rapidshare, megaupload, etc) and then pass the links to all the members within the forum. I have tried having the site taken down by talking to their webshost. This worked the first time, but not the second. They moved their webhost to the Netherlands and the new webhosts doesn't care what they do as long as they are not actually hosting the stolen material. I really do not want these guys to get away with this. Does anyone here have any advice on what I could do next.
Well Netherlands hosts are very lenient on what is hosted(I believe most torrent sites move to Netherlands based hosting after they get in trouble with their parent country) so I'm not sure if you could do much contacting them. Have you contacted the actual owner of the site? In conjunction whois their site and see if they have any of their personal information on there. Rapidshare/megaupload should all have a TOS that uploaders must agree to saying that they aren't violating any copyrights--if thats the case, contact them tell them about your problem and see if you can flag any of their uploads.
Have you tried sending DMCA notices to rapidshare, megaupload, etc, thats probably the only way. How are they sourcing your content to steal it?
Yeha the first thing to do is to try to identify the account that's being used to download the files from your website - look for patterns - post a new file for just one hour or so, then withdraw it and see if it turns up on the pirate website. If it does then look at the members that grabbed it during that hour and narrow the search - I'm sure you get the idea. Also - send dmca notices to the file hosts and they will immediately remove the files - they don't mess around. Monitor the forum (but do not post !) and when the links are 're-upped' just report (dmca) them again and they will be gone usually within hours. If you are diligent you can actually profit from a thing like this - the theory goes ... if the files can't be downloaded (because they where deleted from the filehost), but the forum posts remain with juicy screen caps etc, then all that really is is great advertising for your website - you can't buy publicity like that ! (actually you can, but that's another story lol).
Couple of advice 1.] Make sure that that the materials 100% yours. 2.] Contact the admin of the site about this. 3.] Contact the webhost about this. The problem you might encounter is the location of the server. As you can see internet law are not firm, universal and varies depending on the laws of the country.
You should def. contact the website admin. They don't care about MPAA or RIAA or whatever, but if you said down and wrote them a short note, explaining that you are just trying to make a living, ect ect, they could possibly remove it for you. If the RIAA gets on them or similar anti piracy group, i think it makes the problem worse. Because groups like the RIAA are trying to take away people's rights trying to address the copyright infringement problem. If you get no response there, or they respond and tell you to fill out a dmca notice, then just go about it like that. And giving a DMCA notice at the file hosting company is the best way to stop it, although you'll have to stay on it because people are persistent. Also different file hosting companies take down quicker than others. There are some file hosts that would at least take a week to take the files down. good luck.
DMCA does not mean crap if their host in the Netherlands does not honor the dmca requests. In fact DMCA does not mean crap anywhere if any host did not honor it...dmca = honor system. These days you can signup to whatever hosting you like, so if you are doing something shady, then you surely do not have to signup for a USA host, but a host outside the USA.