Someone has stolen my ENTIRE site!

it is the original unix whois program that gave back that information:

nslookup opt.to
Server: 127.0.0.1
Address: 127.0.0.1#53

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: opt.to
Address: 204.15.10.67




and then
whois 204.15.10.67

(output as above)

 

yea man, kickass how did you do that? i couldnt even get the whois from the .to nic
thanks!

 

any phone number that you can call you should call As I said, been there too, get on the phone ly2 and starting bashing people! hope for the best!

 

on the phone now!!!
lol

 

Well, whats he saying? Probably denying everything....

 

so the site is being hosted by a reseller. The hosting company talked to the dedicated server owner and then gave me his contact info. I just sent him an email and im waiting on a reply.

 

Does the site produce you more than $5000 per year? If not file suit in small claims court in your state and have them served in their state. If the site produces or is worth more than $5000 then hire an attorney and get the attorney to file a motion for an injunction to have the site taken down until the court makes it ruling. State that the site is causing harm to your business and reputation.

As Frank said send them a letter from an attorney which will cost you maybe $100 and tell them they need to cease and desist using your copyrighted material. Give them X days to do this and state that you will levy a users fee of a $1000 a day thereafter and if this goes to court you will ask for damages and attorney fees in the amount of $150,000 or more. You have to be able to show damages, this letter will create those damages for you.

If it goes to court expect to spend around 8k to 15k in legal expenses unless they have deep pockets and if so it will be more in the range of maybe 30k to 70k. If they are smart they will just remove the copyrighted material and everyone is happy. In order to do this you must also research who owns the site now and if they own a company. Check to see what state the company is registered in and who the officers of the company are, when you file suit file against the company and all the officers.

If you get a judgement and they dont respond make sure you also trace their assets and place liens on anything of value all officers of that company own including most of all any real estate and bank accounts. If you want to find their bank accounts have someone hire them and pay them with a check and see what bank the check was deposited in. Once you get a judgement you can have a local sheriff go to any offices they have and start pulling equipment out of their offices to statisfy the judgement. If they filed taxes and claimed a home office you can attach equipment in their home office.

Tracing people is not hard, you just have to know what you are doing or hire someone to do it for you.

If you only go to small claims court which may be best, get a summary judgement showing a copyright violation from the court and then send this to their hosting company and the search engines. Most people will not show up in court within another state and this may be your cheapest option. Best Of Luck Hope This Helps.

 

thanks, great info. thank alot!

 

Whoa, hang on a second, those are both .php sites, likely a nuke-based thing.
So if you found the script, what's to stop anyone else from doing the same thing?
Not to mention it was a free script... But even if it cost, same thing.

The sites look identical in layout but are NOT exact dupes. That's just someone using the same template... If I buy a red bmw 325 convertible and then another guy down the street buys the SAME car tomorrow, they may own the exact same car but they didn't steal anything. Only thing I can recommend is build a site SO good and hard to reproduce that the mere thought of trying about make thieves pass out cold.

Try copying Yahoo sometime, that give you an idea what I mean...
I'll make it easier, you can copy mine LOL!
I'm so confident it can't be copied, I fairly give explicit rights to do so.
Yeah, I ask ppl please don't (because it sounds better than a dare), but there's nothing to do if someone does...
Other than they won't get much past the trial stage.

Pure xhtml, no templates:
text/html 1119 URLs 2863891 Bytes (2796 KB)
Almost 3 megs just in pages...
You don't want to know how many gigs of images and other files.

 

As weird as it sounds you should plan for this to happen..... it doesnt mean its right...

What will piss you off even more is when they rank above you for your trademark name and its nothing but scrape from your own site with huge adsense banenrs at the top. brace for that

 

maybe you need to take another look? the sites are exact. he changed words ly2.com to opt.to throughout the site. all the articles, words, graphics, EVERYTHING is the same. Also i have graphics on the site that were custom made, you of course dont know that and are not expected to. for example, the small graphic on the left side halfway down that says "webmaster directory", that a custom graphic i had made. I'm telling you, the entire site word for word has been stolen. if you spend a few minutes really looking and clicking on links you will see what i mean. i even had a 1000 word article about url redirects writen, guess what, its also on his site.

 

Apparently you can paste the IP in whois.sc and the whois info shows. Interesting...

I dont have any advice to give, ly2. But I do hope you get this settled soon.

 

I don't think any of these things are going to stop this from happening more and more over the next 5 to 10 years.

 

yea honestly as hard as it is to hear you just have to keep focused on your own stuff.

yes i know from experience years ago when trying to seek revenge... believe me.. its best to just move on

 

http://www.seologic.com/faq/copyright.php

This here is some of the best advice and reading for action on copyright infringment of a site.

 

Hey your site has a problem that you may want to look into: go to the home page then click on home. It is a 404 error, as http://www.ly2.com/index.htm does not exist. (It should be .php)

EDIT: it seems fixed now.

 

There is nothing you can do about this, save for a possible DDOS attack if you are especially stubborn and have a wish to waste money and energy.

 

I hope you get him. . .I know how you must feel. I think if they are stupid you can scare them into changing it. . .if not then I think you are stuck.

Skinny

 

it sucks, but I dont see how you can really do anything. The script is a free script, so its not stolen. the other person has full rights to it.

The bad part is having the design be almost a carbon copy. morally it is wrong, but unless the work is trademarked or copyrighted, you really dont have a leg to stand on that I know of.

Good luck with getting the situation resolved though. I cant imagine how irritating this must be.

 

Here are the steps to take when someone steals your content.

1. Send a C&D to the owner
2. If no reply in 12-24 hours send a C&D to the host
3. Send a DMCA to the host (if #2 doesn't work)
4. Send a DMCA to Google to have the site removed (if its ranking for your search terms, at least.)
5. Try to find out who the site's owner is to see if they have any net worth. If so, and if you have *registered* the copyright of your sites content it may be worth going after them in court. If the copyright was registered you can get up to $100,000.

That being said, make sure that the person was really violating your copyright and not just engaging in fair use (ie: get a lawyer.) The DMCA is a powerful tool -- if you misuse it, it can backfire on you big time (just search DMCA+Diebold.)