I recently was answering a request of a user wanting to buy content - upon brief correspondance, and displaying an example site containing the data, I noticed the user screenscraped the content - I have complete, non-deniable proof, linking this user to the offense, and have recovered the user's personal information. Is there an appropriate method for approaching this situation on the forums? Thanks in advance,
the user is not currently using the content anywhere - regardless this person purposely went and stole the content during negotiating with my price, and I require payment since there would be no proof of removal of the content. My main question is - does this forum have any restrictions on outing the offender?
Not that I know of, though PM one of the Mods before you do anything hasty. I suggest you have absolute definate proof before naming any names.
If it was in a buy/sell thread you can leave iTrader feedback. There's no restricitions about outing a member but it can get messy
the proof i have is 100% undeniable - the http log where the files screen scrapped call back my server from their server because they forgot to change image tags, the server that called my server is listed in their user profile as well as many postings, files still up on their server, a timeline of them claiming to get back to me regarding their decision to purchase it AFTER they had already stolen it... i'll give the user 1 chance to rectify the situation via PM before i take it to the forums - mostly curious regarding forum protocol seeing that i am still a new member to this forum...
There's not really any forum protocol for much at all. The community as a whole is very fair minded and will normally let people know if they get out of line!
If you provided the user with access to see the content, even if they "screenscraped" it as long as they are not using/publishing the content (in whole or part) I can't see how you can claim they stole it. Any time I am buying articles, I run them through Copyscape to see if they are plagiarized or not. This isn't stealing, this is verifying. Now if they were republishing your articles, then you could claim they were stealing them.
without the ability to search for every domain a user owns reliably you can not verify if your content is being reused - additionally, what would prevent a user from reselling content they "aquired"... in my opinion taking the content without paying for it is theft
Copyright laws prevent them from legally using or selling the content they don't own the copyrights to. You also don't need to know every domain they own. I can find unauthorized copies of my articles within days of them being published regardless of where they are published on the Internet using tools like Copyscape. If you wrote the articles or have written copyright transfers for the articles, they are still yours as long as you didn't sell the copyrights to others. Copyright laws and the DMCA provide a great amount of protection for copyright owners. It is foolish for anybody to steal or plagiarize other people's works because it is so easy to get caught. In regards to adding extra protection to your articles, you can register your copyrights with the U.S. Copyright office (or the copyright office of your home country) as I do for my articles. This can provide you with extra protections such as the ability to collect legal fees and sue for larger damage awards. Again I would never purchase articles sight unseen and I would never purchase an article without first making sure it wasn't already published elsewhere. This individual may have done the same thing or maybe they were just copying the articles for further review offline. Without proof of unauthorized publishing of your articles you have no grounds to stand on and unless they publish/resell your articles, they have done nothing wrong in the eyes of copyright law.