Hi, I have created a bot which will scrape content from one of my competitor, Recently he filed a legal complaint to me stating that he will proceed to legal proceedings if the content wasn't removed. But i dont want to remove the content. I think there are many countries out there like sweden, where DMCA complaints wont be bothered. Should i move my hosting to some offshore country, so will i be safe. As my competitor has poor user experience and i can make a better site than him, but he has like 1 million posts, so i am scraping his content and ranking better than him. So that i can attract the user base. Please tell me any way so that i can file a counter complaint on him.. Waiting for your replies.
Ethically you are doing wrong, let's say you have good website and experience but after all it's hardwork of their own, if you still want to continue using their copied content you can do that but will come across problem if not today then tomorrow but for sure. It will hurt you more when you will get good visitors or income and then your site will be shutdown because of copyright issue.
Legally, your competitor can sue you for copyright infringement. If you are in the U.S. it does not matter where your site is hosted.
I am currently from india, i planning of hosting my site somewhere in netherlands or sweden, where DMCA does not apply much. So are there any risks for me now, if i host it in somewhere else.
There are still many ways that they can go after you. The purpose of the DMCA is to protect the people who are unknowingly involved in distributing your scraped content, like ISPs, web hosts, search engines, etc. Once they know -- by being told through a takedown notice -- they are legally require to remove that content. Your host is just one piece of it. They can also send DMCA takedown notices to Google about specific pages on your site which are scraped. Google is a US company and must deindex all infringing pages that they are made aware of. They have also announced that they will apply sitewide penalties to domains with a lot of takedown notices. So have fun not being found by anyone in Google. The DMCA provides no protection for you, who knowingly and willfully stole their content.
If you get a offshore hosting, you can easily skip worrying about complaints. However, if DMCA is lodged against you, your listings will be removed by Google who never cares for where your sites are hosted (i had a bad experience and i don't want to be in it anymore, its time we move on). Also, this method is totally illegal and wont allow you to stay for long so rather go for something which keeps you immune, unique and permanent.
If you can rank better and earn more, then apologize and partnership with him. Don't scrape his content.
Get rid of the content. You might not be sued, but being de-indexed by Google will kill the site. Also, would you imagine what your readers will think when they hear this?