Thank you, Mia . . . No we have no money to use an attorney. I'm very grateful for your links and suggestions. The PDF you offer will be very helpful. We now have a copy of the stolen site page configuration, clearly showing Marjorie as the author, and all the ridiculous placement of banners through the Affiliate Windows account which take no effort to make sense, merely plunked down inbetween the texts that made sense with our original ad banners. With that copy for future ref, we can write to the Web Host, as you suggest, maverick. And, thanks for checking, exam, but I find the site up and running this AM.
Easy answer: First notify the hosting company of intent to take legal action. You have NO obligation to contact the Copyright offender and I personally no longer waste to much time attempting it by only giving three days for the offender to respond in the notice I send to them. If they are foreign, i.e. China, I wouldn't even bother with sending an e-mail to them and go straight to the hosting company. Provide the hosting company with documentation supporting your claim. The hosting company WILL shut the site down or assume the legal liability due to notice. Like others have said, enforcing and collecting damages is far more costly than you'll ever get in return. So, skip this. Once the site is down, and I have done this to three sites now in the last month using re-directs, the offender WILL remove the information/bogus link (actually hosts have required all bogus links on two sites in question..which is an added plus) or stay down as the hosting service will not "un" suspend the account until the offending information is removed. As a last and easy resort you file a CMSA (Your official legal action...lol) with M, Y and G and they WILL remove the site/pages in question from the index. Cheers
Thanks gchaney . . . Your thoughts have very much the flavor of "been there done that"! In some other case, the "offending information" could perhaps be removed, say if an article had been stolen. The only way in this case is remove the entire www.foodall.info from the universe along with the guy who registered it, as what he's done is copy and rename our site www.ingestandimbibe.com with very, very little change, actually only a few affiliate ads. Thanks for your help. We're learning what's needed for the "official legal action" (not damages) just to get him shut down at the registrar and at the Hosting Service. And, Corey, thanks for the ref to "pirated sites" You are quite right, we should put this in their archive.
Thanks, Corey . . . That is an interesting collection at the "pirated-sites". Our experience of theft would be a really good example there. The Webmaster has posted an intention to convert to a forum format, so I'll have to wait to add this site theft. I've been crashing away, long, long hours on an Annual Report, thus haven't been able to give you an update until tonight. Actually thought I should be starting a new thread, but I'd need the moderator's advice on that. Newbie status showing, eh? In just the past few days I've sent out a description of the "event" and a PDF of a DMCA to as many pertinent addresses as I could track. The response has been good. It's a real pleasure to post the response we've received from Kevin Brown of Affiliate Window. He took the trouble to call me and express his displeasure at being scammed by this thief. He cancelled the account immediately. Same is true for Tina Flores of AdRevolver (BlueLithium) who has cancelled him. And this evening, I heard from Pat McCarthy of Right Media who cancelled him also. Yet to hear from Axill and BluePoint, two more of the affiliate accounts the thief has created. And then there's the registrar, Tierra Net, Inc., of California. I have high hopes for them as that would shut him down at the source.
Dealings with China, an update . . . Many times searching the souce code of the stolen site's pages, yielded numerous affiliate accounts. An email of a few paragraphs describing the theft, with a PDF of a DMCA attached. I "re-sent" the same letter to each, with an update to include the accounts that had been closed since the last use of the email. I should say that every single one of the companies I contacted were responsive and immediate in their closing of the perp's accounts. Really the evidence was so blatant. The hosting service shut him down, and he moved to another, this time in China. Had a few back and forth contacts with the registrar who said they needed a court order, but in the end just did it. Ahh, it was so good to see "404-Not found"! There was some email exchange with the thief, after that. Very odd it was to see his first in my in-box. He was feeling very sorry for himself. "Just a student. Copying the work is a form of compliment. (!) Used my money trying to make some money with my site." That one really got me. HIS site, indeed. It was satisfying to feel the fright in his words after I told him about my friendships with US diplomatic people. Their meetings with other diplomatic corps are always over meals or at least finger-food. The topic of Marjorie's site is food. The theft made for great converstion, and even interest because so much large scale theft of "intellectual property" can't be stopped, but a small scale like this, well . . . "maybe something can be done." I suppose the guy knew his own government could find him. It was painful and time consuming when I was loaded with work. But I think we all proved that the internet community can regulate itself. Like to say "Thank you!!" to some of the people who were involved: Brenda B. of Amazon Jay Tierney of FastClick Regina Cotto of LinkShare Jeremy Watkin of TierraNet Pat McCarthy of Right Media Kevin Brown of Affiliate Window Tina Flores of BlueLithium A great help and support from the folks at this forum, and from my friend Dynamoo at A Best Web's forum.
Congratulations on recovering your site from the theif. I hope more people are able to do the same when their site is stolen like yours. Thank you for posting the end result also, it will be a help to many.
Congrats, to often a person is just left to "suck it up". You proved to yourself and alot of other folks that it can be done, great job!
For those interested in a followup, I recently had some Emails from someone (!) named Grame Kellett who asked about my page titled Graeme Kellett stole my entire personal website - see the April/2005 update at the bottom of the page. I don't know if it was the same person or not - what 'ya think?
So much bad infomation. It's sad. You do not need an attorney to fight this. Download and fill out the 8 point google DCMA complaint form and shoot it off to all parties involved in keeping that site running. It's a legal document and is serious business. Read the instructions and take it very seriously. Don't whine, give solid reasons why this copyright violation is costing you money and business. If you send it to G and run adsense, point out you and them both lose business and money as a result of this violation. I know for a fact it works. But do the research and pen it professionally. Good luck.
Well done on getting his site removed. We've been having problems with counterfieters copying our websites and trying to pass themselvees off to the uk as official suppliers of some large brand name products we stock. Its a nightmare when our customer services gets a couple of hundred calls or emails asking when their items will ship and you have to explain its some bunch of crims in china that now has their money, credit card details, address and that if they do actually receive the goods they ordered the electrical components are so bad they could kill anyone that uses them. But hey at least they were cheap... sorry went into a little rant there lol. What we did was to select all the websites that had absolutely no business with china, india, korea and a pile of other countries that low cost developers can be found and persuaded to clone a site, and blocked all their IPs using the htaccess file. Now its not the perfect solution but it has slowed down the irrelevant traffic we get from these countries to a trickle. You dont even have to lock out your whole site, just drop the htaccess into your image root folder and that'll do the job. Another tactic to prevent content theft is to inbed a 1x1 pixel spacer gif into your content, but with no width or hight dimensions, and host this on a different domain from your own so its got a complete URL not a local one. A cloner will do a search replace for your url and hopefully miss this if he's ripping your site. When you notice your codes or sites been ripped, by checking stats and requests for the offsite spacer that dont come from your domains, you rename the spacer, edit your own sites to use the new name. then upload a large 800 x 600 gif, with the spacers original name. it'll appear in the cloned article and you can get it to read whatever you want... "this scamming site stole all this content" is a good one. Another is to display something woefully offencive to virtually any living person and let his visitors get an eyeful. cheap fun and easily fixed but it can do the damage and they'll think twice about it in future.