Another website has taken one of my pages. The page relates to an affiliate program I use to run & the site which has taken the material also runs an affiliate program though the same network. A few paragraphs of text are the same and they are linking to my background image where they've copied and pasted the source code (I found out though my webstats & found the image link). It's not an exact copy as they have inserted some paragraphs of their own, however I'd say as it's obvious the majority has been taken from my site. I know the general feeling is that it's best to contact the person who owns the site first but the site has no contact details (hidden), so is it best to contact the host with a DMCA notice? If so, can these be sent by email or do they have to be sent though post & which format do these notices have to be in?
If he's altered the content, and the facts and substance of that content can be directly attributed to you and no one else, your dealing with plagiarism, not copyright. Regardless, the DMCA is useless for text content protection. With images, you can place information inside the files to identify copyrights, and copyright protection is automatic. Pay a small court fee and you have an injunction. All you have to do is prove the date of original publication or keep an original layered PSD to show you created the work. Anyway, everyone "talks" about things and there's little you can do to prove you "talked" about it first. Look at the music industry for example. There are all sorts of songs that are obvious rippoffs of other songs. But prove it?? Not unless you have a very sympathetic judge and jury and a damn good legal team. All you can do is identify the violator (in language mild enough not to get yourself sued) and block them from any further access to your site. Unless of course you have $50k ++ to toss to the lawyers
Well, I am not allowed to link here, so I won't, but I have a primer on the dmca on my website (called the DMCA primer), and a sample notice to an ISP. Maybe if you google it you could find it. Text is protected by copyright...period. Books and magazine articles are protected--why not a web article? If you contact the ISP, I bet you 10 bucks they take that guy's site down.
I've gotten text pulled with DMCAs many times. If you own the copyright then you can use the DMCA. The question of course is how much has to be quoted word for word for it to be copyright infringement? There is no hard and fast rule. In fact, it depends on the court you are in and the case at hand. In my opinion if he's taken a few paragraphs WORD for WORD then it's a no-brainer that it's copyright infringement- these thing don't just happen. On top of it he's hotlinking your images? Get the site pulled is what I would do. Of course, I'm no lawyer and you do so at your own risk, etc. etc. Or, you could just do what I did long ago to a guy who hotlinked my images- I replaced them all with images of horses crapping. Let me tell you it took awhile to find those images- but it was worth it.
pc-monkey is correct. Just because someone changed some text doesn't mean it isn't an obvious copy. It just becomes a bit more difficult to call. The more that's changed, the more difficult to say it's a violation. I would say that a reasonably complete copy along with an actual link to an image on your site is a smoking gun. It shows actual knowledge of the alleged copier. You can use the DMCA to contact the web site owner and the host in the event the owner decides to blow you off. Hosts will take it more seriously.
Really, the key is that when you present a DMCA notice to the host, they aren't going to get into some back-and-forth copyright analysis--they don't care, they almost allways just tell the guy to pull the content. I have one going on right now, and I just DMCA noticed the hosting service today.