Me and my brother owns www.wow-start.com and have coded and designed everything ourselves (and credited the source of the scripts which we are using.) A week ago we found out that www.worldofwarcraft.dk (also know as wowi.dk) have created a portal section on their site, which looked alot like our portal and with the EXACT same RSS feeds. (http://www.worldofwarcraft.dk/page.php?21) We took some time looking into the code and found out that they have copy-pasted our source code into their site. I am 100% positive it is a brainless rip-off because: - They have used the EXACT same div tag names for the css. - They forgot to remove our links to google analytics. - The source code on worldofwarcraft.dk contains content which is unique to wow-start.com (e.g. our javascript for a dropdown-menu, a png-fix and a jump-menu). - Simply by comparing the two source codes it is blatantly obvious that there has been a copy/paste incident; the html-commentaries are the same, the naming of tags, javascript-style, order of attributes, url-reference etc. etc.. even inside the frames which contain the RSS-feeds you'll notice the EXACT same code on worldofwarcraft.dk's site as that we use on wow-start.com. The only difference being that worldofwarcraft.dk replaced "wow-start.com" in the title with "wowi.dk". I could give more examples, but I think you get the picture . We contacted them three days ago and told them to credit us somehow for the time the portal has been online and remove or completely rewrite the portal. We haven't heard from them yet. Now comes my question: What is the best legal action to take? How much does copyright protect against rip-offs like this and what are the consequences of doing such rip-offs? I don't know much about the legal issues, but I am quite sure what they are doing is illegal, and I want the best cards on my hand when I contact them again.
First step would probably be to contact their hosts and get their site taken down. Most hosts won't tolerate any sort of copyright infringement on their servers and the sites will be taken down immediately. Failing that you will probably need to fill in a DMCA I can't post any links yet but if you google for DMCA then you will find out how and what to do. Hope that helps.
Thanks. Just googled it but seems like an us law, but think I have found the corresponding EU version. How do you tell who their host is?
You would probably need to do a "whois" search to find out the host and who the domain is registered to
Hosted by http://www.unoeuro.com/ How to find ? http://who.is/whois/worldofwarcraft.dk/ use this tool to find
I had a very similar issue to this a few months ago. Unfortunately, I found contacting the host didn't help as they wanted proof (ideally from a lawyer) that there was an infringement of copyright. You might get a different outcome in Denmark though (I'm in the UK). I started with phone calls to the offending company but that didn't really get me anywhere. In the end I sent a firmly written letter (using a trackable delivery service) requesting that their infringement of my copyright ceased immediately and threatening legal action if it didn't. In the end they removed all of the offending code but I was actually very close to taking legal action!
I don't know how it is in Denmark, but, in the US a copyright infringement case could last years, and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's generally not worth it.
Www.worldofwarcraft.dk is hosted by: Unoeuro.com Source: http://who-hosts.com/ Try contacting them here: https://www.unoeuro.com/support.php OR OR +45.29808723 (if they're number isn't fake )
I've also heard of people having some luck in contacting google to inform them of the plagiarism, and maybe they will penalize the other site (it might be a good idea because google doesn't like duplicate content and they might penalize you instead by mistake) let us know how it works out for you
Make sure you take screen shots of the site and the codes. It helps as evidence when going to court if necessary.
Definately contact the host so that once they are aware of the breach the rip off website can be held accountable because that's really unfair when you guys have put all that work in. It would be really worthwhile seeking legal advice if you can because they have committed a serious breach.