SCAMMER (important)

Hi

We have a Business social networking website called goonto dot com and the site and its design is been registered with http://www.copyrightservice.co.uk as by 3 of our legal lawyers recommendation. Recently through our site stats we have noticed a domain name called facepook dot net . after visiting this site, we have noticed that these people just simply cloned our website and design.

our lawyers are now working on preparing a letter to send out to them and asking them to completely change the site design. also, they said they will report this issue to facebook as they are cloned the internal pages exactly like facebook.

now, i just wanted to check, if any one of you had this kind of experience before? how did you manage to resolve your problem.

thank you

 

If they do not listen, send a DMCA take down notice to their host. If their host doesn't listen, they are opening themselves up to legal action from you. At least here in the states, a host and/or datacenter looses its immunity from lawsuit once they have received notification of a copyright infringemnet being hosted on their servers, and don't remove it within a reasonable time (reasonable time is open to interperatation by the presiding judge). If you have registered it through one of those services you have a good step up on being able to prove you own the copyright to the work. However, bear in mind, it is probably not very profitable to sue them as if it came to that, you would only get what you can prove you lost or they made, in damages. I don't know how the law is in the UK, this is how it is here. I'm pretty sure it is pretty close to it as they are both signatories of the boerne convention.

Good thing you have your lawyer already on this issue. And it is nice to see you reporting more infringement to other copyright holders. Wait and see what the reply is, if they do it. If they don't, then go on to notifying the host and google (google will take them out of the site index)

 

Not in anyway do I condone theft, however I must ask a question after making the following observation.

Both sites have signup.php etc.

Are you sure this isn't a "script" that many people are using? Did you obtain (buy) the script or did you develop it on your own?

Reason I ask is, I have seen social networking site scripts around the web. Where many sites look almost identical. Because they are all using the same script and the don't take the time to change the template.

At the same time I wouldn't put it past someone to copy a site, especially if they thought the site was unmaintained. Also they make clones of almost every popular site out there (google clone, myspace clone, etc.).

If it's indeed your script, you shouldn't have much problem from google and their host getting it removed. The letter from the lawyer should do the trick.

Thanks/Good Luck!