I originally posted this in this thread, but after some comments from others, I decided to make it into it's own thread. (If this is violating the rules, please delete the post...I'd prefer to avoid an infraction if at all possible ) I'm not a lawyer. None of what I say should be construed as law. This is merely what I have learned after dealing with a dozen or so cases of copyright infringement (and counting). It should also be noted that this information is probably only applicable to U.S. webmasters. Other country's have differing laws, but this information will give you a frame work to start from. Let's shed a little background info on copyright first. Thanks to the U.S.'s adoption of the Berne Convention (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention_for_the_Protection_of_Literary_and_Artistic_Works) on March 1st, 1989, all literary works are automatically given a copyright as soon as they are "fixed" in a "medium" (http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html#hsc). This means as soon as you create your web page, it is copyrighted. However, the United States does depart slightly from the Berne Convention in that if someone infringes on your copyright, you are only allowed to get statutory damages and attorney's fees if your copyright is registered with the U.S. Copyright office. To register your copyright see this page: http://www.copyright.gov/register/literary.html. http://www.copyscape.com is da bomb at finding people who have copied your website. If you find someone copying your website, you must first make a good faith attempt to resolve the situation in a friendly manner. This means that you must politely ask them to stop. If the infringer has contact information on his site, use it to contact them and let them know that you have found their infringement and would like them to change it. If you call them on the phone, use a tape recorder to record the conversation as proof that you made contact and asked them to cease and desist. Take note that some states require both parties to be notified that the call is being recorded (find out which states here: http://www.pimall.com/nais/n.recordlaw.html). For this reason, it is probably better to send them an email message or better yet a certified letter. Make sure to give them a deadline for removal of your content, and try to make it reasonable. A week is pretty good. If they refuse to remove your content, you will need to contact their web hosting company. Thanks to the Safe Harbor provision of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, web hosts are required to take down or disable access to infringing material in order to exempt themselves from liability (http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca512/faq.cgi#QID130). To discover the infringer's web host, get their url (the www. some-domain. com part) and do a whois lookup. Whois is kind of a global white pages of web and DNS servers. I like to use www.domaintools.com. To use domaintools to do a whois look up, in your web browsers address bar type whois.domaintools.com/infringers-domain.com (replacing infringers-domain.com with the actual domain name of course). On the page that comes up look for the Name Server: field in the Registry Data section. It will probably show up as something like ns2.1and1.com (an example only!) and it is the last bit of that name server URL that identifies the hosting company. In our example, the webhost is 1and1.com. Now that you know who their host is, you should go to the web host's site and find out where/who to send copyright infringement notices. This information will commonly be found on their Terms and Conditions page or Abuse Policy page. In some cases this information can be sent via email or fax, but in many cases it must be sent via registered or certified letter. When writing your letter, you must do/include the following: 1. Reasonably sufficient details to enable the host to identify the work claimed to be infringed or, if multiple works are claimed to be infringed, a representative list of such works. In our case, this would be the URL of your site including the page (for example, www. mysite. com/index.html). 2. Reasonably sufficient detail to enable us to identify and locate the material that is claimed to be infringing. This would be the exact URL of the page containing your content on the infringer's site. For example: www. infringers-site. com/page.html. 3. Your contact information so they can contact you. This would mean your address, telephone number, email address, and/or any other means with which they can reach you. 4. A statement that you have a good faith belief that the use of the material identified in (2) is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law. In essence this means you must include this sentence exactly as is: "I have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted materials described above as allegedly infringing is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law." 5. A statement, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that you are authorized to act on behalf of the owner of the exclusive right that is alleged to be infringed. Again, this means you must include this sentence exactly as is: "I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed." 6. Your physical or electronic signature. Most web hosts will honor your take down request within one to two business days. Take notice! If you falsely report copyright infringement, and the other company's site is taken down, you can be held liable for damages. In OPG vs. Diebold (http://www.onlinepolicy.org/action/legpolicy/opg_v_diebold/), Diebold was ordered to pay $125,000 because of a false copyright infringement allegation! "What if the web host does not honor my take down request?" Well, you have a few more options: First, you may be able to contact their web host's hosting company. Many web hosts are not actually the owners of the hardware used to host sites. They are often resellers for a larger company. For example, Host Department (http://www.hostdepartment.com/resellersandpartners.html) is a company that allows regular Joe's like you and me to pretend to be a big hosting company. These larger companies often have policies in place to deal with copyright infringment by sites hosted on their servers but purchased through a reseller. To determine if the hosting company is a reseller for a larger company, use whois again, but this time search whois for the hosting company's name. Simply follow the same notification procedure for the parent hosting company as you would for a regular host. Another option you have is to file DMCA notices with the major search engines: Google, Yahoo, and MSN. While this won't get the infringing content removed from the infringer's site, it will ensure that people searching for your content will be directed to your site instead of the infringer's. Since a majority of traffic to website's comes from search, this is an electronic equivalent of having their site removed. It is also a bit tougher for them to recover from since it requires them to contact each search engine to have their site reindexed. In other words, lots of paper work! Here's the pertinent pages for each search engine: Google's DMCA policy: http://www.google.com/dmca.html Yahoo's DMCA Policy: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/copyright/copyright.html MSN's DMCA policy: http://www.microsoft.com/info/cpyrtInfrg.htm I hope you never have to use any of this information, but if you do, I hope it helps. Maybe if enough people learn the procedures for reporting copyright violations, people will quit doing it so much.