Website text copied- correct procedure

[fenland]

Hi All,

Just wanted a bit of advice really.

I am not a full time domainer/affiliate marketer (yet..)- we run a fence contracting business by day.

Basically we have a decent Compay website which I spent quite a lot of time wrting unique content for. About 8 pages each of 600-100 pages long with descriptions/diagrams etc.

The text was copied once before by a web design company and I got them to admit it and remove/change it.

Well its been doen again and I suspect these people arent going to play as fair. The reason I twigged it had been copied is that I was receiving emails from people asking for quotes some 400 miles away from where we are based. One of them told me they had clicked a link on a site to email me....

Low and behold, went on said companies website and they have left the code set up for my email address.....

Anyhow, what can I do?? Whats the procedure?

 

[WaftyCrank]

I wouldn't even mess about being nice. I'd get a cease and desist letter sent from a solicitor. £70 well spent and tends to work quite effectively.

 

[fenland]

Fair enough..

Any recommendations as to where I should go? Any inter-webby based solicitors offer this? I suspect ours would wonder what the hell I was asking for..

Do I need to take screenshots or anything? Want to get my wagons in a circle first.

 

[Alien]

Might be worth putting your site or pages into copyscape.com too to check if any other copies are around.

Hope you get it sorted.

 

[j13]

Definitely worth getting screenshots and source code grabs (for full page screenshots, the Awesome Screenshot plugin saves a lot of messing about) just in case.

 

[accelerator]

Fair enough..

Any recommendations as to where I should go? Any inter-webby based solicitors offer this? I suspect ours would wonder what the hell I was asking for..

Do I need to take screenshots or anything? Want to get my wagons in a circle first.

Take screenshoots, take copies of the HTML source code, get the IP address. Try and identify what host they are on.

Personally I would write the first cease and desist letter myself and save myself the solicitor's fee. See what response you get. If that doesn't work then send them another letter saying you'll contact their host to get the site taken down. Then go to their hosts and request site removal. If that still doesn't work, then speak to the solicitor.

Rgds

 

[Blossom]

I would contact the web host's abuse department first. They are liable for copyright-infringing material hosted by them, so they are normally pretty quick to take action.

 

[BREWSTERS]

I would contact the web host's abuse department first. They are liable for copyright-infringing material hosted by them, so they are normally pretty quick to take action.

This.

It'll probably be down within a few hours and any cause a problem for the perp straight away.

 

[fenland]

Thanks All- loads of advice there and its most appreciated.

Quick question- how do I find the websites host. Using a WHOIS look up I get loads of details but how do I get the host- do I work it out from the nameservers?

 

[accelerator]

whoishostingthis.com has a tool which might help you a bit.

Rgds

 

[fenland]

whoishostingthis.com has a tool which might help you a bit.

Rgds

Useful tool that..

Found host from it but it looks like they are not a host in the usual sense..Been on their website and there is no sign of them offering hosting. They are US based.

Site has been built on a freecsstemplate / org /

 

[VSC]

Hi,

This has happened to me a few times.

Email to registered web site owner.
Cease & Desist email to host.

I have some email templates you can copy if you PM me your email address.

In every case either the host has acted and taken the site down or the owner has taken action.

If that doesn't work, then you can get a solicitor in.

Good luck!

 

[solaris]

Also looking to the future as someone said you can use Copyscape to find other infringers, or set up Google alerts for key phrases from your content.

Definitely get full copies of the infringing site, if it is not big just get the whole site - probably easiest way to do that is Scrapbook in Firefox - but it may not grab some dynamic content, but will grab the text content.