Is Someone Stealing your Intellectual property?
Maybe you haven’t come across this yet, but it happens more than you think. You could be surfing one day and come across a website that looks eerily familiar. Does that logo look like mine? Wow, this site is exactly like mine format, text, even that link to my friends site at the bottom.
This is not a laughing matter. Someone has, without your permission taken from your site to most likely for their own personal gains to profit. This is especially so if they are in the same business as you and using YOUR material to make money or even “pretending” to be you. The big problem here, is that right now, you don’t know if your website has been ripped off and for those that are lucky to find out, it’s basically pure luck or someone has contacted you asking who the real person is. Imagine, being questioned of the reputability of your OWN site. It’s not only embarrassing, but outright wrong!
All this leads to the question about how safe your intellectual property is? What can you do to prevent this? For traditional print work, copyright protection is not only covered by laws and regulation, but are prevented by barriers to entry, meaning that it is far more difficult to outright copy and distribute the information compared to how easy it is to do the same thing online. For example sake, try to imagine taking a book of written material written by someone else, photocopying it and or retyping it, binding, recovering and then distributing it. This means you need access to a printer and distributor willing or that is ignorant enough to distribute the work and paying for the whole thing. Also, your chances of being caught is far more easy. Plus if you get caught, the penalties are far more easy to enforce than online property where the laws are still there, but very lax and not completely understood at how affects can be measured in terms of lost business.
Internet, including email, websites, other mediums via internet, make it that much more easy to copy another’s work. With a few clicks of the mouse another person can grab all the info from another site and make their own in no time. The laws are there to protect you, but since this is a newly ventured area, some things aren’t as clear in the legal system and nothing concrete is in place which is the reason why copying other sites are more common than ever.
What you need to do
If you do in fact find that a person has copied part or all of your site, approach with caution to avoid any hostile response. This also is a better way to communicate to another and let them know that they have done wrong. Not everyone knows that this is wrong and against the law. Sounds like common sense, but it seems that the world is in shortage of common sense thinkers. Your first step is to send them a polite, but firm email letting them know of what they are in violation of and that you would appreciate it if they could remove the material in question from their site.
Most of the time this is enough and the perpetrator removes the infringement, however, if this does not work then you need to take this a step further and stop them where it hurts, their ISP. When you are certain there is no way they are going to abide by your specific instructions to remove the material, contact their ISP and let them know that their customer is in violation of copyright infringement. Additionally, you can also contact their merchant processor, which will hopefully stop their transactions, thus stopping the money flowing to them. You will have to provide the necessary information to prove you are in the right, but that is the easy part.
Nothing is 100% when it comes to this, but following these methods mentioned above, you can at least try to prevent this from happening. Legal fees are expensive and if it is worth it, then go that route or at least have legal counsel to write an official cease and desist letter is all else fails. Hopefully you will never have to get that far and the person realizes they are in the wrong and listens to your demands.