Somebody Stole My Site!

[psyphi]

While perusing my server logs and checking out some of the sites that I'm receiving traffic from I came upon a site that, to my shock and horror, had completely ripped off my website.

It is an exact duplicate, only they have replaced my site name with theirs in the header logo.

My site is Magatopia.com and the offending site is SeeCase.com.

I haven't taken any action as of yet, but I will be very soon. My site took years to develop and is very unique. I'm not letting some goof simply copy the whole thing and slap it up onto their website.

I'll be sending them some sort of "cease and decist" email, but I don't expect that I'll receive any response.

If anyone else here has had any experience with this sort of thing, I would appreciate any advice that you have to give.

This is just so annoying, I have other things to do with my time than fart around with an idiot like this. :icon_frown:

[joshSCH]

Hmm.. wrong forum to post in, I would suggest a mod move this to the "Web development" forum.

To the poster: I have actually seen websites that are almost the exact same.. I always wondered how people could get away with that, and how copyright laws were enforced online..

[stymiee]

If their webhost is located in the US send a DMCA notice to them and have the entire website removed.

[John A]

Seems like they're using godaddy for their domain hosting service. You can always fire off a message to [e-mail] and see what happens.

While it won't eliminate the problem, it will make the site inaccessible for a period of time.

[psyphi]

OK, sent out the email to them:

June 6, 2007

James Hubbs
Magatopia.com
[e-mail]

Adkoro Inc
Qiu GuiZhi
[e-mail]

URGENT

Dear Sirs,

Re: Copyright Infringement

It has come to my attention that you are copying entire pages from my website at www.magatopia.com and publishing them on your own website, www.seecase.com in direct breach of my rights under International Copyright Law.

You have 24 hours to Remove the offending pages and confirm by email to the address at the head of this letter that you have complied and will not repeat this infringement.

Failing this, I will be taking immediate further action against you.

This is my final communication to you on this matter, and I look forward to hearing from you as a matter of urgency.

Sincerely,
James Hubbs
Magatopia.com

I have actually seen websites that are almost the exact same.. I always wondered how people could get away with that, and how copyright laws were enforced online..

Me too. Looks like I'm going to learn the hard way.

If their webhost is located in the US send a DMCA notice to them and have the entire website removed.

You can always fire off a message to [e-mail] and see what happens.

If they don't comply by tomorrow that's what I'll do. And also to their registrar, enom.

[jbennet]

good i hate how people do that. i make CSS templates, and i offer them for free. The only things that I ask for my email to be at the bottom or that i otherwise get some mention, yet there are always people who blatantly steal my layouts and sell them for cash / use them with the notice removed

[Fungus1487]

those people are called the "wannabe" coders who dont wish to put in the time to learn the subject themselves.

[psyphi]

Well they responded to my email:

Because of error, made duplicate your website, I had already given up all contentses

I reeeeaaaalllyyyy don't like being lied to. And this guy just lied to me twice in two sentences. "Because of error" Right. He accidentally copied every page of my site. And reworked the logo to say his website name. Plus, "I had already given up contentses" No you didn't, not until I emailed you demanding you did. :icon_rolleyes:

So, they took down the pirated content at seecase.com. But, just the index.html. The rest of the pages are still up.

So I sent them another email:

I see that you have replaced the main page. However, the rest of my site is still duplicated on your site.

http://www.seecase.com/arts.html
http://www.seecase.com/writing.html
http://www.seecase.com/computer.html

etc....

You still have hundreds of the duplicated pages up on your site. If ALL of these aren't removed IMMEDIATELY I will be forced to take further action.

James Hubbs
Magatopia.com

I might be too lenient in sending this second email instead of just contacting his host and registrar. But if he hasn't removed every last shred of copyrighted material from his server by tomorrow I certainly will be.

[joshSCH]

Good for you, man. Take 'em down tomorrow if they haven't complied.

[MattEvans]

it does seem a bit leniant to give another chance after giving a 24 hour cease and desist warning already.. if he doesn't remove the hidden hiearchy as it can be accessed via HTTP, definately go forward with further legal/ISP/registrar action; if he does remove it, you might have difficulty finding out if he's put it up elswhere on another domain, seeing as he wont need to connect to your server to get the pages this time... i'd advise regular searches on google for the next few months for blocks of your copyrighted text, i know that's probably an uneccessary hassle, but at least (s)he wont ever be able to host your pages on a site and have it google indexed.

[joshSCH]

haha.. the goal of google is to index everything, and trash what cannot be indexed :) which is good for you, bad for the hack

[stymiee]

I'd send the DMCA request now. It will take them a day or two to comply anyways.

[psyphi]

Well, it appears that they have complied and taken down the pages. I'm almost disappointed that I can't go through the whole process of getting their accounts suspended, etc.

But, now I can spend my time at other, more productive, pursuits. Like the complete re-design of my site that I'm working on. Kind of ironic that the pages being stolen were going to change anyway.

Of course even after the re-design, the old pages won't be any less copyrighted. I'll be watching out for those guys in case they decide to try to put the pirated pages back up again.

Here are a few links to resources I found useful in researching what to do in this situation:
http://www.wealthysecrets.net/plagiarizedlesson.pdf
http://www.whois.sc/
http://copyscape.com/
http://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/legal_agreements/show_doc.asp?pageid=TRADMARK_COPY
http://www.enom.com/terms/copyright_policy.asp

[roryt]

I congratulate you on your efforts. Do you know how long it had been up their?

[psyphi]

I congratulate you on your efforts. Do you know how long it had been up their?

I don't know how long they had the pages up, but it was no longer than a month and a half as that is when they registered the domain name.

[roryt]

how on earth did you actually find it?

[psyphi]

how on earth did you actually find it?

Their site showed up as a referrer in my logs. They either left a link to one of my pages, or were leaching images.

[roryt]

Well spotted. I'm glad you managed to sort it