The Web is sometimes a little bit of a Wild West environment, and one of the bad things that can occur is that another publisher (a spammer) can copy your content and republish it on one of their own sites. This is very easy for infringers to do. They simply “View Source” in their browsers and take whatever they like without regard to copyright, or send a spider to collect all of your pages in one fell swoop.
You can locate copyright infringers pretty easily using Copyscape (http://www.copyscape.com) if they’ve lifted some of your page copy. It’s much more difficult if they’ve limited their sticky fingers to just your design. For example, Netconcepts had its design of Netconcepts.com stolen on more than one occasion, and the company discovered the issue only after a concerned visitor gave it a heads up.
There are six major options for dealing with an infringer:
File a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) infringement notification.
Contact the infringing company’s CEO, head of marketing, legal counsel, or whomever you feel is most likely to respond.
Notify the site’s hosting company, if it is not self-hosted.
“Out” them on your blog, or if your blog is not that popular, get someone with a popular blog to out them.
Have your lawyer send them a nasty-gram.
Do nothing.
If you do nothing, eventually the infringer will redesign (probably stealing another design from somewhere else). That’s not a great option if you’re serious about protecting your intellectual property rights, however.
A phone call to the infringing company is inexpensive and it can work as well. But this isn’t a viable option if you’re dealing with an entity that operates overseas and has masked its domain contact information.
Luckily, the DMCA provides a useful hammer to beat on copyright infringers without the need to contact them, in the form of a DMCA infringement notification. In DMCA legal speak, this notification is also known as a “Takedown Notice.”
As a content producer, you have the right to enforce your copyright. When your content gets “repurposed” on others’ websites without your permission, you would simply file a DMCA Infringement Notification to the infringer’s web hosting provider to get that infringer’s website shut down (you can find a story about this on Ian McAnerin’s site, http://mcanerin.blogspot.com/2006/08/go-daddy.html).
You can also get the infringer delisted from the search engines by filing DMCA notices to Google and the other major engines. It is not a daunting procedure. It might take an hour of your time, and it is well worth it. The process is as follows:
First, look up the web host and the domain registrar of the offending site using lookup tools such as Netcraft (http://searchdns.netcraft.com/) and DomainTools (http://www.domaintools.com/). You can usually ascertain who the web host is from the name servers and/or the netblock owner.
Check the official directory of designated DMCA agents (http://www.copyright.gov/onlinesp/list/index.html) for the host and the registrar. (Hopefully, they’re listed.)
Prepare a letter to send to the designated agent of the web host. The notice you write should include your contact information, the name of the content that was copied, the web address of the copied content, a statement that you have a good faith belief that the material is not legal, a statement that under penalty of perjury you are the copyright holder, and your signature. Some web hosts will allow you to email your notice to them, making it all that much more convenient.
Send a similar notification to the search engines. That will cut off their air supply (their traffic) in case the site doesn’t get taken down right away. Instructions and contact details for each engine are available at the following URLs:
Note that Google requires you to mail or fax your letter, whereas Yahoo! and Microsoft (Bing) allow you to email your notification.
If the web host doesn’t take the site down promptly, submit a DMCA notice to the infringer’s domain registrar. It might be worth sending a notice to the data center that the web host uses before you try the registrar.
Be aware that the DMCA takedown procedure is a double-edged sword. Like any other tool, a DMCA notice can be used for good or evil. Specifically, someone could use the DMCA unfairly against you! It happens. Competitors do sometimes use the DMCA to silence their competitors (http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/managing-infosec/using-dmca-to-silence-competitors-12745).
Therefore, you as a website owner need to protect yourself from unwarranted (or at least unwelcome) prosecution. If the potential exists for you to inadvertently host infringing material on your website—for example, if you are hosting online forums, group blogs, blog comments, or other types of content that can be submitted from others besides yourself—here are some actions you can take to help protect yourself:
It’s helpful if you can qualify as a service provider (http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca512/faq.cgi#QID127) that can be covered under the Safe Harbor provision (http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca512/faq.cgi#QID129). For example, you may qualify if you offer a search engine or a bulletin board system.
If so, notify your customers of your policies (http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca512/faq.cgi#QID128) regarding copyright infringement and the consequences of repeated infringing activity. One way is to make it part of your Terms of Use.
Also, publish a page on your website with DMCA filing instructions and state that, if and when you get a DMCA notification, you will act on it. An example of such DMCA notification instructions is available at http://help.xanga.com/dmca.htm.
And most important, check the directory of designated agents; if your company isn’t listed there, complete and file the required form (http://www.copyright.gov/onlinesp/agent.pdf) to the Copyright Office for inclusion in the directory.
Regardless of the path you choose, it is helpful to be able to simply and rapidly prove that you are the original author of the content. One tool that can help with that is the Wayback Machine (http://www.archive.org). This site keeps copies of websites over time. You enter a website name, click Search, and then you might get a screen that looks a bit like Figure 10-6.
You can then click on one of the dates to see the state of the website on that date. The Wayback Machine does not always keep complete site copies, but a lot of data is available there, and you can use it to provide clear proof that you were the first person to publish a given piece of content.