How to deal with Internet thieves?

November 5, 2007 10:32 AM

Anyone have experience addressing copyright infringement/plagiarism (efficiently and easily) without a lawyer? Or will a lawyer generally handle numerous cease-and-desist orders and/or lawsuits for a relatively reasonable fee?

(I realize people answering these questions are not necessarily lawyers and are definitely not my lawyer!)

My husband and I own a pretty successful small business in our region, and are just starting to attract national media attention and opportunities. One of the cornerstones of our success thus far has been the detailed text on our website, which is probably the most informative and thorough in our industry. He and I personally wrote this text, putting a tremendous amount of work into it. We've recently found numerous other companies have stolen this text -- ranging from a few paragraphs to the entirety of our site. (So far we've identified about two dozen companies who've done this, but are still trying to track down any others.) Some of the companies have also submitted this text as their own to various online service directories within our field, and/or submitted the text in the form of an article to various websites.

When we first realized this, we started by sending emails to the companies' owners, as well as a cease-and-desist letter we created from a template. We've had mixed luck with this effort. We also are in the process of contacting the companies' website hosts and ISPs, and any directories/linking sites.

We're now looking for a more effective means of protecting our work, but aren't sure if this is something we can handle internally without too much trouble or if we need to hire a lawyer. Obviously, we also don't want to spend a ton of money on a lawyer's services just to get the sites taken down, especially if we aren't due any monetary damages.

(Also, not sure if this makes a difference, but just a few of the companies are local enough to possibly be considered competitors, but the bigger problem is the potential harm to our credibility. For instance, if a national media source were to research our company and find our text elsewhere, and not know where it actually originated.)

Does anyone have any experience dealing with something like this, or know whether a lawyer would generally charge us one lump sum or a per-instance fee? Thanks in advance.

posted by justonegirl to law & government (10 comments total)

If you're going to send C&D's, you have to be willing to follow them up if they're ignored. I imagine you could hire a lawyer for this in a batch capacity if you don't want to put one on retainer, but the important thing is to have a next step when the company ignores your nastygram.

Secondarily, you could convert the text to PDF or some such other less-copyable format if that makes sense in the context in which the information occurs, or maybe even just make it available upon request.
posted by rhizome at 10:49 AM on November 5, 2007

one approach to fixing the problem is to replace portions of your text with images (initial caps, whole paragraphs, etc) , and then tracking referrers. If they start hitting your graphics, swap it out with goatse.cx (NOT SAFE FOR ANYTHING, DO NOT CLICK).

You may wish to look into sending DMCA notices to their ISP's; this will almost certainly get them shut down, at some potential cost to your karma. (the DMCA is overbroad and evil, but is a good tool for this type of situation).
posted by jenkinsEar at 11:18 AM on November 5, 2007

Hire an Intellectual Property attorney. Period.

There are things you can and should be doing to protect yourself (registering your copyrighted works, sending DMCA take-down notices, etc) and you're going to need personalized legal advice to know exactly what those steps are.

Any ethical lawyer should be willing to talk cost with you, as well as what your best options are from a cost and results stand-point.

Also keep in mind that a C&D will likely be taken more seriously from an attorney than from a private citizen.
posted by toomuchpete at 11:21 AM on November 5, 2007

I can understand your frustration -- I run a commercial weblog and it's infuriating to find my work copied without attribution across the web. I've employed two techniques to combat this:

1) Split your content into smaller chunks -- if you've got a few huge pages with tons of info on them, they're very easy to simply control+a, copy, paste. Try formatting your information into article series, blog posts, anything with links between to make it harder for someone to do a "lazy lift" of everything you have. If you do a blog post (or have RSS already), set up the feed to auto-add a link back to your own website at the end of each item so scrapers will link back to you.

2) Interweave lots of links into your copy -- this not only helps readers who might have missed another part of your site, but also creates more work for the copier. If you have lots of sentences saying "As we said in our Review of X Goods [link], this is a great product," the content is going to look a lot dodgier on someone else's site.

For C&D advice, you might try asking a small business organization like the NFIB - I'm a member of the FSB here in the UK and they are invaluable for legal advice and resources in situations like this. Obviously all organisations are different, but it's worth checking into small business resources available to you.
posted by ukdanae at 11:32 AM on November 5, 2007

DMCA takedowns. This is what they're for. You can figure them out without a lawyer, but obviously hiring one wouldn't hurt (except financially). I'd try sending takedowns yourself first and not worry about getting a lawyer unless they're ignored or someone's cheeky enough to file a false counter-notification.
posted by deeaytch at 11:39 AM on November 5, 2007

Your stuff is copyrighted with or without a copyright notice, but I would be sure it says (c) 2007 Justonegirl, Inc. on every page of your site. It will help discourage the more honest types, at least.

Then, as explained here, register your copyright with the US Copyright Office. This is necessary in order to potentially collect monetary damages, and will strengthen your case against any violator.

Many other good tips at that link.
posted by beagle at 12:03 PM on November 5, 2007

Basically cease and desist letters are the way to go. And if they don’t work follow them up with legal action.

I run a company who handles this for smaller companies on an hourly rate basis … gratuitous self link is http://www.brandcleaner.com … contact us if you are interested.

Jann
posted by jannw at 12:26 PM on November 5, 2007

2) Interweave lots of links into your copy -- this not only helps readers who might have missed another part of your site, but also creates more work for the copier. If you have lots of sentences saying "As we said in our Review of X Goods [link], this is a great product," the content is going to look a lot dodgier on someone else's site.

This is a great solution for preventing it in the future. Turning the text into images will make your information harder for search engines to find and will make it harder for visually impaired people to read your content.

Constantly referencing other things on your site and linking it will mean that people will have to work far harder to copy your text.
posted by drezdn at 12:52 PM on November 5, 2007

Interweave lots of links into your copy -- this not only helps readers who might have missed another part of your site, but also creates more work for the copier

I don't follow how this will discourage copying. Removing the hyperlinks along with any underlines and font differentiation can be done in a few clicks. If you're going to steal, that's not going to stop you.
posted by beagle at 1:10 PM on November 5, 2007

Removing the hyperlinks along with any underlines and font differentiation can be done in a few clicks. If you're going to steal, that's not going to stop you.

If I put "X is good because, as demonstrated on our other page, it is filled with extra y" then to make that content work on anyone else's site will involve a bit more thinking and editing to repost to another site. If the extra pages and crosslinks are planned out well, it will flow fine, but make it hard for people to steal the text without having to edited it heavily to remove references to your other pages.
posted by drezdn at 2:44 PM on November 5, 2007