Copyright?

[chum112]

Do you have your site protected under copyright? i heard you have to pay for such protection? also have you had any of your content stolen. By content thieves?

[yogesh]

As long as you have it in your terms of service that all of the content on your site is yours and no one can copy it, you can get people prosecuted. Content thiefs are always there, I have had people copy text/images from my site and claim it as theirs. Usually a copy right violation email sent to them does the trick, if not then there always other ways.

[wesley]

Although it is true that unique content is yours and cannot be stolen legally, you need to first find the person that is doing the stealing then try to get him/her to stop.

If you can get to the right person a letter might do but if they ignore the letter, it may be harder for you because of country boundaries and costs involved. There may be no choice but to forget about it.

A court in one country hardly has jurisdiction in a country across the world. And how much is someone willing to pay to prosecute the offender?

[yogesh]

Wesley most hosts take copyright violations seriously and sending them a properly written email would likely see that site go offline. Add to this, you can always send a similar mail to yahoo and google and ask them to delist the offending site.

[kothar64]

Yes I go with you, You can ask to delist, but I think its very hard to punish who do against law in these computere world, though cyber crime police station was set up in Bangalore, India, Its of no use there.

[Xenigo123]

Originally Posted by yogesh

Wesley most hosts take copyright violations seriously and sending them a properly written email would likely see that site go offline. Add to this, you can always send a similar mail to yahoo and google and ask them to delist the offending site.

That really depends on the host. The torrent sites survive off hosts that don't care if the site is using stolen content. It's a real problem in the adult webmaster community and in mainstream movie, music, and DVD sales. It's a damn shame that people are able to profit off of someone's hard work, and dirtbag sites like Adult Friend Finder advertise on these torrent sites.

[subodh]

As wesley said it's really hard. If you are small website owner just considered few hundred dollar income through site. Are you going to spend that much money to punish such copier?
You can do is that show your content to google that your site is right owner of the content. Google ban such site which using copy stuff from other sites on their search engine so that only your site come with that content come in the search engine. It help form some harm to your site rank. I don't know other search engines.

[Oosha]

I am not really sure if this is true, but recently there was a discussion on a particular forum on the internet, that a person who has copied some copyrighted material, has been fined $9000.