Catching Copycats: Protecting Your Online Content - Page 2

Page 2 of 2 Catching Copycats: What to Do if Someone Steals Your Content
If despite copyrighting and trademarking your content it's still being plagiarized, and chances are it could be, what do you do? Per Ennico, the first step is to politely yet firmly contact the owner of the other Web site, via e-mail, about the theft, citing the content in question. (If you cannot find contact information on the site, Copycape suggests emailing webmaster@ the domain name. You can also use a service like Whois to ferret out the owner of the domain.)

That's what Brown, Gunter and Attard, who all have copyright notices on their sites and have used Copyscape, all did.

"I've found that sites where we can reach the owners, they will usually take the material down when we notify them by e-mail of the infringement," said Attard. "It's the sites where there isn't contact info on the site and the site registration data is hidden on domain name lookups that are the biggest thorn in our side. Those are the ones we file DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] take-down notices for."

If e-mails don't work, your next step is to send a cease-and-desist letter to the Web site owner (if you can locate that person) — or have your attorney send one.

"If it's really important stuff, have your attorney send the letter rather than you," advised Ennico. "Most attorneys will do this for, like, an hour of their time, and it's well worth it because a letter from an attorney delivered by certified mail strikes a lot more fear and terror into people. It shows that you're more serious about this and you might actually do something about it, which should frighten most people into taking the offending thing down or working out something with you."

Speaking of working out something, Ennico says you can sometimes turn a case of plagiarism to your advantage by working out a deal that allows the other site to use your content — for a fee.

"Faced with the prospect of paying you a small amount of money or having a lawsuit, most people will pay you the small amount of money," he said. Having your content or a link on another site, albeit with permission, can also be a good marketing tool.

Of course, in some cases, nothing you do may help, especially if someone has copied your layout or design, which is still a gray area. Logos and/or brands are different, especially if they are trademarked. For example, just because your name is Mary Kay and you developed your own line of cosmetics, you can't call your site Mary Kay Cosmetics and/or have your site look like that other Mary Kay e-commerce site. That's what known as "confusingly similar," and it's actionable.

Similarly, if the site that is using your content without your permission is a whole lot bigger than you and well funded, "they're not going to be afraid of your cease-and-desist letter," said Ennico. "Their attitude is going to be 'bring it on.'" And you will have to make a determination as to how far you want to go.

The bottom line, said Ennico: "If you have a successful Web site, people are going to try to rip you off." Another problem, he said, is that "to some extent, you can't really own ideas. Even the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were borrowed from other documents. So you have to live with the fact that if you are in the business of creating original content, if you are successful, people are going to try to copy you in one form or another. And as long as they're not trying to hold themselves out as you, and as long as they're not doing things that are going to take sales away from you, there's really nothing wrong with what they're doing."

Jennifer Lonoff Schiff is a regular contributor to Ecommerce-Guide.com, where this article first appeared, and runs a blog for and about small businesses.