Excited about DMCA

Yes, I am excited about the law that allows me to protect my copyright. Since my previous posting on the site theft there were some more good news. The links to the illegals site disappeared now from Google, Yahoo and MSN. The site has been forced to change its hosting provider.

I was contacted by Jonathan Bailey who runs the site www.plagiarismtoday.com. We have exchanged a few e-mail messages and Jonathan gave me very valuable assistance in my fight to get the illegal site down. The www.plagiarismtoday.com site itself is definitely worth reading.

Speaking of my excitement, there is a fact that impresses me most about DMCA. I am not a U.S. citizen and live outside of U.S. The designated owner of the domain where illegal copy of the site is placed is also not a U.S. citizen and also lives outside of the U.S. Moreover, we both happen to live in Russia. The only tool though that I could find to protect my copyright was the U.S. law. And it did the work for me. Well, I did not actually get the complete success yet, but the situation has improved significantly.

It is a bid weird that the U.S. law works to protect copyright of one Russian citizen infringed by another Russian citizen. I wish there were a law in Russia that could be used in this situation. And I am really happy there is DMCA that I can use.

First results after mailing DMCA notices

I faxed DMCA notices to search engines and the hosting company of the infringing site on Sunday. The law requires action to be taken within 72 hours of receipt of the notice. By this time (it's Friday) I only received two replies so far. Looks like the law is not quite working. Not that I really need the action to be taken in 72 hours, I can wait longer. I'm just curious now whether the rest are going to reply at all.

What about the replies I've got? The one (from Yahoo) is a success -- they removed the illegal copy of convert-me.com from their search results. I'm really excited about it! The DMCA worked for me. So far it helped to exclude the illegal site from Google and Yahoo -- the two search engines that are being used most often.

The second reply (from the hosting company) was only a partial success. They replied the infringing site had been removed. I checked and found I am still able to access it. It took me less than 5 minutes to find out that the illegal site had simply moved to a different hosting company. Now I should probably mail them DMCA notice too, but the site will probably move again. Fighting content theft may take much longer than I expected.

Another bad thing is the new hosting company of the illegal copy of our site is an InterCage - an ISP known to host spyware. Their website is down, there is no information where to send DMCA. That's a strange company and the Internet search on InterCage returns mainly articles on SPAM, hacking, spyware, etc. I guess at least the illegal site went where it should belong. :)

Fighting site theft. Episode 2. DMCA.

I decided to try fighting the theft of my website. A search in the Internet showed content theft being a common problem. I found a good article on what to do when someone steals your content by Lorelle VanFossen. As I already tried to contact the people who stole my site (got no reply) and their hosting company (they were not very helpful), I decided to go official and send DMCA notices to the hosting company and major search engines. A good article on sending DMCA notices to search engines is also available in the Internet.

So I created several DCMA notices and faxed them. Now I'm waiting for the responses. So far I only got a response from Yahoo, they requested additional information from me which I provided. The law requires that the content infringing my copyright is removed within 72 hours after receiving correct DCMA notice. I hope by the end of the week I can have the results. Let's see if I can fight the thieves with the law.

How to fight website thefts?

Our units conversion website was stolen many times. People simply copied the whole content as it was and placed it elsewhere. Sometimes they kept copyright information intact, sometimes they simply removed it. I never knew how to react. Should I try to complain? But I do not have enough time and money to try to sue them. So I always endured.

Finally there appeared to be a new kind of thief. The new illegal copy of convert-me.com was different. They copied all the content and the conversion programs, they removed all copyright info, but they also changed the look of the pages. The "new" website appears different at first sight, but a closer look reveals all the content being the same.

The bad guys did not stop by having a copy of our site with a new look. They started to promote it, so the site is gaining its audience. The people who visit the illegal copy don't even know it is a copy. The original site has been developed since then, new units were added, some errors were fixed. Of course, the illegal copy is not being developed.

I'm now in doubt what to do. The illegal copy of the site does not even give any contact information. I guess I can only ignore the thieves and hope people could eventually find the original site.

P.S. I intentionally do not give a link to the illegal copy of the site as I don't want to give it extra promotion. However, it's not a secret. I can give a link to those who are interested.

P.P.S. As a proof of authenticity of convert-me.com, here's a link to web archive, showing how our site looked in 2000. And here's a link showing how it looked in 1999 before we moved to convert-me.com domain.