As you can see, It’s blatant stealing! he didn’t even bother to copy the hero image and hotlinking it straight off my site and stealing my bandwidth as well.
So here’s my question: Have you guys experienced this situation before? And if so, What did you do about it?
Heh, if that happened to me, I’d move the location of my image and replace the original with something offensive that would appear on his site. Mini revenge.
My temptation is to say there’s nothing really unique on the web and that there are better things to worry about, but I’m sure there’s some legal process if it’s really a problem—such as a takedown notice or whatever. But you are better off talking to a lawyer if you are serious about doing something.
PS: your side seems to be broken now—loading without styles.
Sadly yes. Few years ago my old website was completely copied and used for a new website. I found it online while searching some of my keywords (they also kept parts of the text). And since I wasn’t the one who code it (I had designed it, and payed for coding), I contacted the providing company to ask about the issue; then I contacted the “owner” of the new website. I told both of them they should remove it immediately, as it is my property.
And it worked, as the website was removed in 2 days max.
Besides that you can also set-up rules at the server level to blocks incoming requests from that website.
As for the design I wouldn’t say it is a stretch that it was stolen but I mean it is just really a 2 column grid layout like every other site in existence.
I mean there is a resemblance but nothing near concrete enough to prove they are one of the same. I’m not a lawyer but I would think with things like this it would just end up being a huge money pit. I think when it comes to law the more money you throw at a situation the more likely you are to win but for this I mean not even worth it. Well the design at least because I think that would be near impossible to prove in court.
Maybe not a unique design per se, but it is clearly “stolen” as in blatantly copied. The html with some adjustments and the css with no changes at all, as I could see.
Then there is the cheap hotlinking to the original content, simply by letting the copied html be.
The ip that is used (162.213.255.66) for the copies holds some 420 sites, with a registrant that has many many records.
So you are probably not alone being ripped off for bandwidth and whatever else there is to gain doing this. Hope your cease-and-desist letter will get your work removed from those servers.
