Stole our website

[Doug Stormforce]

I have spoken with the MD of offender’s web hosting company. He was very helpful. They have agreed to give the offender 24 hrs to take down the relevant text or they will take down the whole website.

They have just called back and said he has agreed to deal with it today and for me to have a look at his site first thing in the morning to check the relevant material has gone.

[Bigmuz7]

Sounds like a nasty business .. got me worried about my site now .. will keep an eye open for how to avoid this.

I do a lot of my own design which isnt too outstanding but IIRC the name of the website creator is actually embedded in the HTML which a viewer of a site cannot see. Only when you open the page with an editor and you select HTML view can you see it. This might not be relevant, but it may help prove ownership of the original content and it also has the date of encodement there aswell for each page. So .. his dates will be younger than yours

*edit* load a web page and click View, then select source and will show you some of what I mean using IE 7 or 8

[SeaSkills]

Originally Posted by SeaSkills

It may possibly be innocent on the part of the new centre,

Having seen your examples - there is quite clearly no doubt whatsoever as to the extent of his innocence!

[Jimbob]

This could be an oppertunity for you

In my business, i have found that good suppliers are willing to show people (other people in the same sort of industry)around their production line , knowing full well that by the time they catch up they have moved on to be even better.

Your site is a good site and thats why people have looked at it for ideas (i am not saying they should copy), so you could encourage the RYA for example to say look, i have set a good standard for a site for the industry, which will get your name known as the leader. Then make your site even better............so i think it wrong what he has done, but you are setting standards....thats with due respect to some other good sites

Its the way we would look at it

[TonyC]

well alot of his pages are now:

The page cannot be found
The page you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.
If you are the administrator for this domain please ensure that the page is published in the toolkit.

[Jizm]

Glad you got a result.

[tim griffin]

Well done Doug
In a way you should be flattered that he liked your style of website so much he had to steal its content.

But what a lazy B for doing it and loved his replies and the examples you showed us.

Still all good in the end
Tim

[chewy]

Glad you got sorted fella.
It is a smart site YOU have.

[tonymac]

If he does it again - make him an offer he can't refuse .......

[Doug Stormforce]

The offender’s web host phoned me Thursday afternoon and told me that the stolen text/pages had been taken back by the school itself A quick look online confirmed this. On Thursday evening the offender emailed me one word “Done”.

Since then however he has obviously been busy as things are pretty much back to where they were.

Stormforce Coaching’s Cowes Week and Round the Island products are back up on his site word for word with just the odd training weekend date and price changed. Many of our course descriptions (and lay out) are also back up (all be it with some very minor changes).

When I started this thread I was looking for advice (for which I am grateful for Tim, Tim and everyone else) not to air dirty washing. Those who have emailed me over the last week to find out who the offender was know that I refused to "name" however the offender is clearly now taking the pi@@, so there is no reason for me to protect the identity of Ocean Sports (www.oceansportstuition.co.uk)

Below are some examples of his new edited text, see if you can spot any similarities with our original text.

Originally Posted by
ADVANCED POWERBOAT COURSE - OCEAN SPORTS TUITION RIP OFF SITE (VERSION 2)

AIM: Want to go out at night, go fast and handle the big stuff? Then the advanced course has it covered and some. If you are wanting go further afield or out in more demanding conditions, then this is the course for you.

DURATION: 2 Days (0900 until late first Day & 0900 to 1600 on the second day).

PRE REQUISITES:
RYA Level 2 (essential)
Navigation knowledge up to Day Skipper theory standard (essential)
RYA First Aid (essential)
RYA SRC (essential)
RYA Intermediate Powerboat (desirable)

COURSE CONTENT: The course includes GPS navigation, improved boat handling skills, high-speed navigation, night navigation, rough weather handling, sector searches as well as revision on all aspects of power boating.

Originally Posted by
ADVANCED POWERBOAT COURSE- STORMFORE COACHING’S ORIGINAL SITE

AIM: So, you want to go fast, travel at night and handle waves? The advanced course covers all this and a whole lot more. If you think it’s time you took your boat further afield or out in more challenging conditions, then this intensive two days should bring you up to scratch.

DURATION: 2 Days (0900 till late on Day 1 & 0900 to 1600 on Day 2).

PRE REQUISITES:
RYA Powerboat Level 2 (essential)
Navigation knowledge up to Dayskipper Shore based standard (essential)
RYA First aid (essential)
RYA SRC (essential)
RYA Intermediate Powerboat (desirable)

COURSE CONTENT: The course includes GPS navigation, improved boat handling, high-speed navigation, night navigation, rough weather handling and sector searches.

Here another one

Originally Posted by
INTERMEDIATE POWERBOAT COURSE - OCEAN SPORTS TUITION RIP OFF SITE (VERSION 2)

AIM: To gain the skills required to plan and undertake coastal passages by day. We will demonstrate and coach to enhance and develop your boat handling skills.

DURATION: Two Days 0900 to 1700

PRE-REQUISITES
RYA Power Boat Level 2 (essential)
RYA Fist Aid (recommended)
RYA VHF SRC (recommended)
RYA Day Skipper Theory (useful)

COURSE CONTENT:
Students attending this course will plan and execute two passages - one by traditional navigation and the other by GPS.

Subjects will include; Charts and their interpretation, The Compass Rose, Position, Direction and Distance, Methods of Position Fixing, Tides and Weather, GPS Navigation, High Speed Navigation and practical application of. Berthing between piles, Mediterranean moorings, entering and leaving locks and a range of man overboard techniques.

Originally Posted by
INTERMEDIATE POWERBOAT COURSE - STORMFORCE COACHING ORIGINAL TEXT

AIM: To learn the skills required to plan and complete coastal passages by day and to develop new boat handling skills.

DURATION: Two Days 0900 to 1700

PRE REQUISITES:
RYA Level 2 Certificate Coastal (essential)
RYA SRC (recommended)
RYA First Aid (recommended)
RYA Dayskipper Shorebased (useful)

COURSE CONTENT: During this course you will plan and undertake two passages, one by GPS and one by traditional navigation. Subjects covered include Charts and their interpretation, The Compass Rose, Position, Direction and Distance, Methods of Position Fixing, Tides and Weather, GPS Navigation, High Speed Navigation and practical application of. Berthing between piles, Mediterranean moorings, entering and leaving locks and alternative person overboard techniques.

The Aim, Duration, Pre Requisites and Course Content sub headers are used throughout our site and have not come from the RYA site or any where else. The text was of course written by myself.

Evan after being caught and told by both me and his own web hosting company to take down the copyright breached and stolen material Ocean Sports Tuition uploaded our race events word for word again and made a half hearted effort to disguise our powerboat and shorebased course texts as his own.

You can imagine how surprised I was last week, that Ocean Sports had copied our website site word for word and tried to pass it of as his on. When he then denied it and claimed he had not copied anything I was shocked that someone could lie so blatantly. Now that he has done it all over again and put up our race events word for word I can barley belief it.

[JSP]

I smell something legal is about to happen. Got a good solicitor Doug? Fleece the fecker!

[C2 RIBS]

Hi Doug, sorry your having grief. Out of interest what craft is this team operating for charter as on The Solent and where from? Cheers Ian

[Channel Ribs]

Sorry to read about this Doug.

Have the RYA said if they will get involved?

[Stoo]

Originally Posted by Doug Stormforce

I have spoken with the MD of offender’s web hosting company. He was very helpful.

This information is a little late, but those with similar intellectual property might make note of this site...

http://www.archive.org/web/web.php

This site archives webpages. If you enter your url, it will, in most cases, have stored older versions of your site which can be use to establish prior "ownership" of content.

I'm glad that you thought to speak with the hosting company. ISPs can be held liable for hosting "illegal" content and if a site is copied, it would "qualify" as such.

In my experience, upstart companies that launch their businesses in the fashion that this fellow did, have a very small chance of succeeding, so there's a good chance he won't be along anyway.

[tinker]

Their domain was registered in 2005, they have the same text on a facebook account as well. This could have knock on effects with google (if they route the spider/bot through a proxy server). I have seen similar situations when the offenders site replaces the original in google results (for a limited time) not very pleasant.

You need to speak to a legal expert and get the whole thing rolling,IMO. The company has already damaged your rep and has shown its guilt by removing the original content.

Its unfortunate because the involvement of a 'legal expert' has the immediate effect of incurring costs, which then have to be reimbursed by the offender.

[Bigmuz7]

Originally Posted by Stoo

This information is a little late, but those with similar intellectual property might make note of this site...

http://www.archive.org/web/web.php

Thats a cool site , it seems to only show my site up to 2004 though and I havnt changed domains or anything cool site though

[StarkSea]

Wow. That never happened to me, yet, may be. But here's a good read that shows step-by-step instructions on how to deal with that thief:

http://ezinearticles.com/?Someone-St...Text&id=154473

[codprawn]

Doug

Only just had a chance to read through all of this - it really stinks!!! Your website is far better and the copying is totally blatant.

Having spent over a year working on my own website i would not be at all amused if it happened to me.

Maybe you should have a word with a friendly hacker - a DOS attack could be arranged..........

[tinker]

Forget a dos attack, just register a very similar domain to theirs and have some fun, Google seems to love keywords gained from domain names.

[RIBshare]

Originally Posted by Doug Stormforce

What would you do if someone had ripped of your website? I am not talking one or two lines of text I am talking a substantial amount of the text on the site and some of the layout

Clearly this is a breach of copyright and I have plenty proof that I wrote and therefore own the material.

What would you do?

Hi Doug,

I had a legal battle a few years ago regarding a similar matter with a marketing client. I outsourced some copywriting to a "professional copywriter" only to find that he had copied 87% of my client's competitor's website which was totally unacceptable. With this case the website text never went live but we took legal action but it was an expensive fight and one that was settled out of court in the end as they put their hands up. We didn't use them again!

My advice to you is much what other people have said, document any communications, take screen prints of you website and theirs including page content and HTML title tags, descriptions etc. If you do take legal action you will need as much information as possible but I suggest you write a letter to say that you are aware of the copyright infringement and give them a deadline to remove it. If they do not respond to it then seek legal advice, I suggest you CC your solicitor in on the initial letter (this won't cost you anything but having a CC with a solicitor firms name normally gets people's attention and shows you mean business!).

One thing you may want to look at/invest in is brand names for specific training elements. These could then be trademarked to protect your business. Unfortunately cases involving passing off and copyright infringement are expensive and long winded and I personally think the Government should offer more support to help SMEs protect their interests.

Your business is all about quality of training and reputation, I would personally focus on investing in a referral scheme or customer retention marketing with the view to creating more business from existing clients (who know who you are and how good you are) rather than spending a lot of money on a legal fight.

Hope this helps.


Jonathan