This weekend while doing a web search I came across a very disturbing site. A new company (checked domain registration, etc) that is in the same business as me has used my exact words to describe their business and print pricing.
I mean exact words. From the Ian Russell Gallery of Fine Art website there were many paragraphs that were just lifted completely. From my personal main site I found more lifted paragraphs. And even my tongue and cheek description of how to calculate print pricing? Yup, that was there too.
So, once you’ve found straightforward plagiarism, what do you do? I’ve been researching that, looking into sending out Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notices, and contacting the web hosting company directly to let them know that a site on their servers is taking from other online companies. I’ve saved their pages and taken screen shots to have on hand and to provide in the DMCA notices. Guess that’s what I can do for now……
Now, to the readers out there…. Ever run into this?
It’s pretty hard to catch folks when they copy from your website. But in this case, having a word for word copy of your own material is pretty blatant. And even in the world of the web, where we can link to each other, do reciprocal linking, etc, when it comes to reproducing something from someone else’s website word for word? Yeah, normally you’re going to use some quotation marks for that.
Why a web developer for this particular company would actually choose to copy directly from my site? I’m uncertain as to the motives, but they don’t feel friendly. The new print company’s Pricing Page ripped a ton of my information directly off of the Ian Russell Gallery of Fine Art web site. And yes, folks are being notified of the plagiarism. Good grief people, take 5 minutes to come up with your own pricing information.
What was snatched?
Print Reproduction Price and Products from R.L. Charpentier
Currently we offer a wide array of print products for photographic and painting reproduction work. Water color papers, textured velvet, glossy / matte photo paper, Photo Rag and more. In addition to what we currently stock, custom paper requests are accepted as we can profile new media in under an hour.
All non-canvas reproduction materials run at $.08 per square inch. We can reproduce up to 44″ wide by 40 feet long, borderless as well. So, if you’re looking to create a 24×36″ print, that would come to $69.12. 24x36x.08. Pretty simple to figure out pricing for any print size you have in mind.
More than just that, but only giving you a sampling. Think I’m kidding? Check out the screen shot I captured today. I blacked out the company’s name to give them an opportunity to take down the copies of my material on their own of course. 😉
Reads kind of the same, eh?
So, if you’ve ever run across this type of blatant copyright infringement, tell me what you’ve done. Did you go down the DMCA path? Direct contact with the offending site/company? I’d love to hear readers experiences on this one……
Comments 3
I had something similar happen to me about 8 years ago when someone registered a variation of my business name and set up a web site blatantly stealing all my branding images – logo, backgrounds, etc. Thankfully I didn’t need to resort to anything heavy-handed. An email pointing out the theft, noting that they had no right to the images and demanding that they were taken down resulted in a hasty site rework. Thankfully the guy didn’t renew his registration quite quickly enough and I managed to grab the domain a few months later.
I’d already shared some discussion points on this privately, but have noticed that a DCMA takedown request to both the instigator and their host (obtainable from a whois lookup) usually gets results pretty quickly. Hosts dont like to be party to any potential lawsuits.
That’s pretty scary. We all worry about the odd image being liberated but this is another story altogether.
Luckily I’z dontz writez goodz sos no way some1 wouldz steal me stuff 😀