Company using our graphic and descriptions

[ctrlaura]

Please can someone advise? We created a graphic to be used on our site and a competitor has stolen it and is using it on their homepage.

I have politely emailed stating that it was created by and owned by us and asking them to remove it but they have ignored the mail.

I have also had another business copying our product descriptions which were painstakingly written to ensure ours were unique. They have mailed me to say I need to send them the orginal paperwork stating that I wrote it and they will basically carry on stealing my text until I can prove otherwise.

This is extremely frustrating for us to be spending the time and effort ensuring our site looks great for our customers and has unique content for competitors to just come along and steal it.

Any constructive advice greatly appreciated.

 

[kulture]

E-mail the host companies that host the respective competitors web sites and inform them of the breach of copyright. Request that they take the sites down as they have ignored your requests to stop publishing your copyright material.

You could also invoice both sites for unauthorised use of your copyright material. Look at the Getty thread, if they can invoice so can you.

 

[ctrlaura]

Thank you for your response Kulture, however, how can I actually prove that I personally wrote the descriptions other than having to had register our whole website to be copyrighted?

We have the copyright symbol and our business name in our website footer but what does this actually protect us from?

With regards to the graphic, we have all the original artwork so we can prove that is ours if they ever respond to me, I couldnt email them as they didnt have a contact email, I've had to complete a 'support ticket' on their website.

It's all extremely frustrating..

 

[MikeJ]

Get snapshots from here...

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

... which shows what various people's websites looked like historically.