Archive for the ‘Copyright theft’ Category

I don’t know how many readers are familiar with the notion of content aggregator based websites? Put simply these are sites that pull content from others.

Some are useful sites, say, drawing news content on a particular subject, and others are sites which abuse the hard work of others. One such site is one that has appeared in the last couple of days is “all-things-lanzarote.com” (no link for obvious reasons)… I should point out this imposter is nothing at all to do with the established site allthingslanzarote.com.

This site has been aggregating content from our Lanzarote Relocation site, and have also got the backs up of at least two other well known sites on the the island, one of which it would appear the domain name is emulating. I’ve not mentioned the other sites as I haven’t asked them for permission at this stage to include their names. However, they will be made aware of this post and a more than welcome to comment here with anything they wish to say on this matter.

It is possible to leave a comment on the site that has copied our content, but I’m guessing the comment I made will not last very long … Here it is…

Paul – put very simply. Your lifting of our content breaches all of the unambiguous copyright notices at the bottom of all of our sites, and those of our clients. I ask, very simply, and very clearly, that you remove ALL duplicate content and ensure ours and our clients sites are not ‘farmed’ in future. Is this clear enough?

I reiterate Paul (if that is your real name of course). All of our own – and our clients sites, carry clear and unambiguous copyright notices. You have not been granted any permission to reproduce our content in any way shape or form.

Your activities, now I and the other involved have brought our disapproval to your notice, are, on this basis illegal under the terms of the Berne Convention.

I would normally have mailed the site owner. But as might be expected by someone who is unscrupulous enough to steal the hard work of others. The site owner has not included an email address, and has chosen to hide his true identity behind the privacy options on the who is information.

Domain Name: all-things-lanzarote.com

Registrar: WILD WEST DOMAINS, INC.
Whois Server: whois.wildwestdomains.com
Referral URL: http://www.wildwestdomains.com
Status: clientDeleteProhibited, clientRenewProhibited, clientTransferProhibited, clientUpdateProhibited

Expiration Date: 2011-01-28
Creation Date: 2010-01-28
Last Update Date: 2010-01-28 Read the rest of this entry »

One thing not that many people in Lanzarote know about me was that I originally did a degree in photography – but never chose to follow it as a career. I’ve taken on the occasional project over the years (usually under duress), and have spent some time teaching the subject (far more appealing to me than the pressures of professional photography) in higher education both in the UK and US… But, I still keep my hand in for my own pleasure and amusement and sell the occasional image through photo libraries.

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Seems I spend a lot of time on this topic – and I suppose the upside of it is that plagiarism is a form of flattery – but hell, it is annoying when we put so much work and time into our business and our website content.

It’s a small island – so plagiarism isn’t that hard to stumble on here…

This one completely takes the biscuit for bare faced cheek – it’s lazy, it’s unprofessional and frankly – pathetic. (I’ve twice contacted the site owner without a response…) Read the rest of this entry »

Seems they are at it again…

I know, I´ve been talking about this a lot recently – but it’s an important issue. Today, eagle eyed Sally from Sail Lanzarote S.L. spotted in her stats some suspicious activity, and asked us to look into it… This afternoon she came back with a web address – which she again found in the stats – that had clearly plagiarized their website.

They had downloaded the site using FrontPage and changed the images and made minor alterations to the text. It was a clear breach of copyright – all our sites and those of our clients carry a copyright warning.

So, on this page are the two screens grabs for you to compare…

Was the site copied? We reckon clearly, and as every occasion in these circumstances we were prepared to go as far as legal action to deal with this if necessary.

Whilst we find it somewhat flattering that people like our work enough to copy it, and it also being a testament to Sally and Paul’s writing skills – it is not acceptable to steal copyrighted materials, so we took action.

Here’s the email we sent…

You have blatantly copied a website designed for one of our clients www.saillanzarote.com – in addition to copying much of the text you have also copied the web page design for which our client paid for. The original site has a clear copyright notice which you have breached.

In addition to being unprofessional, lazy and ill mannered, to steal text and design in this manner is a breach of international copyright law as outlined under the Berne Convention.

May I suggest very strongly you remove this text immediately and desist from using the original design or we and or our clients (a registered Spanish S.L. company) will no option other than to pursue any means available to us to have it removed. In addition to facing possible action from our lawyer in La Palma, we fully intend to bring your illegal actions to the attention of Google, your hosts, the SE domain registrar, and to the attention of the general public via any and all online media available to us.

I expect the content to be removed within 24 hours and an apology to my client for your blatant abuse of their hard work and investment of time and money spent on their business. Please, make no mistake that action will be taken if you do not comply within 24 hours this is not an idle threat.

At the time of writing  the pages have now been removed (or possibly renamed – so we will be checking in the future) – so no need for me to name names. 

It will be interested to see if the apology is also forthcoming? We’ll keep you posted…

It may surprise some people on Lanzarote and the Canary Islands (given how common Coyright Infringement is in the region), but International Copyright Law (see the Berne Convention) still applies as much here as it does anywhere else in the world. We constantly monitor the Internet  to protect our Copyrighted text, images and other intellectual property, on ours and our clients sites, to ensure it is not being used without our authority by other websites.

Only yesterday we had three instances of this…

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The simplest advice of all is if you want to protect your Intellectual Property and don’t want it to be copied, stolen or abused – don’t publish it on the Internet. Be your work words, photographs, websites or anything else that can be described as creative this is the only sure way to protect yourself. However, it’s nigh on impossible these days to run any business without making a certain amount of examples and information about your business easily available. (The same can be pretty much applied to your private life too with the prevalence of Social Networking sites like Facebook!)

Now, here’s a short story for you by way of example; After a somewhat ‘entertaining’ evening I knocked together a little t-shirt design for a bit of fun on a site I use – I am not going to mention the site here, for the simple reason that despite feeling let down by them, it remains one of my favourite sites and I have no wish to get myself banned… Read the rest of this entry »