Re: copyright

Although I am not an attorney, I have had a bit of experience in this area
(copywrite infringement)  I have had a similar experience, mine was
blatantly on the page of the site verbatim in style, content ect.

While I think a behind the scenes plagiarism has probably less chance than
on a viewable page, if you can prove with a paper trail (or screen prints
from the past) that you did indeed use that combination first and how you
came up with it, you can then at least file suit and hope for compensation.

In my case, I had the papertrail showing how I accumulated the documentation
and I had screen shots of the site when it was posted as well as my dated
files.  We did file suit and the offending webmaster was fired from their
job and the page taken down.  I also went a step further and have actually
received the copywrite information from the government.
Teajai Kimsey
Managing Partner
Budget Website Design
www.budgetwebsitedesign.com
>From Concept to Completion & Beyond ~
316.944.8700
----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Muehlendorf" <haoka(at)wi.tds.net>
To: <hwg-techniques(at)hwg.org>
Sent: Thursday, July 25, 2002 1:03 PM
Subject: copyright


> Hello List -
>
> Something strange happened to me last night. I had been doing searches
from
> AltaVista, MSN, Yahoo, etc. for a site that I recently did, just to see
how
> its standing was percolating up (or down). It's doing way beyond my
> expectations.
>
> When I was done, just for the heck of it, I did a search for an old site
> that I did in 1996 for a local manufacturing company which no longer
> exists, and no longer has a site. When I had done the search engine
> registration on this site, the results were absolutely phenomenal. I used
> techniques that I had picked up on these lists, and other places (plus I
> sacrificed a couple of chickens...hehehe). In any case, some search terms
> for this particular site would bring it up as number one in Yahoo, MSN,
> Lycos, etc. etc. It was great.
>
> Well, when I did this "fun" search last night, there was a URL that came
up
> in the results, call it xyz.com, and the synopsis that the search engine
> gave was, word for word, the "description" meta tag from my old site. So,
I
> clicked the link, went to the site, and viewed the HTML source. The meta
> tags for "description" and "keywords" were VERBATIM from my old site from
> 1996, and this site was published in 1998. I immediately felt that whoever
> did this site "stole" my meta tags because of the great results they got,
> hoping that they would get the same good results.
>
> Well, I was flabbergasted. Then, I was p*ssed! I started to write an email
> to the webmaster, but had second thoughts. I think I just want to retain a
> lawyer. What do you guys think?
>
> Any comments or help would be appreciated.
>
> TIA,
>
> Mike
>

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