Re: copyright

You really need to consult an attorney well versed in Internet law.  He/she
will either dismiss it or suggest the best course of action.  Likely you can
have the attorney whip up a professional cease-and-desist order -- that
scare tactic alone is usually enough for someone to back down.

Don't try threatening them yourself --it never works.  I had a guy do that
to me because his site was a porn site named the same as my non-porn cat
site (three guesses what word was involved).  I had three things going for
me:  he didn't have a valid claim because my site was there first and I
could claim "first use" (two frequent visitors of my site are lawyers); my
site is non-profit; and if he had had any legal leg to stand on, he wouldn't
have sent me the threat himself.  The creep saw that my site came up first
in the search engines and I guess he felt my site was depreciating the value
of his domain name (he was trying to sell it for $50,000).

Mike

----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Muehlendorf" <haoka(at)wi.tds.net>
To: <hwg-techniques(at)hwg.org>
Sent: Thursday, July 25, 2002 2:03 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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