Stealing a whole site!!

TheCrabb

TheCrabb

Banned
Oct 9, 2009
292
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0
South Africa
I just read turbolapp's post about having a picture stolen and abused (soo not the first time I have heard about this happening!) but it raises an interesting point about internet law.

If the douchebag is in another country, who do you turn to?

I had a whole site stolen a few years ago (long story - you can read the blogpost here http://jimmycrabb.com/index.php/internet-business/website-theft) by some muthfucka in Madagascar who then hosted the site in America.

WHERE was the crime comitted and who should I have turned to?
 


TheCrabb said:
If the douchebag is in another country, who do you turn to?
Click to expand...

Usually the most you can do is notify the hosting provider, and hope they're in a country that has some form of respect for copyright law (compatible with your own, eh).

Beyond that, not much you can do cept for maybe a few illegal tactics yourself :P But its usually better to just chalk it up because its not like you're going to recoup any loss.

And you'll see people throw the acronym DMCA around a lot regarding takedown notices, but that only works on a US hosting provider.
 
All I could do was have the hosting company pull them and then I spent the next few weeks wailing and gnashing my teeth bcuase there was nothing else I could do. Surely there is some other international mechanism in place? If not it's a liscence for assholes around the world to get away with murder!

As I said, I am in South Africa - so if I lifted YOUR site and and hosted it over here - what yould you be allowed to do legally??
 
Depends on the laws of South Africa, and what international agreements there may be regarding such matters. For example that recent event where the Japanese woman bought her kids back to Japan. If Japan had signed the 1980 Hague Convention on International Child Abduction, then she would be the one charged with kidnapping, not the father who came to bring them back to the US.

So if there's no trademark or copyright agreement in place, I would be fresh out of luck and could only hope for the hosting provider's company policy to allow them to take action on my behalf, but they wouldn't be legally required to.

Unless I had a global brand that would be severely hurt by your infringement, there wouldn't be much point in me pursueing the matter beyound contacting your hosting provider. Otherwise, if I were actually that big, there would be a chance I had already hired a South African law firm long before you'd known about it. :D
 
That's what I was afraid of...

But then again maybe there is a buck or 2 to be made here. Send me you competitors URLs.
1) I will register the ccTLDs for South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho, Angola and a bunch of other useless, unheard of African countries.
2) I will clone your competitors sites a hundred times and host them in a bunch of countries that don't have diplomatic ties with what ever country your competitor resides in.
3) Your competitors will disapear from the SERPs because of heavy dupe content penaties and won't have the money to do anything about it because I will have hijacked all their sales.

Sound good - just PM me...only $1997 per competitor that you want to be eaten by the dark continent :-)
 
TheCrabb said:
That's what I was afraid of...

But then again maybe there is a buck or 2 to be made here. Send me you competitors URLs.
1) I will register the ccTLDs for South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho, Angola and a bunch of other useless, unheard of African countries.
2) I will clone your competitors sites a hundred times and host them in a bunch of countries that don't have diplomatic ties with what ever country your competitor resides in.
3) Your competitors will disapear from the SERPs because of heavy dupe content penaties and won't have the money to do anything about it because I will have hijacked all their sales.

Sound good - just PM me...only $1997 per competitor that you want to be eaten by the dark continent :-)
Click to expand...

No one would bother it is relatively cheap to get hosting in eastern Europe, central America or China which have faster speeds and still don't care about copy write complaints.
 
I believe the laws regarding websites relate solely to content and logos/branding/images. You can pursue someone for stealing content but the actual design of the site doesn't fall under copyright/trademark issues.
 
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