Another Site Owner threatening me with Copyright Infringement

S

Seema

New member
Mar 16, 2008
740
29
0
I run a review site which reviews 20 of the leading brands of a product. The brands are listed in order on my site of best performing brands by conversion rates and each brand links to a review.

The reviews, design, graphics and everything are 100% unique and have been written by a professional writer.

The issue the person has is the order of the brands. He is stating that he has right to the ordering of those brands. When looking at his site its simple to see that he does have the brands ordered in the same way as I do. The brands are in a table with 4 colums, rank number, brand, discout code, star rating and link to review, which are all consistent with this persons website.

What I want to know though is can someone sue me for the order in which I have presented my brands on the front page?

Futher to this are there any copyright experts on here who might be able to help. I'd be willing to offer anyone who is skilled in this fet for any advice they might be able to offer.

Also before anyone says go hire a copyright lawyer and get them look over your site. Obviously this is something I will do but I want to get the general opinion of people who might have been in similar sitations before.
 


The basis of your concerns is a bit specious.

Can someone sue you for X?

The answer: Someone can sue you for anything, no matter how frivolous.

The main question is how unlikely are you to get sued, thus how ignorable is their complaint. In this case, I'd ignore him. What you don't do is respond to them, but you already probably blew that trying to be macho.

I am not a lawyer.
 
What he said. ^^^^

People can sue for anything. Will he win? Who knows. Will he sue? Who knows. If he did sue, he would probably lose a lot more than he'd gain, but he might be one of those types (although I doubt it).

Just ignore him (if you haven't already responded) and let it go away which it probably will. If he found your site, he was probably snooping for new ideas himself anyways.

I too am not a lawyer.
 
I'm a lawyer but not a copyright lawyer, but unless I'm missing something it sounds like you should be fine. There are a lot of companies out there that hire a firm to send cease and desist letters to see if you will blink and take down your site. I have received about 5 of them in the last year or so, and most of them are just that: bluffs. However, the devil is in the details and I would have to read the letter and review the site to give you further thoughts.

If it's a money site and you're making decent dough off of it you should hire someone to give you a site review. There are some great A+ firms that will do this for a reasonable fee (not me, i don't do this stuff) and imho it's well worth the money for peace of mind and to avoid very costly litigation.
 
Thats a pretty week argument. Neither one of you own the brands your representing therefore neither of you has any say in how the other presents the products. If a brand comes to you and says your in violation thats a different story. Your both trying to sell products. The only way you would be infringing on his rights would be if you jacked his custom coded page and even than thats still a stretch. Just ignore the guy. It sounds like he's just pissed off at having competition
 
Fix1111 said:
I'm a lawyer but not a copyright lawyer, but unless I'm missing something it sounds like you should be fine. There are a lot of companies out there that hire a firm to send cease and desist letters to see if you will blink and take down your site. I have received about 5 of them in the last year or so, and most of them are just that: bluffs. However, the devil is in the details and I would have to read the letter and review the site to give you further thoughts.

If it's a money site and you're making decent dough off of it you should hire someone to give you a site review. There are some great A+ firms that will do this for a reasonable fee (not me, i don't do this stuff) and imho it's well worth the money for peace of mind and to avoid very costly litigation.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply. I really appreciate you giving me your take on all this.

The problem I have is that the site is a work in progress. I dont make a load of money from it but it is moving up the rankings for fairly decent search terms and the traffic has started piling in with my increased seo efforts. This in turn is making the site more and more visible to the competition.

I dont want to be bullied by this guy, but what he has requested I do if I dont want to be sued is, re order the items on my site so they are different and also make citations to his site, in other words give him a link from my site to his, and to make it clear on my site that my site was inspired by his, which is complete bullshit because the design and content are completely different. The ony thing that is consistent is the tabular structure of the brands on the index page.
 
Ignore it mate- typical butt-hurt strong-arm tactic from a competitor.

Don't reply or respond unless you get a real commo from a real attorney, and even then, just hand it off to your mouthpiece. Don't talk to the fucktard direct at all.
 
galacon said:
Ignore it mate- typical butt-hurt strong-arm tactic from a competitor.

Don't reply or respond unless you get a real commo from a real attorney, and even then, just hand it off to your mouthpiece. Don't talk to the fucktard direct at all.
Click to expand...


This is great advise. If you respond to him in writing you can pretty much guarantee he will use it against you ( I would)
 
tell him to go fuck himself. people have threatened to sue me but they don't follow through besides if your site is actually different aside from the positioning of brands then it is not copyright infringement, just look up your copyright laws.
 
Presumably, a review site is built around your reviews of the products. There is no legal basis for a copyright claim just because you agree on the order of the quality of products. A whole lot of sites would be in trouble if that was the case. Your reviews are unique, therefore you are protected.

Your response should just be to ignore him though. Don't give him any ammunition to waste his time and money because it would end up wasting your time and money too.
 
Tell him to show you a copy of his filed copyright. Doubtful he registered this and so would have a tough time suing you.

Copyright Registration
In general, copyright registration is a legal formality intended to make a public record of the basic facts of a particular copyright. However, registration is not a condition of copyright protection. Even though registration is not a requirement for protection, the copyright law provides several inducements or advantages to encourage copyright owners to make registration. Among these advantages are the following:

• Registration establishes a public record of the copyright claim.

• Before an infringement suit may be filed in court, registration is necessary for works of U.S. origin.

• If made before or within five years of publication, registration will establish prima facie evidence in court of the validity of the copyright and of the facts stated in the certificate.

• If registration is made within three months after publication of the work or prior to an infringement of the work, statutory damages and attorney’s fees will be available to the copyright owner in court actions. Otherwise, only an award of actual damages and profits is available to the copyright owner.

• Registration allows the owner of the copyright to record the registration with the U.S. Customs Service for protection against the importation of infringing copies. For additional information, go to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection website at www.cbp.gov/xp/cgov/import. Click on “Intellectual Property Rights.”

*Not a lawyer.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom