What to do with website plagiarism?

My website was plagiarised. Is there any way I can make the plagiarists to remove my content or close their websites?

No not really, unless you loads of money for lawyers.
Have you asked him to take it down?

if they aren't in the same country as you it would be difficult.

here is some nice advice though:
Write a polite, but firm email to the webmaster of the offending website and explain that you have found your copyrighted work has been illegally reproduced on it. If you have used Copyscape to detect plagiarism you could even include the link that highlights the illegally used copy and states an actual word count.

Inform the webmaster your material should be removed from their website within a certain time frame, I chose 48 hours, or you will take the following action:

1. Contact their web hosting company and inform them of the webmaster’s abuse. A WHOIS search (e.g. http://www.whois.sc) can reveal plenty of information about a particular website, including hosting information and also contact details of the individual or company that registered the website.

A personal introduction, for example, ‘Dear Mr Smith’, is very effective when making the first contact to combat plagiarism, especially if this information is not readily available on the ‘Contact’ section of the offending website!

2. In case the offending webmaster does not take the prospect of the above action seriously then you should also clearly state you intend to file a notice of Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DCMA) infringement with search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

This action can potentially ruin a web business as the search engines take a dim view of plagiarism and can remove an offending site from their search results should an infringement claim be justified.

You can also point out that you can prove your website is the originator of the copy by using the Internet Archive (http://web.archive.org/).


via: http://www.geckoe.com/website-plagiarism.shtml

Thanx for your replies.
How exactly can I "file a notice of Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DCMA) infringement with search engines such as Google and Yahoo"?
What if contact details are not present on the whois (protected by whoisguard.com)?

Here's information from google.
http://www.google.com/dmca.html

With my private domain name they can send through my protector. You might try something like:
theirDomainName@whosisguard.com

My domain protector has strong spam filters before they forward email to me.

Forget about Google and Yahoo...go straight to the host with your evidence and his/her refusal to take the material off line and your desire to avoid legal entanglements if possible.

It's my guess that a lawyer, schooled in that area of the law, could expedite this issue with a simple snail mail letter and some proof of ownership.

most hosting companies don't want questionable content on their servers and will shut it down asap. A formaly written polite but stern letter in the mail often strikes much harder than e-mail. Plagarising a site is bad form and is frowned upon by the commmunity. Failing all else let people know thats what they have done and many people will boycot the site.

I doubt many hosts would do anything about someone who is copying pages. This person is paying them to host his site there, So without a court order don't expect them to listen to you.

If the host is reputable they should.

Why should they? It's not thier job to be the middle men in squabbles.

Reputable hosts have alot more to lose. Last thing they need is some blogger going off about how they were plagiarized and the criminals host for instance godaddy did nothing about.

I used to work for a company that measured/monitored online brand reputation. Most large companies are very sensitive to not piss off the blogosphere. Small things can sometimes get amplified online, and it can then start appearing in traditional media. After all 90% of journalists read blogs, and 2/3 of all news stories break online first.

No, but if their customer is hosting content that clearly violates copyright laws, they are NOT required to wait for a court order to take action....each host has you electronically sign a contract that addresses such violations of the DMCA, and all of us who pay for hosting are made aware of the results of infractions....we risk losing our accounts and all files in said accounts.

If i was hosting an MP3 of Bad by Michael Jackson then i expect they would do something, It would be fairly obvious im not Michael Jackson. But if someone emailed them and told them i had copied one of thier pages i wouldn't expect them to take any action.

ANY host worthy of their reputation will investigate and take action to remove the files and themselves from the picture if valid proof of copyright violations are made available to them....it's the only path to take if they wish to avoid spending prodigious amounts of time in court and thousands on legal fees.

I think you are stuck in a "perfect world" view. In a perfect world hosts would know for sure who had copied who and in a perfect world we could all afford legal action against people on the other side of the planet for something as trivial as copying a page. but in reality it doesn't work like that.