Talk about stolen content! I need help...

[Eric Polsinelli]

Hey guys, I recently noticed many more 'hits' coming into my website (www.perfectpictureimaging.ca) from Russia... not thinking anything of it I left it alone...

Just now I discovered that the hits were coming from this website http://www.art108.ru/ I was shocked! A complete copy of my own site, but with the photo's changed.



Now, I've had problems with stolen content from my page... even pages being ripped off, but they were from American's... and our laws are pretty simple.

Does anyone know what I can do to for this 'out of town' guy? I've already sent an e-mail, but I don't even know if they can read it

This just plain sucks.

[T Paul]

I don't know how much luck you will have as the web site's design is a common FrontPage theme (Expedition). So it only looks like they stole your Picture Perfect Imaging logo and if that's not trademarked or copyrighted, I'm not sure what you can do.

Now the leeching issue is another problem. Leeching describes the practice of building web pages that contain unauthorized content links, known as a hotlink, direct link, or remote link to files hosted by another site. The result of hotlinking is that the offending site is able to present it's pages without paying for the bandwidth needed to serve up the stolen content. The victim site ends up paying the bandwidth expense for serving up the files without gaining any page views. As for them leeching from you web site by linking to the graphics on your server, I believe the only fix is to keep changing the name of the graphics and that will cause them to break on their end.

I did a quick web search and found a couple of other options. If you are into programming, there are two levels at which you can apply controls to prevent hotlinking. One option is to control it at the web server level. The other possibility is to use a scripting facility such as PHP to control access to the resources to be protected from hotlinking. One other options is software. I did a quick search and found a couple of products that provide bandwidth abuse prevention. Best of luck!

The programming side is well above me, but perhaps others might be able to help you out.

~T

[Leah]

Looking at the source code of their site, what they appear to have done is take a complete copy of your site using a product called Teleport (you can tell they used Teleport because of all the tppabs tags in the html code). This means that they're not linking directly back to any of the graphics on your site (or at least not to those I checked), so they aren't relying on leeching, so anti-leeching techniques won't help.

If you've used a standard template as T suggests then there's not much you could do legally about them grabbing your look and feel. You could almost certainly sue over the appropriation of your logos, but how much is it going to cost you to bring an action in Russia? Your best action is probably (1) to send an email asking him (domain: ART108.RU, person: Igor V Shavkunov, phone: +7 905 7647569, e-mail: v_p_d@mail.ru, created: 2004.01.09) to stop (which you've done), (2) if no response, I suggest contacting the hosting company that is hosting the page for him. By doing a DNS lookup and then a whois on the alias, that is rbc.ru, whose email address is hosting@rbc.ru. If you email them giving the details and asking them to ensure that the stolen material is taken down then they may very well close down the offending site (or they may not, but it's worth a try)

For the future, to stop someone else doing this to your site, you may want to look into products such as HTMLProtector which can stop Teleport and similar products grabbing your site.

[Eric Polsinelli]

I heard back from the owner of the site, and they said that they will remove it a.s.a.p... I guess we'll see, but I defiantly appreciate all the suggestions!