Our site has been copied by several different sites. So far I have been successful in getting the other sites to remove my content. Has anyone else had such problems and if so, what did you do to resolve them?

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Visit the most comprehensive Las Vegas Real Estate and Henderson Real Estate website online. Or look at pictures of my Parrot

Generally the thief knows they are guilty and an email asking them to remove the content does the trick. I suppose one could initiate proceedings to receive compensation but that is not without cost and could become a full time job in itself.

One agent had taken some of my exclusive landscape photos for his site. I emailed him first and after I didn't receive a reply, I emailed and sent letters by certified mail to him again, his broker and webhost.

Later, if you decide to take legal action, it's good to have a log of communication with the perp, and certified mail is best.

Anyway, he took my pictures down. If he didn't, I have an attorney (who has done work for me before) who would write a letter on my behalf first, before we mobilize for action.


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Ruperto Elpusan, MBA, e-Pro
Broker/Officer
Beverly Hills-Malibu-Palos Verdes Real Estate
Torrance/South Bay Real Estate
Rancho Palos Verdes Home Values

Sure, you can hire an attorney but that's going to be expensive.

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Jason in Dallas
Telecom Sales and Service Manager
RE license coming soon

Usually you don't have to take it too far, and even with an attorney, just that initial letter is enough.

Web hosts are especially receptive because they're concerned if their servers are housing illegal content. There is the threat of bringing up the issue with their upstream providers who in turn could shut them down if sufficient proof is provided.


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Ruperto Elpusan, MBA, e-Pro
Broker/Officer
Beverly Hills-Malibu-Palos Verdes Real Estate
Torrance/South Bay Real Estate
Rancho Palos Verdes Home Values

How did you find out that it had been copied?





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www.GulfCoastHomes4U.com

As an attorney and agent, I agree with the previous posts: Be sure you not only contact the thief but their web host, and broker if they are an agent.

Find a lawyer friend to send a letter on their letterhead if that doesn't work.

SueC

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Sue Caskey, Esq.,Realtor(R)
http://www.suecaskey.com
Keller Williams has Millionaire Agent Training PLUS profit sharing!
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I used www.copyscape.com It uses the google api to search for similar content to your site and then posts the results. I ran it on a lark after seeing it posted in another forum. Boy was I surprised when it showed three other realtors had stolen my content. The worst offender was Loudgraphics.com They are a Las Vegas based website designer. They still haven't changed my content enough, but I'm getting tired of pursuing it with them.

Visit the most comprehensive Las Vegas Real Estate and Henderson Real Estate website online. Or look at pictures of my Parrot

Jade how do you feel about websites that have 100% duplicate content? I dont know about you but those types of websites should be reported to google and yahoo. Realtors that take their exact same content and just post it under a different domain name to manipulate search results.I have seen several of them in Las Vegas.

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The Best Real Estate Agents in Las Vegas and Atlanta in the Las Vegas Real Estate Market Atlanta Real Estate Market offering Las Vegas Homes for sale and Atlanta Homes

I'm sure that unique content will do much more for website promotion than stolen.

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www.RealEstateGates.com - Gate to Worldwide Estate!

Unfortunately SE's have little interest in plagiarism.

They reply saying "take action, and when the offending copy has been removed our spider will find out."

Holiday home in Spain : Andalucian horses for sale


[This message has been edited by Jenny (edited 09-21-2004).]

[This message has been edited by Jenny (edited 09-21-2004).]

True to an extent. Google will remove it if you fill out the proper forms. They are a stickler for it, because of the temptation to remove competitors from their crawl. They have to comply under the digital millenium copyright act (DMCA).

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Visit the most comprehensive Las Vegas Real Estate and Henderson Real Estate website online. Or look at pictures of my Parrot

It's a shame people want to ripoff content. It's probably because it's so temptingly easy to do; just right click and save, or File/Save from your browser and presto, you have the whole page.

There's also sort of a (bad) culture from the early days of the Net where people just save stuff because there's this view that the Internet is public domain.

But, enforcement of intelletual property rights has made rapid strides from the early days.

If people aren't motivated to do their own stuff, it's easy enough to license legal content out there. And it's not inexpensive. That goes for written content, and even images. It's better to just get out there and snap away with your digital, but also, you can purchase cheap licenses from stock picture libraries.

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Ruperto Elpusan, MBA, e-Pro
Broker/Officer
Beverly Hills-Malibu-Palos Verdes Real Estate
Torrance/South Bay Real Estate
Rancho Palos Verdes Home Values

Google or any of the other search engines are never fast about doing anything when someone is violating their regulations.

Most webmaster know that is they are violating regulations that by the time google or any of the other SEs get to it ..it is to late.

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The Best Real Estate Agents in Las Vegas and Atlanta in the Las Vegas Real Estate Market Atlanta Real Estate Market offering Las Vegas Homes for sale and Atlanta Homes

Just to update, I've had most of my content removed. I have one a$$hole who owns Loudgraphics, a Las Vegas "website design" company who left most of my stuff in place. I'm in the process of trying to get their webhost to drop their site for copyright violations. At this point I've had it, so I'm going to go the distance with this jerk. His blaise attitude just adds fuel to the fire. He actually told the realtor who owns the site that he did remove the content but luckily it wasn't the text that was getting them to the top of the search engines----

Visit the most comprehensive Las Vegas Real Estate and Henderson Real Estate website online. Or look at pictures of my Parrot

nothing much to do or your can copywrite your text which is a lot of $$$

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List your site free at realestate.movingcare.com

oops

[This message has been edited by Las Vegas Homes (edited 10-24-2004).]

Sure there is a lot you can do report them to their hosting company and the hosting company by Law has to make them remove the content or face legal action.

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The Best Real Estate Agents in Las Vegas and Atlanta in the Las Vegas Real Estate Market Atlanta Real Estate Market offering Las Vegas Homes for sale and Atlanta Homes

thats why i designed my site in flash. they cannot right click and save as nor they cant copy and paste. each of my links are optimized to the same file size as a regular HTML.
www.preferredvalleyhomes.com

alvin,

You may be preventing people from copying your stuff in a way even though they can still actually copy the images and everything.

But you must know that you are killing any chance of getting spidered by google or any other search engine. In my opinion I would prefer that someone copies my stuff then not being able to get clients from search engines.

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Real Estate Web Design - 30 Day Free Trial

We have developed 'articles' that contain links back to the respective author. This allows the 'thief' to acquire the content they are after legally, and gives the author a link and recognition.

How do you prevent anyone but a a first time sitemaker from removing the link?

That is definitely the problem. I don't think there is much that can be done about plagarism overall. Can you afford the time to search on the internet looking for someone who has copied your pages?

You dont have to search the internet to find these people that have copied your content. There are programs that will auto search for you by just imputing your website address and notify you by email when something is found.

The real estate industry is really bad about using other peoples content. It has almost become as bad if not worse than the porn industry.