The cheek of some people!!

[stuey]

In the interests of market research I did a bit of googling this evening for a popular product which sells well on my website. The product is currently out of stock on my website but is on order.

Imagine my horror, anger, disgust, when I discover another, only recent, seller of the same product has blatantly cut and pasted my product description and basic instructions from my web site and stuck it on their own site!! And I can tell they have simply cut and pasted it because I worded the paragraphs myself, it is word for word the same and amusingly they have cut and pasted the same two spelling errors which I only noticed this evening!!

I don't really know what to do about it but feel rather angry about the whole thing!!

I have no copyright information on my site so assume I have no leg to stand on. They on the other hand have a huge spiel about all wording and pictures etc are property of them and cannot be reporduced blah blah blah.... Hippocracy!!

Is there anything I can do?

Rant over and sorry!!

Cheers all Stu

 

[ReamviThantos]

Name and shame would be a start.

 

[Shewie]

As far as I know all works placed on the internet are protected by copyright, unless they have you permission to broadcast your data then they are in the wrong.

You should first try and contact them and ask them to remove it, if that fails you should get some good pointers here ...

http://www.ipo.gov.uk/types/copy/c-manage/c-useenforce/c-enforce.htm

 

[santaman2000]

Your wording (the wording saying it's copyrighted) is less important (if at all) than the fact that it appeared on your site earlier than theirs (if that can be proven)

 

[roger-uk]

Your wording (the wording saying it's copyrighted) is less important (if at all) than the fact that it appeared on your site earlier than theirs (if that can be proven)

and you have enough money to enforce it as this would be a civil action not a criminal one and to get damages you would have to prove losses.

[Please note any advice is worth what you have paid for it ]

 

[santaman2000]

and you have enough money to enforce it as this would be a civil action not a criminal one and to get damages you would have to prove losses.

[Please note any advice is worth what you have paid for it ]

In the case of copyright infringement it's not "losses" for damages but rather royalties owed for using (stealing) the copyrighted material. You set your own fees for royalty payments (although I'm sure there is probably an industry standard)

 

[stuey]

Cheers for all of the information chaps. Superbly useful thank you!
I have a legal bod looking into it with a view to helping me pen a stern letter to the cheeky chappy.
I've no intention of trying to get money etc.... just want him to change his wording and put the effort in to write his own product description like I did.
I feel a bit petty doing anything at all about it as it cant be more than three or four lines of text at most but I think its more the bare faced cheek of it and the fact he hasnt even been bothered to correct my two spelling errors!