Copyright infringement protection

Copyright infringement protection is a must whether you are operating a business online or offline.

You need to protect not only your website content such as images and articles you have written but also your products and services.

At Teneric, we have a policy to trawl the eBay auctions and ensure that new competitors do not simply purchase our products and pass them off as their own. This ensures that our products are only sold by ourselves and others do not simply reformat our work, add their logo and proceed to sell to unsuspecting consumers products that are not theirs to sell.

We found this recently where a new competitor in the market place had done just that, so what recourse do we have ?

Talk to the company about the infringement

Normally a quick email or telephone conversation with the company concerned should suffice. They will agree to take down the offending material and that is the end of the matter.

But how do you protect your products? How will you know they will keep their word and not re-sell without actually having to keep making test purchases?

This is a big problem because people can simply hide behind the internet and you don't know who they are and their business reputation.

So what other actions are available ?

Contact their webhost

In some cases, contacting their webhost is a last port of call. The host will investigate your claims and could disable the website.

To find who hosts the website, you'll need to "ping" the site to find the IP address. In Microsoft Windows, click "start" then "run" and key in "ping www.thewebsiteaddress.com" and you will see the IP address.

Search in Google to find "reverse IP" and key it in. It will show the nameservers - these will belong to the webhost - then contact the webhost will all your evidence.

County Court Claims

You may be able to claim damages in the local county court. These courts hear all civil claims and may be a way to obtain damages from the third party. These courts are set up so it is relatively straight forward to bring cases. But take legal advice first and read everything you need before heading in this direction.

Trading Standards

In the UK the trading standards department look after all online advertising claims. So if a site has false claims on how big they are or how many customers they have, contact your local trading standards with the evidence.

Do a Google search to find your local branch and provide as much information as you can.

Protecting your copyright

Of course it may be simple to state that you invented something first of all before anyone else - but do you have the proof ?

One way is to register this with the copyright departments. In the UK there is a registration service at the copyright service so you can always prove it is yours. In the US a similar service is available for a similar price.

Alternatively, you could lodge your work with a solicitor - they will know what to do.

You may not think anyone will copy your work and pass it off as their own, but as we have discovered recently it does occur. If you have put some of the above plans into action at the beginning, you will save a lot of time in the future.

This article does not constitute legal advice.

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