This is somewhat of a rant, and I want to know how my fellow vendors would deal with this situation..
My bridal team's new website, LWBstylists.com (littlewhitebookstylists.com) officially went live this Wednesday.. I haven't posted it in many places, just on my personal Facebook to show to friends, Bridal Tweet, and on a few of the places I advertise in.
I checked the traffic for my site this morning, and found over 80 hits were coming from "newyork.craigslist.com." This was strange because as a new website, I wasn't expecting many visits, especially not from Craigslist in New York (I'm from Los Angeles). I poked around and went back to the original Craigslist post, but it was deleted; however I was able to find this website that shows exactly what was said: http://ca01.ca/rssfeeds/newyork/?p=5395
I am SO shocked that someone would try to ask for a copy of my website, and only within 2 days of going live. I worked incredibly hard building my site with the limited amount of HTML I know, and would hate for it to be copied for someone else's benefit. I'm inclined to believe it's another vendor who saw my posts somewhere.. This isn't the first time this happened; last time I caught a fellow makeup artist who copied my exact meta keywords word for word, and didn't even bother to take out my name!
I guess what I want to know is, how do you keep other people from stealing your content/design, are there other ways to find if people are copying your site, and what do you usually do when you've found someone whose already copied it?
Views: 128
those bloodsuckers...It sounds like they are not fluent English speakers...do you think it could be someone from another country trying to pretend to be you to scam people? It's happened before. =(
By the way, love your website :)
Sarah
I totally understand how you feel; I am a graphic designer and constantly on the look out for people stealing my designs/content. I'd recommend two things:
1) buy every single version of your domain name that you can... (lwbstylists.com, .biz, .us, .net, .info... all of them) to prevent copycatters from using your name to create competing sites or otherwise scamming your would-be customers
2) copyright and/or trademark your logo, service mark your slogan, and otherwise legally protect your brand markings ASAP. Copyrighting costs $45 and takes fifteen minutes to submit the application online.
Legally, there's not much you can do; as the infringee, the burden of proof is on you to prove that they stole the design from you. Without your documentation, they can always claim that they thought of it first. There's not really a way to hide your source code; there are things you can do like generating your code in Word or something or using JavaScript to hide your coding, but anyone who's intent on looking at your code can easily figure out how to get past your defenses. There is ALWAYS a way to see someone's source code. Otherwise, watermark your images so that they can't be stolen and used without some difficulty. If you can point a finger at the exact person who stole your stuff, then by all means go to the police. But bear in mind that intellectual property, especially on the Web, is murky at best. Copyright your stuff and hope for the best. Sorry that this happened to you though. Maybe you could consult with a web designer to find out how to make your source code a little less accessible, if not completely unreachable.
© 2024 Created by Christine Dyer.
Powered by
