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fraudulent copy of my website & blog

Question

I found out that someone made an illegal copy of my website and blog. It is just my working website & blog, with their domain added to the name. The reason why beats me. I am an artist / designer, I don't sell anything at the moment. I just use it to promote my work. And there is not a lot of traffic. The other domain is registered in Minnesota, but the fraudulent website is hosted in the Netherlands. I have written the host provided and they have sent a warning to the owner to take it down or the account will be suspended. It seems that in the Netherlands there is no law that regulates this kind of issues. Does anyone know if I can file a complaint somewhere else? I don't have money to spend on a lawyer. But I do want to take some action and make sure this does not happen again. Thank you for any advice!

ClaireDD

Sorry, mistake: registered in Minneapolis. Not that it makes a lot of difference, I guess.

May 16, 2014 14:07
ClaireDD

And the host provider is registered in the UK, with headquarters in The Hague, and they boast doing offshore hosting...

May 16, 2014 14:21
Anonymous

Ask Europe Direct helpline services.
They might be able to help you, for free.
Tel. No. 00 800 6 7 8 9 10 11
http://europa.eu/europedirect/index_en.htm
or send them an email.
URL website link: http://europa.eu/europedirect/write_to_us/index_en.htm
If not call the European Commission DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology.
Tel.: 02 29 60240
http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/connect/en/content/organisation-chart
They should be able to offer some free assistance.

May 16, 2014 17:21
ClaireDD

Thank you!

May 16, 2014 22:47
wpbreps

By the way...so you're saying they basically took the content from your site, slapped on their site, but their site has a different name?

So if you're websibe is abc.com, their site is xzy.com, but it has your content on it?

Anyway, I had a site whose content was also copied and in the end, the site is still out there because that person moved the site to a russian host, and well, good luck getting those hosts to follow the law. As my site had graphs/pictures, I now have to put a watermark on the picture in a way that if the image is removed, vital information is missed from the picture,and this prevents the "thief" from simply cropping out the watermark. Sure, they can still replicate my graphs, but they haven't resorted to that.

May 17, 2014 00:44