Wow, thanks so much for all your comments.

Jamie, I checked the whois record (at Whois lookup and Domain name search ) to find the nameserver the site was hosted on.

Suzanne, yeah it probably is voluntary since they are not bound by the same laws we are. Fortunately, in the past, I've found most foreign webhosts to be cooperative anyway. This one is a real jerk.

I wrote to a webhost in Germany once because one of their clients had stolen the whole text of one of my websites & copied it to my site. The website owner had told me to f*** off & claimed that he copied the text from a book! not a website (odd that he was willing to admit plagiarism) - but the webhost was quite responsive. (In a further twist, it turned out that the owner of the website in question was also an employee of the webhost!)

Kevin, that is really interesting about the fines. Wow. I had no idea it was so much.

I've had people rip off my pages before. The complete text of my webdesign site has even been copied on 2 separate occasions by other webdesigners! Guess I should have sued, my bank account would sure be looking good.

I do know that copyright registration is optiona; it's not required in order to enforce one's copyright. Under US copyright law, a creative work is copyrighted the moment it is created whether registered or not.

However, if bringing a lawsuit, it will certainly prove ownership beyond a doubt. So if one has registered a copyright, a legal case will be a slam dunk.

On the net, there are also other ways of proving which website first published the material (Archive.org, the site owner's own records, webhost records, etc.)

qh4dotcom that's a good idea. I hadn't thought of the domain name registar.

Matteo, yeah, rewriting the page is a good idea. It's already been slightly reworked. It's just that I shouldn't have to do it. I just shouldn't have to do it.

TrafficProducer, wow, that list of links is superb. Thanks so much.

Dealing with business entities in other countries is just such a challenge.

Thanks again everyone!
cheers & gracias ~
Denise