who's hosting?

[ronparrs]

How do you find out who is hosting a particular website? I have found that there are a couple of people who have stolen our copyrighted material (navigation, text, layout; basically all 600 plus pages) and are using our registered trademarks as well. I want to report them to their hosting company as the offending companies or persons seem unwilling make things right. One of the offenders has also stolen the copyrighted material of 3 other sites to use in his. Talk about stupidity (or just being ballsy!?)

Any information you can provide will be helpful. Thanks a bunch!

[ADAM Web Design]

The best way to do it would be to look up the nameservers of the domain name in question and contact those people.

If the nameservers belong to the domain in question (not bloody likely if they're copying), you can possibly contact their bandwidth provider by figuring out who owns the block containing the IP address in question.

That's about all I can think of.

[cspelts]

I don't think reporting them at this point would do any good - for all the host knows, you could be a competitor and their customer could be the innocent victim.

Instead, I would send a letter to the offending site and tell them you'll have to involve a lawyer if they don't immediately remove your content. And set a realistic deadline. Then if they don't comply - go see the lawyer - but if they're at all intelligent, you won't have to.

[nottheusual1]

Originally Posted by cspelts

I don't think reporting them at this point would do any good - for all the host knows, you could be a competitor and their customer could be the innocent victim.

Not quite so - send a very nasty letter to the hosting company from "your lawyer" and invoke the DMCA - Digital Millenium Copyright Act - and the hosting company (if located in the US) will be put into a position of having to deal with it immediately or face the same consequences as the original offender - which, btw, is really big money. Show prior works and references to the infringed materials and they will become involved.

From UCLA's DMCA site:

" Service providers, however, are expected to remove material from users' web sites that appears to constitute copyright infringement."

It's all but draconian, actually, but can help the little guy as well as the big guy, which I'm sure was never the intention <<chuckle>>

:not_the_usual1
[you decide]

[chocolate4free]

I think a useful thing to add to your site if you keep getting your images stolen or content is to set a scale of charges for unauthorsed use. Including an excerpt from the Berne convention.


COMMERCIAL USE OF PHOTOGRAPHY/GRAPHICS
If you wish to use any of our photos/graphics commercially, permission will have to be obtained from "company name" directly and a fee paid. Please write to "email address" with your request.

To deter Webmasters from using our material on other Webpages or using them outside the above permitted uses, we have been advised to set a scale of standard charges for unauthorised use. This makes it extremely easy to obtain significant damages for unauthorised use of the material, by applying the legal process from any court in a country that is a signatory to the Berne Convention, most Countries in the world have signed this convention.
The scale of charges are:
£100 GBP per day per photo/graphic, starting from the date of the infringement.
Unpaid bills accrue interest.
Expenses incurred by us and the collection Agency, in the collection of these fees are also chargeable.

Photo info: There is a technology available from Digimarc Corporation which enables a digital watermark to be embedded into the image, this company has a robot that scans the Web looking for images with a watermark which notifies the registered owner of the photo and the URL address where it found the photo.

I have found this very useful - and have reduced the problem.

[ADAM Web Design]

cspelts has a bit of a point. I had a guy last year that worked for me under contract before striking off on his own who ripped off portions of my website (mostly my legal page).

I could prove to the hosting company (CrystalTech) that he was plagiarizing content, since he copied and pasted their entire promotions page and forgot to remove their company name in two places. I'm not allowed to mention who is responsible, due to legal implications, but it did occur.

I contacted CrystalTech about it and not only did they tell me they wouldn't do anything about my content issue (which I could understand since it was difficult to prove who did it), but that they wouldn't even deal with him copying/pasting their own content since "it was reselling their hosting."

So hosts don't always take this seriously. The pages are no longer there, however, and I don't view the guy as a threat (he was completely clueless) so it's not a big deal. I'm just pointing out that hosts won't always get involved if you ask them to.

[cspelts]

I've had an entire site completely duplicated twice. The first time it happened, we contacted the site owner and he was astonished because he had paid a freelancer to "design" his site - and had no clue it was stolen. The only thing this designer changed was the text in the logo - he even left in my tracking code, which is how I found the duplicate. That site came down immediately.

The second time it happened, I was unable to contact the site owner - there was no valid phone number and my emails went unanswered. It was very frustrating, but once I mentioned in an email that we would be contacting a lawyer the site disappeared.

The next step would have been a letter from a lawyer, which would have cost several hundred dollars - but thankfully it never got to that point.

[spytrdr]

Originally Posted by ronparrs

How do you find out who is hosting a particular website?

www.netcraft.com