[thelist] Copyright breach - advice please

[M. Seyon]

Message from Help Center Live - Mike (12/22/2004 10:50 AM)
>Hi,
>
>I'm a newbie on the list but I'd really appreciate some advice on a 
>difficult issue.
>
>I wrote a PHP chat application and registered it with SourceForge about a 
>year ago. It is pretty popular (c 3000 downloads a month).
>
>A few days ago one of my users informed me that another website is 
>providing the app for download but it is attributed to someone else. I 
>downloaded this version and all the developer has done is search and 
>replace my copyright lines and make very minor changes to some of the graphics.
>
>The developer is Portuguese and Google translator doesn't really help, but 
>it is obvious that they are claiming it as their own work.
>
>My website is www.helpcenterlive.com
>The offending version is at http://www.weslley.com/scripts.htm (WI PHP 
>Live Help)
>
>As I mentioned, the downloads are identical apart from the copyright 
>search and replace, the name, and the translation of some of the images.
>
>What should I do?

First and foremost I'll reiterate my statement of a few weeks ago - "as 
professional and knowledgeable as some of us are, I don't think this list 
is the place to ask questions concerning serious legal issues. And yes, 
copyright infringment is a serious legal issues."

Executive summary of that: "Consult a lawyer"

That said, I would send a cease and desist email to the developer, with a 
specified date by which he should remove the offending material. If he 
doesn't comply I'd follow up with a report to the domain registrar, hosting 
provider and ISP of the individual detailing the infringement.

You can get these quite easily with some simple WHOIS searching about.

I'd further report him to Google - http://www.google.com/dmca.html - and 
also use the Google link search (to see which sites link to his) and report 
the issue to any major sites linking to him.

regards.
-marc

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