In August of this year, I decided with my girlfriend to start a business selling bracelets. Since I myself am a programmer, I decided to write a site. My design was completely unique, I invented the layout of the elements, the color of the buttons and changed them more than once. In general, the final appearance of the page was determined one month from the start of development.

And so, yesterday I go to the Internet, drive Google bracelets into a Google search and discover that there is a clone of my site on the Internet. Almost 90% of the site is copied. And when I looked at the source code of the page I discovered that the code is also mine. I did not like that the person (in fact, my competitor) completely copied my site, putting only his bracelets (as his supplier was different), and did not ask me for permission. Launched advertising and successfully sells goods.

A month ago, I was strangely blocked by Google Adware, allegedly for selling replicas. Although the search engines advertised a bunch of non-original products. So I have suspicions that this was him too. As usually such sites are blocked if someone deliberately writes a complaint. And in such a black way, he ousted me and essentially stole my business. Even earlier, several times dissatisfied customers called me, as if I had sold them a bad product, although it was not us. Now it became clear that they just confused our sites. I wrote to him in the mailbox, but they ignore me.

So, here's the question: what tools can you prove that my site was uploaded to the network before it. And is it possible to sue for copyright infringement, under the article of intellectual property infringement? Or you can make the hosting / search engine maximum remove the site from the index?

Links to sites:

Closed due to the fact that off-topic participants VladD , romeo , aleksandr barakin , LEQADA , Nofate ♦ 2 Nov '15 at 19:12 .

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    Here, too, Zuckerberg piled on the ideas and codes of the Winklevoss brothers. This is the world. Ruthless and merciless ¯_ (ツ) _ / ¯ Who first got up, that and sneakers. - Alexey Shimansky
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    With your arguments go to court is useless. The court will talk when there are legally recorded rights to corporate identity. In this case, you can only try to punish the scoundrel (and you need it? Bait these sites, will open another scam). - Mik
  • Leave better just "all rights reserved, copying materials [pursued by law or equivalent]" in the basement. The current version of the seriousness does not add. - etki
  • Maybe remove the links from the question? Otherwise, it turns out like advertising. - VladD
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    I suggest closing: legal issues do not apply to topics discussed on this site. - VladD

3 answers 3

is it possible to sue for copyright infringement, on the subject of intellectual property infringement

Unfortunately, if you do not have a contract for the development of a corporate style / code, and / or if you have not registered the rights to a corporate style / code, it will be useless to go to court because apart from words, you have nothing to confirm your intellectual property rights.

UPD

For the sake of interest, we talked to lawyers and this is what we come to:

Evidence - the evidence is all you can attach to confirm the copyright:

  1. A development contract is a good plus if you have ordered a site from someone (however, remember that a competitor can backdate and contract for himself)

  2. Notarized registration of ownership of the code / design (best confirmation)

  3. Valuable letter with a screenshot of the code, design, sent to himself in the days of development (and better unpacked)

  4. Layout on another resource source code / design

  5. Psd image sources, etc.

  6. Date of file change on the server

  7. Cache search engines (highly questionable documentation without official confirmation of the owner of the search engine).

  8. Witnesses (completely forgot about them), - people who can confirm that you are the owner of the site and corporate identity from a certain number or that your website with such a design was launched from a certain number.

If you have any of the above evidence, you can go to court, but if you do not have notarized rights, the situation is 50/50, everything will depend on the ability of lawyers. The main thing for you is that a competitor cannot prove his rights or that he created a corporate identity / code before you.

Remember , if you don’t prove a competitor’s guilt, he can file for damages, i.e. all that he spends on the court and lawyers, you pay.

  • Any search engine cache that shows that the site was older? - Qwertiy ♦
  • Well, Google's cache is for court and is not proof. You never know, maybe on one site robots.txt was incorrectly registered. Google is not the ultimate truth. - VladD
  • @VladD, as an option, the first site is in the cache for the time when the second domain has not been purchased yet - probably, this is already something more conclusive? - Qwertiy ♦
  • @Qwertiy: For my taste, no. Timestamp in Google's cache is not legally binding for Google. - VladD
  • @Qwertiy: Now, if a Google employee under oath shows that he personally saw this site on such and such a date - this will go for testimony. - VladD

The first option is to write a claim to the registrar and hoster. If you competently legally make up - they can easily block your competitor's site without question. Here a lot depends on the hosting provider and your correctly composed letter. Plus, you can write to the attacker at his address a letter or call the number on their website and talk in person. The options are many and without trial)

  • Do I understand correctly that you are proposing to take illegal actions? - VladD
  • VladD, Please quote the text from my message that violates the law. All within the framework of rights. - Dofri
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    @Dofri, is DDoS considered legal in your country? - LEQADA 5:24
  • For example, “The approximate content is as follows: a la wrote a statement to the department K for your illegal use of someone else’s code. After the institution of the case, you will pay all fines in accordance with the law. ”- obvious blackmail. - VladD
  • Regarding ddos ​​- I agree, maybe it's a bust. But if my site was so brazenly stolen, I would consider all the options. In order not to produce discussions - edited your starting post. - Dofri

It is useless to search the search engines if your last name is not Zuckerberg, you only have hope for automatic algorithms. From their point of view, "who first got up, order and sneakers," but there are nuances: it is necessary that both the original and the copy have enough text content (so that the automation has a basis for conclusions), the content is the same (to be recognized as a copy), and your site ranked significantly higher (which means more incoming quality links). In this case, the competitor disappears from the search results as a "copy".

The design of search engines do not care. In general, if something was designed, and you did it well, smother with the fact that the design will be tyrit. By the way, your competitor has fine-tuned your design: the picture is not crookedly stretched, the font works fine in all browsers. True picture redraw lazy. Learn. ;-)

Well, trying to earn on advords on the site of the store, and prohibited by the rules - this is generally a strange idea. You just scare away buyers, while not earning anything. I am silent about the fact that making money on breaking the rules is fraught.

  • Yes, I like the back-end, but at that time there was no money for the layout designer. I did as I could) There were a lot of customers and everyone was happy, because they knew that replicas were sold on the site, there is information and we repeat on the phone every time. - Valentine Murnik
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    @ValentineMurnik Picture at least correct, but the square heads look scary. Never change the proportions of pictures. Well, remove the "protection" from the right click, it never protected it from anything. - Athari
  • Thanks for the recommendations, correct the picture) - Valentine Murnik