What should you do if your site was copied?
- What should you do if your site was copied?
- Is the site subject to intellectual property rights?
- Step-by-step for the owner of the site that was copied
- Judicial settlement
Protecting intellectual property rights on the Internet is one of the most difficult areas for a lawyer. First of all, this is due to the imperfection of Russian legislation and insufficient legal practice. Abroad, all these issues have long been regulated by relevant laws that protect the interests of authors and copyright holders of digital content. The situation in Russia is gradually changing for the better. In case of violation of intellectual property rights, the owner has the opportunity to defend his interests in court and recover monetary compensation from the culprit. These innovations are designed to help content creators avoid illegal encroachments on the results of their work by unscrupulous competitors and pirates.
Is the site subject to intellectual property rights?
In 2014, the Civil Code was amended to protect the legal rights of website owners. Copying information from someone else's site to create your own is a common situation in Runet. Most often, this method is resorted to by unscrupulous competitors who do not want to invest in the development of a personal brand, but instead steal other people's ideas and copy successful developments. The use of non-unique content lowers the position of the site in the search results, but even this cannot prevent unauthorized copying of information.
Due to the new law, the site is assigned the status of intellectual property. Thanks to this, the resource owner can protect his product from illegal use or its individual components. Among them:
- A website logo that helps a supplier of goods and services stand out from the rest.
- Text and graphic content of the site pages: articles, descriptions of goods and services, videos, photos.
- Domain name of the site and trademark.
- Program code.
These components are protected by intellectual property law and cannot be used without the owner's permission.
Step-by-step for the owner of the site that was copied
If you find that your site has a duplicate, you should try to resolve the issue without a trial. For this you need:
- Send the owner of the clone site a letter of claim, which contains information about the violation with a link to documents confirming your copyright to the intellectual property object.
By law, all sites must contain contact information about the owner. First of all, this is the legal address of the company, which you can send a certified letter in paper form. If the site has an email address, it is worth duplicating the message. According to the established requirements, the recipient is obliged to resolve the controversial issue within 24 hours. This can be the removal of copied materials or the provision of evidence of the legality of their posting on your site.
- Send an application to the hosting company with the requirement to block the clone site.
Reputable hosting providers care about their reputation. If the copyright holder provides undeniable evidence of illegal copying of the site, the provider will issue a warning to the violator and remove the plagiarism. If the site is constantly being complained about because of the theft of content, then the hosting company will most likely block the problem resource.
If information from your pages has been illegally posted on social networks, you should file a complaint against the offender and send it to the administration of the social network.
- Contact search engine support.
This option is good if you were unable to resolve the issue through the hosting company. You must notify Google and other search engines customer support. They will exclude an unscrupulous competitor from indexing, which will make it impossible to attract users to the site. In the absence of attendance, the clone site becomes useless.
Legal settlement
If none of the above methods helped to get rid of the clone site, the copyright holder can file a claim in court and defend his interests. In Moscow, the Moscow City Court deals with copyright protection cases. To successfully resolve the conflict, you need to collect evidence in advance that confirms your rights to the content. Experts advise using web archives, where copies of site pages are stored. Also, to protect content, you can use the notarization of the site.
If a positive decision is made on the claim, the copyright holder can apply to Roskomnadzor with a statement to restrict access to the clone site.
These and other issues related to the protection of intellectual property rights can be discussed with the A4 Law Firm team of lawyers and receive detailed advice on how to combat illegal copying of content.
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