Copyright Infringement – Another Competitor Busted

We recently came across a new service that may be of interest to anyone that has a web site with good content.

Copyscape – http://www.copyscape.com/ – is a service that will search your site and then search it’s index of sites to see if there are any matches (it seems to kickback results similar to Google, so its probably using its API / index).
We have already busted two competitors of using our content verbatim.

The first offender is DigitalLawyer – digitallawyer.ca. They copied our entire site text and put it in their design, including various product pricings, sales pitches and more. After a quick email to their parent company Unexia Interactive Inc., they have removed the entire web site and claimed that they would research where the offending copy came from. Since this company did not even have a design portfolio online, then hopefully no damage to our reputation was done and they did not profit from this stealing.

However, a second search unveils that another site Crystal Clear Designs – crystalcleardesigns.com – is also copying our content. Ridiculous. This company has a portfolio online it is seems pretty decent, so it is suprising that they would copy our content. An Internet Archive search shows that they had different web site up to at least March 6, 2005. So sometime in the past year, they decided to change their look and copy our content. We are contacting them today to have them remove the offending content. We will keep everyone posted.

[UPDATE: Crystal Clear Designs agreed to pull the content after an internet archive search indicated that the our content was online since 2003, way before their new site launch.]

If you have a site that is highly ranked in the search engines and has good content, then more likely than not, someone has copied your work. I suggest you check out their free and possibly their paid service.