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internet consultancy and web design

| Protecting the content of your web site

Visual Orange web sites are rich on information and we share knowledge. We know that we serve as a source of inspiration, which is the purpose of these pages but as for all web site owners it also attracts people that abuse the information for their own business objectives and present it, as a product of their own expertise and as their intellectual property.


How to identify abuse of your content

Using Opentracker.net software analyzing proper and improper user behavior is simple and visible. We find our web pages on machines of the Software Technology Parks Of India, in Bombay or Bangalore like:
  • file://localhost/F:/Capstone Project/Proposal/Corporate Branding Services.htm
  • file://localhost/F:/Capstone Project/Proposal/IMPORTANT/Branding.htm.
  • file://localhost/C:/Documents and Settings/Administrator/Desktop/31 Jan/Brand Management online.mht
  • file://localhost/C:/Documents and Settings/Administrator/Desktop/31 Jan/Multinationals online brands.mht
Question is what is this company doing with pages of Visual Orange on their machines? We assume they are preparing an offer to the client Capstone and to convince this potential client of their expertise the content of Visual Orange comes handy, as it saves time and the sales pitch will be supported by a solid phrasing of why we have to follow up certain guidelines when going online but there could be many other reasons..

Unusual behavior identification

Another unusual user behavior is when the same user visits all of the pages of your web site down to password reset page and accesses the pages of the web sites straight from his machine. For example a user from The Limelight Networks Llc.; in Tempe Arizona with changing IP's within the range of this network, but always with 1300x1300 screen resolution, on a Unix system and using Mozilla (Gecko) 5.0 paid 70 visits with an average page view of 6 pages per visit, within 10 work days. Pages were not revisited and pop ups were not accessed via the link on the page self but by accessing the url directly. This is generally speaking a clear sign of harvesting content. But here comes the surprise, further investigation into this matter revealed that Charlotte a Spider of Searchme, Inc. in Mountain View, CA (search engine start up) was indexing the pages. Normally spiders are not shown in the stats of the user tracking software. This spider however shows up as a user and it seems to mimic user behavior with one difference it accesses the pages directly. So let's hope searching the internet will improve.

How to handle copyright issues

What we do:
The first user is blocked from the web site by IP blocking. We appreciate to serve as a source of inspiration but finding complete web pages of our company on some remote machine of the competition is not desired.

Charlotte the spider is welcome and we have to block the IP in Opentracker self, otherwise we would loose control of the bounce and click through rate, caused by this new search engine. All the visits of Charlotte are counted as single events. This means a user comes and leaves again without clicking through and this is influencing our user statistics in a negative sense.

Checking your content on www.copyscape.com

If your content is unique and is a mirror of your expertise you should make a search on copyscape once a month to trace pages that have your content copied and displayed. When Visual Orange finds pages with content that are part of our web sites, we do the following:
  • We inform the owner of the fact that he/she published our content without written consent and that our copyright and our intellectual property right are violated.
  • We grant them 3 work days to remove the content
  • Most web site owners are cooperative because it is illegal and a felony to copy content and this will be prosecuted by court as such and an additional fine will be requested to compensate the damage.
  • Get used to the answer that this content was delivered to them by some copywriter and they did not know that he/she copied it. If we would take each case to court, we would be forced to do nothing else than be in meetings with our attorneys.

What to do when you receive no response

Skip the first steps if you are reluctant to warn the owner of the web site first and
  • file a complaint at Google. Google will ban the web site from its index when you have proven to be the rightful owner of the content. Anyway as it is duplicate content, Google will return the content, displayed in search results, of the page which is first scrolled by the bot and this is in most cases the rightful owner.
  • Contact the hosting company directly. In 95% of all cases the web sites were taken off the air from the hosting provider if the owner did not react to our e-mail.
  • Get a good lawyer and take the responsible person to court. Almost all countries follow the Berne copyright convention, this an established fact and also if a server is located in Panama or even Thailand damage compensation can reach quickly $150,000 or more, plus lawyer fees on top of this amount, for willful infringement.

How to prove you are the rightful owner

  • Archive your web site. All versions are burned onto a read only CD and kept.
  • Consult the internet Archive. They keep track of your web pages online and are consulted frequently when copyright is in question.
  • Be aware that the right is on your side and enforced by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by the U.S. Copyright Office that explicitly states to protect preexisting works from from Berne or WTO, WCT and WPPT member countries.

Copyright checking is included in our >> web site management package

When Visual Orange accepts to take on a web site, to manage it properly, we scan the internet regularly for copied content and deal with the owners of the web site infringing the copyright, Google and the hosting company. Taking the person to court however, who is responsible for the felony, is up to our clients. In most cases it is not necessary to take drastic measures and web site owners apologize for the copy and paste of their "freelancer".

Additionally when content is delivered to Visual Orange by the client for a new web site project, client signs a contract declaring that he/she owns the copyright or has written consent from the rightful owners, to publish all the files delivered as web site content to Visual Orange.