Viewing Copyright infringements of your designs. Your views please !
Copyright infringements of your designs. Your views please !
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User: Peter B. 10 years ago
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Hi All, I have ran into something that I really did not see coming. Here's the short version. A customer came to me last year asking me to design her a website. She was a painter by profession and wanted a site where she could show her paintings. So we sat around the table, discussed her wishes and ideas and got started. She would supply the text, we would edit the text where needed and made a site. Took us some versions and time to get to the final model. This site had been online for several months but she complained she would not list top in Google. I explained this was not that simple and that more had to be done to the site, which would require more time and more costs subsequently. Nothing odd there, right ? We did a few pages to see if that would spark any changes. We then did not hear from her up to a few weeks ago when she asked for the access codes of the ftp of the server for her webdomain. We asked why she needed those as we handled the site via EverWeb, so there was no need for her to access the ftp . ( We also feared she would mess things up ). A few days after this she asked for the authority code of her domain. She wanted to switch providers from us to someone else who would make her a brand new site she could edit herself. ( Added info: She lacks all knowledge of html etc ) So with slight disbelief we asked her why and she replied that she found a new guy that would do it all for free for her. I told her she could still use her current hosting and could simply replace the site with the new design from her new designer. Her designer had made her believe that he just had to do both the site and the hosting, it would not work any other way. So we sent her the authorization code and indeed a few days later she moved the domain to the new provider. A few weeks pas by and today we went to look how the new design would look. Our jaws dropped.....not that it wasn't a nice site....not at all...it *was* our site. We had designed it for her and when customers host their website with us we do not directly charge them for copyright on our designs, they only pay the hours we work on them. She knew that and as she's a professional painter herself, making art, you'd think she would understand a thing or two about copyright. Guess not.... So now this new provider has copied all parts of our design over to his server and even had the guts to remove our copyright sign and enter his in the source code. So he had a sweet and simple deal, steal the competitors client, steal their design, remove their copyright mark and put his own into place. So we have set out to mail the blasted woman a thing or two and sent a copy of that to her ' webcopier" ( can't call that a webdesigner ) . The thing I am now wondering is this: We have an EverWeb license. So we can use the software to make websites and any code in these websites is licensed as well as it is made by us. How is this now that WebCopyBoy has stolen our design. It would seem he infringes on the copyright and license of EW as well, does he not ? Your thoughts please... |
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User: James G. 10 years ago
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Copyrights are a tricky maze to navigate. First, I would say since you are in NL, look into what your country's practices are. If he recreated the site with different code (not using EW, or using EW differently than you), there is most likely no infringement of any kind. Just like anyone can recreate Facebook down to the last detail, using different code and there is nothing Facebook can do. Only thing I can think of would be if your company owns a copyright on the visual look of the designs you use, it may get a fight, but may not. Only thing I can really think of doing to get it changed is to send a letter on company letterhead that is worded strongly (like it was written by an attorney) asking for the design to be changed. My opinion on the matter is to leave it alone. Poaching web clients is a business unto itself. My guess is she will be back, or move onto someone else when she realizes things are not happening well. What I would do if I were you and cared about this client: Keep an eye on her site, analytics, metrics, keywords, and anything else. Contact her in 2-3 months and ask how things are going. If her reply is that she is 'happy because I am now on page 1', use what you have seen to warn her about what could/will happen in future. Also, depending on the contract she signed, if any, she may have already lost the rights to the images she uses on the site, a common scam by crappy web devs (and Pinterest). If there are errors not going away on her site, inform her of those. Most crap services I have seen will stuff keywords that have nothing really to do with the site to get to page 1. Of course the flip side is Google hammering your site to the bottom and you having to scrape your way back up by doing things correctly. |
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