@ksundheim, you post a very good question as this is very relevant in the current situation in the internet. I was highly interested that I did some snooping around, and was disgusted at what I found out. Not only that they dont have a strict policy to penalize offender. The 1st step they said is that you go contact the offending site owner (in which you did) and ask them to put up relevant credits and references link. If they dont oblige your next step if it is a copyright material is to send a DMCA removal notice to the offending site-owner or to the ISP or hosting site and inform them of such misconduct. They did you wrong and the burden is up to you :( , no wonder this is very rampant in the cyberworld

I have also had content stolen, but it comes to a point when you have to stop looking for people stealing your online content or that's all you will be doing all day, every day. I spent the better part of a day looking for stolen content which really ticked me off. Then I realized that I was much better off doing what makes me happy, writing new content. Best of luck getting everything remedied.

ken: I've squatted on at least 100 variations of my URL, have trademarked every posiible item that can be trademarked, and patented every possible piece of my site that I can patent...Unless youwant to spend hundresa of thousands in legal fees, all you can do is circle the wagons and defend as much of your proprietary intellectual property as possible. I used to run a large slaes organization for a global licensing company and the amount of unauthorized use of our images was rampant, especially on the web...

This is all part of doing business online. You can't really do anything at all. Usually legal procedings are costly and they person operating the site might not be in your jurisdiction.

Good question! I have run through this many times, and in today's global economy it is really difficult to hunt all of them down. We have had cases where people blatently mention that they want to build a system that works just like ours! (an apartment rental search service)Your best bet is to use domain tools (dnsstuff) and find where they are hosted. But that is only the start, you then find the physical location where these businesses are registerd.Once you establish they are in violation you can obviously sue them.Good luck!

Your best bet is to document as much as you can and then contact the site owner and ask them to take the content down. Even if the site owner is the offending party, this works in some cases. In others, you'll need to send the documents to whoever owns the server which is supporting the site (GoDaddy as an example). The hard thing is that even if you do everything correctly, it's hard to un-ring that bell so to speak.

Agreed. It's very hard to catch them. I actually caught one site doing this, and upon asking them to change it, they changed 1 of 2 links in one article (every article has 2 reference links to it). I didn't know that they had more than one article of mine on their site without the active reference links. However, after they only activated 1 reference on the article that I contacted them about, I again asked them firmly to 'put all the links up,' meaning that they should put the 2nd link for the article that I was referencing. I got an email back saying that the following had been changed: (they misinterpreted what I had said thinking I meant all the articles they had taken - I didn't know that they had taken more than 1 article). There were 24 articles in total. I just came back to this thread b/c I caught them stealing another ; ) - aren't internet people the best.