Copyright???

[WrestleSages]

Well, I made a logo for a site. And I made other graphics in the name of the site. Then the owner of the site tells me that another website has the logos for themselves and they have the same name as the company i made the logos for. Now this pisses me off as well as the owner. What can I do for them to take them off?

[fredricknish]

Do you mean to say that the graphics made by you is now used by the another site?
You could have posted this in the Legal Issues forum.But no problem,one of the mods will move it there.

[WrestleSages]

oh, I looked for something about legal but didn't see it :)

[KWJams]

But there are many shortfalls in policing the WWW.
Snagging graphics would be very difficult to prosecute.
There is a method of documentation called a poor mans copyright.
When an inventor has an idea he/she records it in detail and mails it to self. The date and postmark on the envelope is supposed to stand up in court.
The same method I believe can be used on your graphic, open the file and check properties, the date should be listed when it was created and perhaps a screen shot can be taken and sent to the snagger with a legal sounding letter along with a screen shot of the graphic on their site stating that there will be charges
pending.
I have no idea if this will work, but it may scare them off.

[kevin]

Originally posted by WrestleSages
Well, I made a logo for a site. And I made other graphics in the name of the site. Then the owner of the site tells me that another website has the logos for themselves and they have the same name as the company i made the logos for. Now this pisses me off as well as the owner. What can I do for them to take them off?

First email them and inform them that they are using copyrighted material and to ask them respectfully but assertively to remove the copyrighted images.

Give them several days to comply.

If they do not then email them again to let them know you will be contacting their webhosting service and that you will be informing said service of the copyright infringment(s).

You will need to give the webhosting service ample time to reply to your email informing of the violation. Some will respond quickly and some slowly, but most will eventually respond.

Do a whois search to find their webhost if its not displayed on their wesbite somewhere. If their webhost is also their ISP, all the better.

If all that fails you're pretty much out of luck unless you have a lawyer on retainer or some other resource to a legal remedy.

If your spellling or grammar is not good get someone to help you write the emails so they will be taken seriously.
Never make illegal threats and only make legal threats you can follow through with.

Kevin

[Steve S.]

First off I am not a lawyer but a photographer. Are you from the USA? Is the person(s) who infringed from the USA or a country that has a treaty to honor Copyrights? Have you ever registered your logo as a trademark or registered a copyright?

I know that seems like alot of questions but they must be considerd. The artist or as they say author of the work owns it.....that is not only fair but it's right. Without ever doing a thing you own a statuatory copyright. BUT had you taken the time and spent the money to register it. Should you decide to go to court, having a registerd copyright will make all the difference in the world as to how much you can collect in damages or go a step fruther and file a civil suit to collect even more. You do have up to one year to file for a copyright after you discover infringment but it probably won't carry the same weight in court if you decide to go that route. Unfortunately unless you have nothing better to do it will probably cost you more in time and money than anything you can recover.

As mentioned above, contact the person(s) and ask them to remove anything that belongs to you. If that fails contact their hosting service, most like to stay away from those who infringe or those who could give them a bad reputation and may remove their site (probabably won't stop it from poping up somewere else though).

At http://www.loc.gov/copyright/ you can fill out online forms to register. For photographs you would use Form VA and it is possible to register as a collection under one fee if you can fit everything on an 8x10. Hope this helps some.