[Lang]

Keith,

I have been down this road with my web site and really there is nothing you can do. I have a friend who has got himself into the commercial law niche specialisng in IT matters and his thoughts are:

Once you put something on the World Wide Web you are quite clearly offering the material to everyone in the world and anyone can use that material provided you can not claim and PROVE a physical or financial loss. How you are going to sue anyone in one of the 194 countries outside Australia has me tossed.

Having stuff on the web with copyright all over it does not prevent private use because you have sent it to 6 billion people. Private use can include a non-commercial second web site because they are only giving your material to the same 6 billion people you have already given it to.

Recourse can only happen if someone makes money from your written or graphic material (and much of your stuff is not original but arranged and edited material from third party sources) or you lose money, reputation, business opportunities etc from their republishing.

Of course the whole thing would turn into a shambles if everything published by everyone was pirated willy nilly so we rely on good manners to keep the thing on an even keel. The cost of legal action and the insurmountable problem of proving then quantifying losses and damage prevent almost anyone (including multi-national companies) proceeding against "borrowers". The worst you will get is a letter threatening all sorts of legal action if you don't remove their copyrighted or trademark material.

The best you can hope for is acknowledgement of the source, which in itself is a huge barrier to any action by the owner. You can even use Coke in your commercial website if it is in context ie "Our soft drink contains 30% less sugar than Coke(R)" and you can even put a picture of a Coke bottle beside yours in the ad if you acknowledge their trademark. People don't often do this by convention as apart from being bad business running down your competitors it gives them free exposure.

Keith, don't get too upset by seeing your stuff elsewhere and give up - your site is too good to lose. Just suck it up and ask people, whom you can contact, to please acknowledge you as the source. For anyone else I would also ask that you show a bit of respect for the efforts of any web site owner to find, produce and arrange material by acknowledging the source of anything you use. There are several quite long articles in Wikipedia written by me but stolen from various magazines and web sites by others who have submitted them under their own name - such is life.

Lang