Dealing With Theft

Ok, so you've just received an email that said "I found a thief! This is the website address [url] and they stole your [material]!". I remember the first time I received a theft report, I was completely shaken and had no idea what to do. Frankly, I was quite flattered that people think my work worthy of stealing (seeing as how back in the days, I had barely any graphics experience). Nowadays, I'm just annoyed.

Step 1. Take a look
There's no harm in taking a look at sites which are hosted by freewebs or geocities or other common hosts. Be careful of some sites that you've never heard of, they may be loaded with viruses and the person who reported it to you (if they're a stranger to you) may be trying to damage your site by infecting your computer with a virus and forcing you to put your site on hiatus. Not very likely, but hey, prepare for the worst.

Make sure you know exactly what it is the offender has stolen. A lot of the time, I end up having to search through a whole bunch of pages just to get to the stolen content, but it's improtant that you know what they've stolen so that you can use it as evidence to back up your argument. You should also have your original material out so that you can compare the two as evidence as well.

For things like guild layouts or other image layouts, it's pretty easy to spot theft. If it's something more complicated like coding, then it's not so easy. For Neo-Reality, the one thing that helps me spot theft the most is what I deliberately plant in my coding. Things that don't affect the layout but nobody would ever notice was there. Most thieves who steal coding aren't familiar enough to build something from scratch (an obvious reason why they steal) so they're also not familiar enough to spot your deliberate... "mistakes". If you line up your original material and the stolen material, you can easily spot if the person has copied or not.

Another thing to watch out for is what you actually have on your material. For example, on most of my guild layouts, I have minor flaws that nobody spots. They aren't actually deliberate, I just tend to forget things here and there. If somebody was to steal my layout and edit it so that the credit is gone or some of the features has been changed, I just zone in straight for the mistake and there's my evidence. Some thieves protest that they can make "mistakes" too but the chances of them making the exact same mistake on the exact same pixel is about 297500 to one, give or take about 100000 (mostly give).

Step 2. Contact the owner
Forget who "made" or "wrote" the stolen content, go straight to the owner. Owners are the ones with absolute power, and they are also the ones who suffer the most if you were to bring their site down, therefore, they are the ones who will most likely co-operate with you.

Find their email on their staff page, or if they don't have any contact links (which shows that the site is way too small or inactive to bother bringing down, but justice is justice), try to see if you can fnd any email forms and source the email from their or from the form host. If not, contact the site's affiliates and either ask for the owner's email or ask them to remove their links (providing evidence to support your argument, of course).

I believe that all offenders deserve a warning, even if they look like they'll steal from you again. You look like a better person if you give someone a warning before bringing them down. Email is the best form of contact. It's impersonal, it's formal and you can put links in there (as opposed to Neomail or Instant Messaging). Address the issue at hand BUT do not supply evidence. I know this sounds weird, but just trust me on this one. Below is a template of what you might like to write. Just supposed a person name Joe stole my Faerie web layout, this is how I would contact him:

Joe,

It has come to my attention that you have stolen my Faerie Website Layout. I am not particularly picky about the reason why my credit is no longer on the layout, as long as it's restored back to it's original place. Please co-operate with me and do so within the next 48 hours.

~Jen
http://www.neo-reality.org

Nice and short. I've given him 48 hours, which is a pretty reasonable amount of time seeing as how putting up a credit only takes one minute. While I'm waiting for a reply (which could take around 24 hours to over a week, depending on how active the person is or how guillty they feel), I'm taking screenshots and labelling the relevant evidence and storing it away. The reason you don't immediately show the evidence is because the thief would then know where to change their stolen material so as to reply with a "What are you talking about? Your evidence doesn't even match my layout!". This would be most annoying as you would have to either drop the charges (and let another thief roam free) or go through the entire process of collecting evidence again (assuming the thief only edited the parts where you pointed out and left the rest of the layout as is).

If the theft did not occur on another website (which is usually quite rare), contact the thief and just use the same process above, reminding them that Neopets does not tolerate theft and they can get frozen (on all accounts where their IP number has accessed).

Step 3. Getting serious
Hopefully, it wouldn't come to this part and the thief admits s/he stole and either restores your credit or removed the stolen content. But almost half the thieves I've encountered all reply with the same phrase:

"I MADE IT! IT'S MINE! YOU STOLE FROM ME!!!"

As ridiculous as that may sound, it's true. A lot of people force themselves to believe that they did nothing wrong and that your accusations are completely false. This is the part where you whip out the evidence, slap a date on it and email it to them. Also include notes about copyright infringement, and what the penalties are for refusing to acknowledge someone's copyrights.

Here is an example of my response if Joe was to reply with the phrase above:

Joe,

You may be fooling yourself but you don't fool me. Do you really think I would accuse you if I didn't have concrete evidence already prepared?

[link to screenshot] and [link to screenshot]

If you still want to continue believing your ridiculous lies, I am happy to post this up on my site's front page for my visitors to decide, or would you prefer I email this to all your affiliates and let them decide? It's your choice.

Please do not continue lying and say that I gave you permission to completely destroy my layout. I most certainly did not allow you to violate my copyrights and my testimony will hold up in 54 different countries all over the world. Do not make me use my legal rights, I don't want it to get that serious.

~Jen
http://www.neo-reality.org

Another thing I forgot to mention earlier was that you should always keep these emails as evidence of correspondence. If it really does get that far and you end up in court with the culprit, you can always print out these emails as evidence if the thief denies your testimony.

Step 4. Legal rights
Everybody who publishes something that can be publicly accessed in some form has copyright over that material. Even if it's some tiny litle story you wrote about a dog and a cat when you were 7 can be copyrighted. As long as people can see it, it's copyrighted. You do NOT need a patent to hold a copyright, you already have legal rights over your material by creating it.

If the thief still refuses to give up, I'm afraid there's nothing more you can do except get really serious about your legal rights. Consult your family's lawyer, or a friend who is a lawyer about these things and if you're really serious about getting your justice, ask them to draft up a legal notice for you. If you want to continue, get your lawyer to find out the contact details of the culprit according to their IP number or the regsitration details they gave to their host (usually IP number) and send them the legal notice.

Things should stop here. The thief would have no reason to continue lying to everyone if he/she realises that it's going to affect more than his/her internet life. If the problem persists, remember that you have concrete evidence and make sure you make your argument clear.

On Neopets
Things are not so serious on Neopets as they on on other sites. If you see someone stealing from you, take screenshots, upload them and report them to Neopets. Neopets would then send the offender a warning and if the thief refuses to take the warning seriously, report them again (referring to your previous report). Usually give the thief about a week in this case because Neopets might be slow to respond to your report.

Special Cases
I have come across one site that seemed to think that bargaining with me was the best approach. I had previously dsiplayed the evidence on the front page to expose the theft since the owner didn't take my warning seriously. She then argued that "lots of people can make those same mistakes" which was complete bull because you'd be surprised what kind of incredibly wrong coding I put in just to throw thieves off. After emailing all her affiliates, she pleaded for me to take her off the wall of shame whilst still lying that she didn't steal. In the end, still not admitting her theft, she removed the layout, said she would leave Neo-Reality down if I took her off the Wall of Shame. In this instance, I wanted her to admit that she had stolen because letting her get off now seemed to easy. But, what's best for both parties would be the better choice. If she never comes to Neo-Reality, then she'll never steal from me (or I'll just go through the same process and keep wrecking site after site) and that's on less thing for me to deal with so that I can get on with more important things.

Then I have come across a site which seemed to have "selective amnesia". I had shown them evidence of theft, they agreed to take the stolen layout down, but two weeks later, they had it up again and refused to admit I had contacted them and they had admitted to stealing the layout in the first place. I then sent a report to freewebs and they froze the site. Simple as that. It's not ok if you've made it clear to a thief that you don't tolerate copyright infringement and then he/she goes back and steals all over again. You've warned them previously, so show no mercy now. It's their fault they didn't take you seriously.

Of course, the classic "the staff member did it" excuse. It really doesn't matter who gets the blame, as long as they are no longer violating your copyright. I strongly suggest not getting involved in domestic issues so stay out of it unless you absolutely have to intervene. I had come across a site who had stolen my table template coding and the layout was "made by" the owner. I contacted the owner about it and she said it was given to her by a staff member. I then contacted the staff member, forwarding her the message from the owner (just as a reinforcement that I wasn't contacting her for no reason) and it turned out that the owner was just lying and used the staff member as a scapegoat. I really get ticked off when people do this because it just seems like a personality defect if you don't take responsibility for your own actions, I really detest people who are like this. So I emailed the owner back, made it pretty clear that I was going to exert my legal rights even if she was halfway across the world, and she removed the layout the next day. The staff member quit the next day as well, I don't blame her, I wouldn't stick around if people would blame me in an instant when something went wrong.

There's probably more scenarios out there, but I've come across them before. For now, remember the steps above and the theft issue should be resolved in no time. As for now, try to keep your site as safe as possible, you never know when you're going to hit another thief.

~Jen