I am a victim of website design theft. My corporate website got copied by a Chinese competitor. What should I do?

I don't want to be too irrational and get myself more frustrated. Best way to go about this? Suggestions welcomed.

Meow.

ok no probz...I'd like to help ya...

What you should do is to call me and give me the details about your website + webserver as well as your competitor....

It is nearly impossible to get the website out of your competitor's server...as it has been already copied. But you can enable security on your website through your webserver for the protection of your website.

Meanwhile, I'll see if it is possible to teach a lesson to your competitor in any possible way.

Thanks,

Harry

P.S. my number is 13482642093

You just bring them to court as this is illegal in China, don't update your own website as the dates of the original files might be needed. Several cases have already been tried here in Shanghai and won as well.

Once the court rules the website will be removed either by the owner or by the government.

By the way, you can't protect your website. There is always a way to access the data even if the website has been encrypted. I used to work as a security consultant and network administrator, so I know all the "nifty" things. If you want a website you can get it if not the whole thing in one go then in pieces!

our website (large german company) was also stolen, not only that, but our board of directors was shown to be in charge of the chinese company! our lawyers got onto the case and after about 2 weeks, the offender's website changed dramatically back to a simple chinese design.

uhm besides content I just want to remind you that there is pretty much no law that protects you from being copied by someone else in design or so.

Several cases have already been tried here in Shanghai and won as well.

really? well it's china.

Good example is microsoft which was copied by sina at the beginning of the month, all gary wiseman (the leader of live.com) could do was complain:
Sina.com steals our design and graphics
We were recently made aware (thanks to a comment on our blog by Phillipe) of a new classifieds site in China that had not only lifted our previous user interface’s look & feel, but also directly copied some of our graphics (note the cool pushpin graphic that our designer Becky created). The shocking thing is that the website in question is owned by one of China’s largest search engines called Sina.com. Couldn’t they afford to hire a designer?

Anyway, take a look for yourself at the images I’ve attached to this blog entry. Alternatively, check out the screenshots of our previous UI and then visit: http://post.sina.com.cn/v3_index.php

Let’s just say that I’m looking forward to our China launch..

- Garry

Or digg.com beeing copied by, digg.com.my, digg.cn, cndigg.com. and even netscape.com
43things beeing copied by aimido.de, ah this list could go on forever.

I did a blogpost earlier on this, it resulted in the sites digg.cn and cndigg.com beeing totally trashed and destroyed by the digg.com users.

sometimes if you want somebody to not be an ass and copy you right out in the internet you got no choice but hitting the "loyal user help" button.

http://www.wangr.com/english/?p=23

bezoli is right, hit them and hit them hard with loyal users, they can usually do a lot of damage to a board!