Forgive me. Typing from the phone. *smiling*

poseidon's Avatar
ABT, wouldn't DMCA apply here? The site seems to have stolen the girls pictures and their written profiles. My understanding is that it's not required to register a copyright, but the registration will only help prove ownership/creation. Maybe all it would take is a take down demand letter - at least to remove the profiles created by a provider though not necessarily the pictures. (?) Check out the site - I found it by searching "Max Rax escort." It's a blatant rip-off.

I should also mention it's a pretty useless site, as well. I doubt anybody would've known about it but for this thread and others on eccie.
AustinBusinessTraveler's Avatar
To get DMCA to work you need to show the copyright to the ISP and most ISP's will want a registered copyright. So, you're back to 5-10K and a 10 week to 6 month wait. The sites they stole content from would possibly have a strong enough claim to scare a few of the tighter ISP's, but then they would expose themselves to liability in that they review their content and all their content is their property, so that's not going to happen.

You can send a demand letter once you've established that it is copyrighted material and that you own the copyright (most photos are copyrighted by the photographer unless otherwise specified). Some ISP's will pull content just on a demand letter, but not all and definitely not an ISP that would host a site like this.

The problem is that you have to establish not only that it is copyrighted, you have to establish you own the copyright, not them. This is quick once you get to court - it just takes forever to get there.

Ultimately, P, the DMCA would get a legitimate sites attention. From their answers, these guys are not a legitimate site so they'll just tell you to have a lawyer call them. Here's the headache of dealing with "legitimate" Google, much less a bunch of punks: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2009...kank_she_.html