LogoPond

Thank you for sharing this information. I'm really sorry that your logo is ripped. I can't believe there are so many ripoff sites, how do you find them? 1. None of my logos are stolen(thank God), but I'm thinking that even if I'm not robbed, I should react when I see robbery - call the police or try to stop it. I'm saying, that in this case the whole Logopond community should send them those e-mails. There are 77068 members of Logopond and if we inform the whole community, I think at least few hunderts would do the right thing. So if I can help, e-mail me at lukabalic.design@gmail.com 2. Other than sending e-mails to owners of this sites, or hiring a lawyer, shouldn't the police work on that too and catch the criminals? In this case we could also send hundreds of e-mails to Polish National Police to report a crime. 3. In "Logo RipOFF sites" topic @Designerdan said: "Maybe you guys should form some sort of collective that has legal representation. Then you can go after these people. There must be an attorney that specializes in these sorts of cases." - I agree. I think if every member of Logopond pays 1$ per month, we would have more than enogh for attorney who would protect and fight for our rights. Who wouldn't pay 1$ for logo protection? 4. @Stomping said: "Tell the Wall Street Journal or the NY Times business section to do an article about them and similar sites. Who knows.. it could work." I think 2. and 3. are only ways which are really going to stop this, otherwise when the owners remove the stolen material, they will still be in business, or even if they remove the whole site, they will set another site somewhere else. So what do you think?

I think you've got some good ideas, although I'm pretty sure police really can't do much of anything. Copyright infringement cases - while technically involving broken laws - really equate to the claims of one party against another that laws (which are very nebulous, tricky to prove, and often unclear) were broken. To protect our civil rights, law enforcement simply can't make those kind of judgments, which is why these types of situations need to be arbitrated in a court of law, with specific copyright legal council present. And all this gray area needs to be sifted through before a judge can determine which party (in the eyes of the court, based on presented evidence) holds the true, original copyright. Basically, aside from stern, threatening sounding "take down" and "Cease & Desist" letters, there really isn't a whole heck of a lot we can do to stop this, unless we're financially prepared to go to war legally each time something like this happens. This is why this phenomenon is so rampant, because really, only the top design firms/agencies have that kind of money backing their dedicated legal departments to deal with situations like this. Legal battles are expensive and time-consuming, and most solo designers or small firms just don't have the time, money, or energy to deal with stuff like this. So they let it slide. At any rate, I'm currently having my take down letter Polish translation checked for accuracy, and then I'm going to fire it off to the ripoff site's web host. We'll see what happens. Forming an "artist collective" whereby we all pitch in a nominal monthly fee for legal council in these types of situations is a solid idea in theory, but may be difficult to implement. If it becomes the site's responsibility, charging a monthly fee may deter many people from using the site - even if they understand that the money will be used for legal purposes, if/when necessary. People like their online communities to be free. Period. If the formation of an artist collective and the collection of monthly dues falls on our shoulders, I would gladly join and pitch in, but there's a tremendous amount of work on the back end that needs to take place well before something like this could even be implemented. We'd need to first appoint some sort of governing committee - preferably by vote - whose responsibility it will be to organize the collective, set up some sort of payment system, collect the fees, monitor membership, yada, yada, yada. That's a lot of work. That's basically like saying, "We're going to start up another AIGA or GAG." So I dunno. To me, there doesn't seem to be any sure-fire way of ending this crap without heading down the aforementioned legal route on an individual, case-by-case basis.

Yes, web hosts have full names and info on their clients, but they can't really verify that the person is who they say they are. Typically when we have someone steal or use content they're not allowed to they get a cease and desist letter and take it down. If not, then we notify the web host with proper documentation explaining that the scam website has taken something and the web host will take the website down to keep their hands clean.

Congrats on winning a battle!