Copycatting between forums

What do you guys think about this?
http://www.realestateforum.com/showthread.php?p=5817#post5817

An issue brought on on realestatewebmasters.com

I would like to know from you guys what is copycatting and what is not.

many forums are similar but when does it become content theft?


ik

 

Looks like a generic forum template that they use.
What did they take that belonged to this site?

Or any other?

 

Actually when you read the thread in my forum, you will see that there was a new development. What I hadn't seen this morning was the fact that some of the category description were copied word for word from realestatewebmasters.

 

I don't know. I think having a relatively standardized set of forums is just the way it is. In an industry, people will follow the same topic trees because those are the things to talk about.

Copying the forum descriptions verbatim is weak, but at the same time there are only so many ways you can re-word a sentence. If you are talking about content theft, you are really only talking about maybe 20-40 lines of text - that could very well have been copied from sources other than the first forum. And really, how much work went into writing those 40 lines of text. It's worth complaining about, but it's not worth even writing a letter IMO.

A message board's success is based on it's marketing, it's committed community, and it's administrators. In no way is success based on forum titles or descriptions - by and large descriptions are ignored by users anyways.

I think the original complaint thread shows that the owner was more miffed than thinking about legal action and he seems pretty reasonable in his assessment of the situation.

 

It's a regular thing for me now. I see copies of my successful forums cropping up on almost a daily basis. It's somewhat amusing. I really wonder if these people think they're going to make big bucks off it.

 

The funny thing is that if they do become popular, they are bound to be found out and exposed. Talking about being short sighted to begin with.

 

Have you copyrighted anything?
Added this is the property of ______ not to be used by others etc or anything of the sort?
Add a tag in your pages for copyright?

If you need help with adding copyright info in your html let me know.
It's really easy and i can post the tags.

Or even go file a copyright?

 

Actually, when you go to archive.org, you can retrieve the old snapshots from your site. Shouldn't that be enough to prove that you have created the wording first?