Here’s an interesting story that I thought would be interesting to share with you:
On the 18th of May 2010, we received an email telling us to check out this other training provider’s website as the informant said that the client testimonials were identical to our own.
I typed in the URL that was given and started navigating my way through the site and low and behold the text in the “About Us”, “Partnerships”,”Why Choose <company name>”, “Become a Speaker”, and various client testimonials were absolutely identical to our own (word-for-word).
You can see the screenshots from our recent press release about the incidence here. We’ve blurred out the company in question since they removed the content.
These kind of things happen a lot on the web and in the majority of cases it’s a simple misunderstanding or the other party just removes it immediately upon contacting them about it and sincerely apologises for the gaff. After this, everyone just goes about their business and moves on – no real harm done.
Unfortunately, in this case it didn’t go that smoothly.
I’ll spare you the details but the other party basically made many excuses AND also refused to immediately remove additional content we found after the main copied content was removed.
Just to be fair, not everything on this company’s website was copied from us. We only asked them to remove the specific content in question. Reasonable right?
Now, the other party starts to get very defensive and even threatened us saying the person that notified us must have used some kind of magical software tool to find the copied content…
They’re trying to make us look bad for finding out about them copying us…that is interesting.
The important issues he’s missing are:
- By using the EXACT same content to describe his company, client testimonials (which were not his clients), etc – he’s giving an impression that he’s affiliated with our company when there is no affiliation.
- If his developer is copying content from other sites to build other client sites, how many other sites has this developer copied?
- If you saw one of your testimonials you had given to one company on another (unrelated) company’s website, how would you feel? Especially, if you never gave this other company your business before.
We’ve sent repeated requests to the other company to provide the contact details of the web developer in question so we can investigate further, however, the other company has yet to provide this information.
You can some more details from the press release.
