It's a small business owner's nightmare: Discovering that a competitor has taken your work and passed it off as their own.
That's what Dan Smith, CEO and founder of book promoter Smith Publicity Agency, says recently happened to him.
He was checking Google Alerts he'd set up for his company when he stumbled on a website for a new book publicity agency he hadn't heard of before.
Only the website looked strangely familiar - a good deal of the content, he said, seemed to be directly copied from his own website.
"It made me very very angry, because I've worked 15 years in this business and he was using our testimonials, our site language, our media placements," Smith told the Daily News.
"They were kind of stealing my success, in a way, I felt."
Screen grabs that Smith staff took of the Albee Agency website on Nov. 30 show that passages of text on the site were nearly identical to copy on Smith's website, or very similar with light modifications.
The FAQ section in particular had nearly all of the same questions and identical or slightly rewritten answers, Smith said.
They also found that the CEO of the Albee Agency was claiming to have worked for Smith Publicity for 10 years on resume website LinkedIn, starting in 1994 - a ridiculous claim, Smith said, since the company had only been founded in 1997.
Separately from Smith, authors featured in the testimonials section of Albee's website began to complain because they said they'd never heard the agency, and had never endorsed it themsleves.
Chuck Wendig, one of the novelists featured in Albee's testimonials section, took to Twitter to point out something was fishy. "WTF? Who is the Albee Agency? They have a testimonial from me on their main page that I never made," he wrote.
Smith said he got in touch with the Albee Agency after documenting all the suspected copying and asked them to take it down.
Since then, much of the text has been altered or removed, and the reference to working at Smith has vanished from the founder's LinkedIn profile. Smith is currently considering legal action.
But there are still passages on the site that appear to be nearly identical to, or loosely rewritten versions of, copy from Smith's website.
The Albee Agency did not respond to Daily News requests for comment.
Unfortunately, it’s all too easy for anyone to copy and paste text off of a website and get away with it, experts say.
Raj Tumber, business mentor at SCORE, a non-profit that provides advice to small businesses, recommends putting up a copyright policy on your website as a warning to anyone contemplating lifting your content.
But you don't need a copyright notice to take action if you do think that someone has stolen your work.
"It's important to realize that you don't need to register your website for copyright protection for it to qualify for protection," NYU law professor Barton Beebe said.
"You can formally register your website's content with the copyright office if you actually decide to file a cause of action in federal court."
Once you've documented everything you suspect has been copied, it's time to get in touch with the offending party and give them a chance to make it right.
"There are some cases of innocent infringement when they don't realize they've copied," said attorney Doug Isenberg, founder of the Giga Law Firm.
"With a competitor, they're probably not innocent and won't respond to a simple request - that's when you want to get a lawyer involved," he added.
A lawyer can send a formal cease and desist letter asking the owner of the offending website to take down your copyrighted content. If that doesn't work, you can contact the Internet Service Provider who hosts the website.
"The ISP could be liable for contributory infringement if it continues to host a website that it knows to contain infringing content," Beebe said
"The website owner himself might ignore your email or letter, but the ISP will probably respond."
bgoyette@nydailynews.com
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