One of my manufacturers had an injunction against them preventing them from making any claims about their products so they were referring people to my site for information since mine was the only site that had details that were compliant with the regs.

No sooner did they discover it, then every other site that sold the same products scraped my pages and began to use my very own copy and photos to compete with me. They even bought the same Google AdWords I did, and since they didn’t experience the cost up front to build the copy or shoot or edit the photos AND because they weren’t tight with the manufacturer like we were, they under-cut the prices and totally messed with our business.

Putting a lawyer on the case only cost me money, they’d take their content down for a few days and they put it back. I wish I could tell you that there is a good soultion for this, but even in my case where it was clear that these are my images there wasn’t much the
judicial system would do.

Some examples of the offending online stores below:

http://www.acnedoctor.com/Sleep-Rx_pill.html
http://www.acnedoctor.com/Lipodrene-Sr.html
Stealing photos and copy from my site (which has now been sold)

Anyway, I sympathize. if you come up with a way to put a stop to it, let me know.

Oliver Starr
http://www.mobile-weblog.com

What I would do, if I were in your shoes, is file a DMCA notice with the hosts of the infringing sites. You can get the work removed quickly that way. If you need any help with that, either send me an email or check out my site, I’ve put most of my information up there but there’s still a few things that haven’t gone up yet that might help you out.

Let me know if there’s anything that I can do to help!