Hello!
Welcome Back! Happy Holidays! Today's topic will discuss how to find the owner of a website that is using your intellectual property without your permission. I always get calls from clients regarding a website that is unlawfully using their trademarks or copyrighted material. In the majority of these cases, the website owner's information is not readily available. Here are a couple of ways to locate the infringer.
1. Look up the owner's information on whois.net. Whois.net will allow you to type in any domain name and they will provide the registrant's (owner) information. Most times, the name of the owner or company is readily available. However, there are instances when aliases are used. In this case, use the following method:
2. Contact the Internet Service Provider and inform them of the infringing activity and they will provide the owner's contact information or they will contact the owner on your behalf.
I hope this information was helpful. If you have any questions or comments, please leave one.
2 comments:
Great post. Very helpful.
Phillips,
I am about to give away the secret sauce!! Here is another way:
1- Go to Domaintools.com and do a whois search for the infringing domain;
2- If you get garbage (i.e. fake) whois information or a private registration go to step three;
3- do a MSN IP search on the IP address of the infringer:
a- for example:phillipsgivenslaw.com has an IP address of 64.202.189.170
b- MSN search for ip:64.202.189.170
c- you share your server with a trillion others- not useful on this one but who knows on the next
3.1- lets try another real infringer: do a search for "eastwood insurance" on google; it resulted in eastwood.autoinsurancechoices.com; this is clearly NOT Eastwood
a- whois gives the Contactprivacy.com privacy company
b- get the ip and do an MSN search; now, because all of the other sites on this IP address are health related websites I believe we can make the decision that all of the sites are related
c- poke around until you get a good name from one of the websites
d- if you never get a good name contact the server host (who is in California) for more information regarding their client
e- send out a good old fashion Cease and Desist
Hope this helps someone
Michael Kassing
MarkTend.com
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