Need help in trying to stop content theft

[jtstar]

My Web dev skills amount to html, javascript and a little dhtml. I have a website, www.enchanted-isle.com that has hotels and house rentals on it. I have built most of the simple pages myself, but I have a competitor who is stealing my pages, putting them in frames and adding a click here to rent link, and turning around in a few months to start charging them for his services. I have used javascripts to pop out of his frames, but soon he disables my javascripts, and all links and emails on my pages and turns them into links to his reservation form. His site is www.isla-vieques.com. He's obviously doing something on the server side to disable everything. Is there anything I can do?
He turns this:
http://www.enchanted-isle.com/byowner/limones.htm
into this
http://www.isla-vieques.com/puerto-rico/casa-lim*2nes.htm

Any ideas or help!

jim

[PeejAvery]

Once something is on the internet, it is very easily copiable. The only way to be 100% safe, is to never put it up. Now, this isn't going to be solved by code. I think the only way to settle this is legally.

What I don't understand is you are worried about stealing yet I see the following in your page. Do you own Positive Image Graphix?

<meta name="copyright" content="Copyright 1997, Positive Image Graphix. All rights reserved.">

[jtstar]

Yeah, I am Positive Image Graphix and Enchated-Isle.Com is one of my sites.

I am considering the legal route. The problem is he moves his servers around and is himself Swiss, and lives in New York City and on a boat supposedly in Culebra. I guess I'll just keepmessing with him changing my javascripts around.

Thanks for the thought though.

Great weekend,

jim

[PeejAvery]

A client-side scripting language is not going to be able to change this. You will have to incorporate some other form of security. Some people use server-side languages to keep hot-linking, but he doesn't hotlink, he actually copied the source. There is always the copy and paste method. If it is on the internet, then there is always a way to steal it. Sorry.

[SuperKoko]

A commercial web site is publically available.
Consequently, anybody can use view the source code, copy it, edit it, and publish it.
Similarly, I can copy/paste the contents of your post on codeguru, and publish it, claiming that I'm the author of this post... This is a bad thing, but I can... Simply doing CTRL+C/CTRL+V.

The best you can do is to sue him for copyrights violation.

There exists DRM (Digital Right Managements) for PDF documents, so that you can write PDF documents that are viewable but copying the contents of the document is not possible with Acrobat Reader.
This is a dummy protection, because.

It's at the software level. Somebody may reverse engineer Acrobat Reader and add the copy/paste feature or write a compatible viewer.
Anybody can press the "Print Screen" key and use an OCR program... Or may even copy the contents manually, copying them with the help of eyes and brain.
It's also possible to hook the OS drawing API to get the calls to the text drawing functions.


DRM provide a very poor user experience, and are only possible for propreitary formats (i.e. Users have not enough info to write their own viewer, because they don't know some keys necessary to decipher the data) using closed source viewers or with hardware support.
In other words, DRM are not a WWW (World Wide Web) thing.
The WWW is designed to be seen by anybody with any propreitary or open source browser.

If you want to make your web site more accessible, have a look at that:
http://htmlhelp.com/cgi-bin/validate.cgi?url=http://www.enchanted-isle.com/

Learn about semantic HTML.
Avoiding font tags, and table for layouts.
Use POSH (Plain Old Semantic HTML) with HTML 4.01 and CSS.
http://microformats.org/wiki/posh
Microformats may be a good thing too:
http://microformats.org/
Learn the HTML 4.01 Strict DTD. Learn to declare DOCTYPEs. HTML is not a tag soup.
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/strict.dtd
If necessary, learn SGML basics.
The specifications are at:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
A quick reference is at:
http://htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/

Make your site accessible:
http://diveintoaccessibility.org/
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/


HTML Tidy may help you:
http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy/