Stolen site design/coppermine template

[kevito]

Looking for advice on how to contact this guy:
http://www.swi.vectranet.pl/~szyptowskia/home.html
to inform him to take down his site.

Half of the links still link to my site, it's so obviously ripped off from me.  Not to mention my thumbnails are still displayed on the page.  I spent weeks customizing coppermine to have an overall uniform look to the site, and it is quite annoying to see someone lift all my work and try to use it under their own name.  I have no problem with sharing the template, as this is opensource software and I'm sure my tweaks took nowhere as long as developing this software did.  But without permission, it's a little rude to hijack my site line for line.  How legal is this?  Anything I can do?

[Tranz]

hmm... I don't know the language... but it seems it's not his own domain, but his host: http://www.vectranet.pl/

So you would have to contact the host and say you want to launch a complaint against one of their users, szyptowskia

[Joachim Müller]

Kevin,
you can do a lookup on the vectranet.pl on http://www.dns.pl/cgi-bin/en_whois.pl - this is what I have come up with:

Search result
Domain object:
domain: vectranet.pl
type: CORPORATE
registrant's handle: nsk43383
nservers: aloha.vectranet.pl.[213.195.184.218], ns1.tkdami.net.
created: 2001.05.31
last modified:2004.11.22
registrar: nask
option: the domain name has not option
Holder's Contact object:
company: TELEWIZJA KABLOWA "VECTRA" S.A. ZAKŁAD PRACY CHRONIONEJ
street: UL. PRZEBENDOWSKICH 17
city: 81-543 GDYNIA
location: PL
handle: nsk43383
phone: +48.586248352
last modified: 2004.04.28
registrar: nask
Whois database last updated: 2005.01.25

They only host this small subdomain for that bloke, there's little point in contacting them imo.
This is really a very stupid rip-off, with your contact info being on this bloke's page all over the place. This must be a very silly guy, as it would have been dead easy to actually steal your site's layout and remove any reference to you from it. I'm afraid that this guy must be a moron, so it will be as hard to reason with him once you found him, and the polish laws being very lax when it comes to copyright; I'm afraid there's little you can do, sorry.

Joachim

[Tranz]

Don't know if it's possible.. but since he is using links pointing to your site... and if you know PHP, you can put a check on your files to see where the visit is coming from. If it's from that domain, you can put up a message.

Too bad he's not hotlinking your images... you could have more fun by putting up substitute images to punish/embarrass him.

[Abbas Ali]

Also this guy has removed the "Powered By" logo.

[BMWHeaven]

if he steals, just create a .htaccess file, which doesn't allow him to link images from your site...
Just search google with these searchwords:

htaccess prevent image linking

[Tranz]

That's the thing.. the images are not being hotlinked. You can tell by seeing the src of the imgs.

[kevito]

Thanks for the help.  I figured it would be fruitless as it's just a subdomain and the guy seems pretty lame anyways to not even properly rip me off.  At least I can take honor in the fact that there's someone out there that liked my layout enough to jack it. :-\\