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January 23, 2003
ContentPurity Scam
Want to see something really interesting? Compare my company's website, ContentWatch, to this company's website: ContentPurity. I've configured the links to open in separate windows so you can open them both at the same time.
Someone from our office stumbled across this other site last night. Apparently the guys running "ContentPurity" used to be part of our affiliate program. They've ripped off all of our stuff, right down to the product descriptions! Originally, even their product names were the same as ours, but someone from our office contacted them this morning and since then they've changed a lot of stuff on their site. They've also blocked access to their website from anywhere in our office (as if they think we won't notice them anymore). I don't know how they did that, but now from inside the office we get a "403 Forbidden" Error.
Everything on the ContentWatch website is protected by copyrights and trademarks, and we've gone through the proper legal channels to get that done. It will be interesting to see if the owners of ContentWatch decide to sue.
Posted by Joey at January 23, 2003 12:00 PM
Comments
I’m curious now.
Posted by: Joseph Dinwiddie at January 12, 2004 05:36 AM
The Content Purity site has changed a lot since we first discovered it. Originally they were using all of our product names and several of their testimonials were lifted straight from our site. Since then they have changed the names of all their products and put up unique testimonials. They are probably not violating any copyrights or trademarks anymore.
Posted by: Joey at January 14, 2004 07:28 AM
What would they sue them for? At this point, they don’t look to be infringing anything...?
Did your affiliate program provide them with the material in the first place? That relationship may make it harder to sue, too.
That is funny, that they put the IP filter on their site. As if you won’t be able to access them from a thousand other systems, anyway.
You really have to wonder, about people who behave dishonestly and then have to live such paraniod lives! Is it worth it?
Posted by: Rand M at January 14, 2004 12:14 PM
Yeah. It was pretty funny how similar the original sites were. I had forgotten about this, it was kinda nice being reminded. :)
Posted by: stu at January 15, 2004 12:28 PM