January 24th, 2010 Add Your Comments Bookmark and Share

I registered carsforagrand.co.uk back in May. I have a large number of BANS based websites, a number of which are based on the format of “Something For Not Much”. Surely the only reason people use eBay is to look for something that is dirt cheap? If you’re looking for a profitable way of using BANS then you could do much worse than use this tactic :)

Anyway, I don’t really have any interest in cars (not since my boy racer days) so I paid to have some articles written to fleshout the site, did some minor cosmetic changes to one of the BANS templates and then did the bit I was most looking forward to – changing the BANS search system to solely locate items based on a distance from a post code (If anybody wants to know how to do this just leave a comment and I’ll do a quick guide). The site went live, it made a little bit of money (not enough to make me want to invest any real time into it until it had matured for a year) and that was that. The fact that eBay changed their affiliate program to move from revenue share to PPC didn’t help matters with this site, I really didn’t fancy getting PPC on car sales!

The site was left as a forgotten part of my inventory until a few weeks ago when out of the blue something turned up in my inbox. It was from somebody called Chris and went along the lines of “You’ve ripped of our concept and content”. Was a bit of a surprise for sure. I was going to just ignore it but there were a couple of things Chris said that immediately got my attention – “I see you are an internet marketer” and “I’m not going to go on a big rant and threaten you with lawyers and all that nonsense”. This was important to me because first of all he’d actually gone to the bother to look me up beyond an e-mail address and secondly he’d bypassed the quoting US law at me stage. I digress but if there is ONE thing that really pisses me of it’s being spammed by somebody who then goes on to quote the “Can The Spam” act as justification that their message isn’t spam. Back on topic – so how did I react? Nicely of course. I’m a nice person and unless I have a reason to be pissed off then I’m generally easy going. So I shot Chris an e-mail back saying I certainly wasn’t intending to steal his concept/content* and that I’d happily forward the traffic from the domain on if he gave me the URL of his site. Turns out that Chris owns www.carsforagrand.com

*This is a real danger of using article services. Most use Copyscape checking but authors are generally clever enough to alter an original to pass the check! You should really do a manual check before publishing the article online, I certainly should have.

A quick look at that site reveals that Chris has obviously invested a huge amount of time and effort into his site (not to mention that whoever wrote my opening paragraph was certainly heavily “influenced” by Chris’s), at the end of the day you’ve got to respect that. I’m not out to impact anybody elses efforts online or for a free ride. The end result is a 301 redirect for as long as I own the .co.uk domain. He’s more than welcome to it.

Since this all got sorted out I decided to run this past a local IP lawyer contact just to see where things stand, of the record opinion seemed to be that there wouldn’t be an issue – opening paragraph aside the sites were very different. However, and here’s the thing, the fact that I need somebody like that in my list of contacts is what is really pissing me off with working online at the moment. Over the last 2 years there has been an explosion of online litigation, originating mostly from you know where. I always have and always will work well within the defined laws of where I choose to live. Lately I have begun to question whether working online really is worth the grief, but that’s a post for another day.

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Paul B