Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but if you are thinking of copying the text or graphics from another Realtor's Web site, you could end up paying up to $100,000 in damages per incident for copyright and/or trademark infringement.

Or you could get off scot free.

It all depends on how the Realtor you've burglarized cares to handle the situation. One Realtor chose to embarrass her Web site thieves, two fellow agents working in her own home town.

Arizona broker Alice Held didn't know how special her Web site was until she found that two local competitors had independently of each other taken most of her material and put it on their own personal Web sites -- without permission.

These two agents were guilty of copyright and trademark infringement, a form of intellectual property theft. One was so bold as to put his own copyright notice on top of the material he lifted from Held's site, she says.

"And that was just an accidental discovery I made one afternoon while I was updating my dead links," says an outraged Held. "One took my personally designed saguaro cactus guys, and my Christmas page as well. What's sickening is the statement they put at the bottom of the stolen pages: 'We bring you this web site out of the love we have for this community and our wonderful neighbors. It's our way of giving something back to a community that gives us so much.' What hypocrites!"

Held's award-winning Web site has been the object of admiration as well as envy, but originality has its price. She has had to police her site constantly and inform agents that they can't take her words and art without permission.

"This was deliberate," says Held. "One of these people came to my site every month to get my holiday pages."

So what did Held do about it? She contacted both agents, waiting more than a week with no response from either one. Meanwhile, she also complained to friends online.

Held says she was surprised at how the online community rallied behind her. Soon, word got around as agents passed Held's story onto other friends. Held estimates that at least 1,500 online Realtors have seen the purloined Web pages and know the names of the offenders.

Many of the agents wrote the offenders condemning their behavior. The public embarrassment did the trick -- one site was changed within two working days, and the other took a week and a half.

Neither of the offending agents had the courage to apologize, says Held. That disappointed her, but even more disappointing was the ignorance displayed by some agents whom Held thought would know better. "At least three agents who wrote me told me that once a Web page is published it becomes part of the public domain," says Held.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Contrary to popular belief, intellectual property such as the written word and graphic designs are protected as copyrighted and/or trademarked material as soon as they are created, explains Held's newly-retained intellectual property attorney Alan Blankenheimer, an associate of Brown & Bain. "It's really just common sense," says Blankenheimer. "You can write a story about star-crossed lovers -- just don't try to put your name on 'Romeo and Juliet.'"

So what is intellectual property and at what point does it become protected material?

"There are different types of intellectual property, but appropriating material from a Web site may involve copyrights and trademarks," says Blankenheimer. "Copyright infringement can be copying computer code or higher level language but here we are talking about copying material as from a newspaper -- taking chunks. An original work of authorship is subject to protection under copyright laws, but it needs to be "fixed in a tangible medium of expression." Being fixed on a Web site qualifies the subject under copyright protection."

Adds Suzanne Scheiner, another Brown & Bain attorney, "A copyright protects individual expression, not the idea itself. If someone wants to use the same idea, they can use it in a different way. Alice won't be the only Realtor to use the saguaro cactus, but if her cactus has a particular look from the artist who created it, then it can't be copied without infringement."

Trademarks are another matter. "If you use a symbol or set of words, and it is associated with your service and product and someone else takes it, it is an infringement," says Blankenheimer.

So how do you know you've committed copyright or trademark infringement? A violation of the copyright law takes place when material is taken without permission and that can take place the minute it is created, right down to a doodle on a cocktail napkin.

"It's a simple six-grade lesson that you learn in school," says Blankenheimer. "Don't copy other people's work."

See tomorrow's Agent News for Part II - What To Do About Web Site Thieves