To protect your home, you use alarms, barking dogs, and other deterrents you think will discourage break-ins. The same is true on the Web. There are a few steps you can take to protect the text and graphics on your Web site before and after someone tries to steal them.

"You do really go through an emotional upheaval with the shock of seeing your years of hard work, expense, and creativity, only to have an unscrupulous agent just grab it all and put their name on it and take credit for it," says Arizona broker Alice Held.

Held has been successful in getting two local agents to remove material from their Web sites that they had stolen from hers, she says. Held contacted them personally, and other agents who knew Held contacted them as well.

But while embarrassment worked well enough to get the agents to act quickly, Held says she's through going after Web site thieves by herself.

In the future, she's turning Web site theft over to an intellectual property attorney she's placed on retainer.

Held explains, "Now I know what to do. I would not go to the agent immediately - I would leave the offending site up and have my attorney send a cease and desist letter to the offending agent, and I would send a simultaneous letter to the board of Realtors, the state regulating department for real estate, the agent's broker, and to the agent's Web designer and to the agent's Web host."

Few agents are willing to risk arbitration or court, much less a fine of up to $100,000 per violation and remove purloined material when informed that they've been caught. Until then, most Web site thieves get away with their crime.

The theft of intellectual property is handled as a statutory matter which means you aren't going to be able to put Web site thieves in jail, but you can make their lives miserable by dragging them to court or before state regulatory boards. But those measures come only after attempts at polite resolutions are taken.

So what can you do? Get stronger on the prevention side.

Web site theft prevention

"You can register a copyright with the U.S. government and you are presumed to be the owner," says Alan Blankenheimer, an intellectual property attorney with Brown & Bain. "And your proof of ownership can be the artist's rights and your bill of sale, or a declaration from the artist that the rights or copyrights to the work they did for you were transferred to you."

"You can get JavaScripts that will disable the right-click function when the agent (or Web designer) tries to snag your graphic, and another will do a pop-up screen with your copyright notice when they put their cursor over the graphic," explains Held. "There is also a spider you can implement through Digimarc that will help you track down photos, graphics or web content that have been watermarked by their digital watermark, so you'll know when something of yours has been taken."

Editor's note: A good article about these scripts is available at Webdesign.com.

How to deal with a Web site thief

Once you’ve discovered a theft, Held says to do the following:

1. Leave the offending website as it is. Before contacting the agent, prepare copies of your Website and theirs. Document both sites on disc and in print.

2. Have an attorney on call, one that you have met with before. Arrange to have a cease and desist letter prepared to be used when needed.

3. Simultaneously send the cease and desist letter with copies to the agent’s local department of real estate, the agent’s board of Realtors, the agent's broker, the agent's Web designer, if known, and the agent's Web host. (Editor's note: Web hosts will sometimes take sites down that are in copyright violation disputes.) If you feel you cannot or do not want to engage an attorney at this point, you can do these steps yourself.

4. If the agent resists removing the material, and it is shown that the theft of graphics, content, etc. is a breach of copyright or trademark, you are entitled to automatic statutory damages of $100,000 per violation - plus the agent will have to pay both attorney's fees.

"The copyright law is to foster creativity," explains Blankenheimer. " If you want to have a great site, use your own ideas. It's good for everybody."

"If I had this to do over, I wouldn't let it own me," says Held. "I don't want to lose business getting upset over theft - that's double theft."

Published: January 17, 2002

Use of this article without permission is a violation of federal copyright laws.