Primary marketDo Agents Steal From Websites? You Bet They Do!
A wise Realtor® friend recently sent me this note after reading something I wrote about writing warning letters to agents who steal intellectual property from another agent"s website:
Bill, have you ever had to go further than [writing] a letter(s)? Perhaps we should start a list of these individuals -- a good group to avoid doing any business with, like exchanging links, referrals, etc. Obviously with such loose ethics, we would be doing consumers a favor.
Well, so far we"ve gone further than sending our own letter to a website thief only once, when we had our attorney send a letter. We went this far because the agent had copied my wife Debbie"s site word for word, icon for icon, artwork for artwork, space for space, text for text, throughout his whole site.
In fact, it was Debbie"s site, but with his name and local links in place of hers. Then, the guy boldly proclaims in his site, "I created everything in this site myself." That really ticked Debbie and me off.
However, not only did the guy lie about "his" website, he went and applied for an award for the site, at one of the biggest realty sites. Well, Debbie and I have known the key players of all the big realty websites almost from day one, and so they just called us and told us what this guy"s site looked like and what he was foolishly doing.
So, we printed out, in full color, one of his duplicated pages for every purloined page in Debbie"s site, and stapled every one together. Then, we had Darren Smith, our Internet Law attorney (who is also a real estate broker) mail out the package, and our damning letter. However, (and here"s the key), we didn"t mail it to the website pirate but to:
The president of the agent"s firm -- biggest regional realty firm in the Pacific Northwest
The Executive Vice President of that firm who oversaw that agent"s own office.
The realty firm"s Regional Manager for the agent"s area.
The office manager/broker of the agent"s office.
We waited three days and then Darren sent the demand to the agent, himself.
By this approach we assured ourselves that the pirate"s bosses would be able to visit the pirate"s URL which would still be there on the Web, compare his site to Debbie"s, using not only the paper copies they"d gotten by snail mail, but also on the Web as well, and in that way catch the disgusting agent with his pants fully down.
Oh yes, our attorney said in the demand letter that if the material was not removed, we would sue the real estate company, too, since ultimately the agent was affiliated with them. This is a very good idea, but likely works far better when the theft, by an associated agent, is so obviously flagrant and not just a few lines of text.
I think that it was because of the sue-the-big-firm stipulation, and the fact that the bosses, likely embarrassed, could see what a lying, thieving rat the agent was, that they not only made him remove all stolen material, but they even made him write Debbie a letter of apology, which we had demanded, which must have really twisted his tail.
We know that at least three hundred agents have stolen and are using parts of Debbie"s original website material.
Mostly, these stolen pieces are our carefully crafted, WAYS OF SAYING THINGS to visitors that most everyone would agree is one of the BEST WAYS to say it, whatever it is.
These, sadly, are things that maybe took us days of concept time to think up and write in just that perfect way.
Pirates take not merely the text, but with it also the way the text is decked-up, or the fonts or colors used in that special text, the way the text (sometimes 600 words or more) is stacked up or indented on the page for maximum effect, or is in a certain kind of frame that perhaps no one had thought of before.
One of redhead Debbie Ferrari"s icons is a cartoon of her sitting in a red Ferrari-like car. Some other red-headed agent lady stole that, too.
We got her, though.
That"s the only problem with being first with something on the Web, everyone less creative can just copy what you did and get similar results. Stealing your wording, or formatting, or artwork is like a smaller version of stealing from a book that you wrote. Stealing is stealing. So is shoplifting. No difference at all. Remember that. We periodically go on a rampage as we recently did, and nail eight or 10 of the worst offenders. Usually, just an email to them from Debbie or me does the trick and causes them to remove the offending material. Nobody wants to be sued. However, if someone persisted, we surely would have our attorney send a letter similar to the one he sent to the pathetic rat who stole everything in Debbie"s site. If you have a terrific site, I bet you anything that someone out there has made a duplicate for himself or herself of some or all of it.