One thing you might want to consider is going ahead and firing off a
"cease and desist"
letter to your competitor about the violation. It might very well be,
as strange as it may sound, that they have no idea they're violating
copyright law. they might even purchase permission to use the text for
a fee, especially if they're well established and have a amount of the
budget set aside for legal fees and penalties.
I work for a publishing company, and i can't tell you how many times
we have the same conversation with authors about bibliographic
references, permissions, etc. Some are just oblivious about it (and it
amazes me that they went through 8 years of college not knowing this).
At other companies, I've heard of people going ahead and using
copywritten material, knowing full well they don't have permission to
use it, and just moving forward until they get caught. Then, when the
owner comes forward with proof of ownership (which doesn't take much
if you have your own paperwork together, BTW), then they'll either
pull the offending text or ask how much it would cost to continue
using it because it's become a crucial part of their text. In
addition, the phrase "it's easier to beg forgiveness than it is to ask
permission" doesn't apply here financially. There's all sort of
penalties and interest companies pay to continue to use content they
didn't get permission for the first time.
Not to be a pessimist or anything, but as for even the average
ambitious/maliciuous hackers out there... If Microsoft and the entire
entertainment industry haven't found a way to successfully defeat
them, then neither are you.
That was a conversation we had to have with our upper management when
we found some of our key titles hacked on the internet for the first
time. Not just the text, but press-ready PDFs with cropmarks and full
bleeds. And they wanted myself and IS too figure out a way to not let
that happen again. We brainstormed the TIFF/re-PDF option as well, but
decided it was wasted effort, mainly because nobody is going to spend
the money on the hardware or services necessary to OCR scan a printed
document into something useable first time out.
--
Philip Regan
pregan at gmail dot com
http://homepage.mac.com/pregan
REALBasic 2005r4, Mac OS 10.3.9, Mac-centric development
Xcode 1.5
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