Reporting inaccurate or false Whois data

Usually webmasters engaged in fraud use fake names, fake addresses, fake phone numbers, and so on, to associate with their website. The only real ID associated with their Whois record is their e-mail, so they can be contacted by their registrar--though sometimes that isn't even real.

This raises problems for people who are offered payment to produce content for a website, such as what happens when Internet forum owners offer paid posting programs, and are never paid for their work. How can one ensure that their work isn't used by a fraudster who has not paid them? The solution is simple: An ICANN Whois complaint.

ICANN is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and is responsible for administering various top level domain names such as .com, .net, etc. It requires that owners of domain names maintain accurate registration data regarding themselves in the system, or they can have their domain name revoked.

An ICANN Whois complaint can be lodged through InterNIC, which is ICANN's website for the public. To do this is simple. Simply visit the ICANN Whois Data Problem Report web page, enter the domain of the site you believe to have inaccurate contact information without any "www," (eg., "sgegtesgte.com"), your own name and e-mail address so that you can track the complaint, a security code to verify that you are not a robot, and click "Submit," and provide the information that the next page requests regarding which Whois entries are true and which are fake. (Before reporting the inaccurate information, you should ensure that it appears to be inaccurate by doing a Whois lookup on the domain name).

So what will this accomplish? If the domain name owner wishes to preserve their site, they will be forced to provide accurate contact information. With this, you can serve them with a law suit, report them to the police for fraud, or use any other legal strategy you can think of which required their previously unknown contact information. If they don't want to respond because they fear the reprisal, ICANN will probably disable their domain name and your content will no longer be making any revenue for a scammer.

Keep in mind that they could transfer your content to another website, but this will cost them the price of a new domain name, and you can always follow the same process with the new web address that you find your content on. You should save your content and search for it on Google every couple weeks after the original site is blocked so that you can determine whether it has been reposted elsewhere in violation of your rights as the copyright holder.

You might also consider filing a DMCA takedown notice with the host of the website if it is located in the United States and you want to claim copyright infringement.

RELATED LINKS (Open in new window)

ICANN Whois Data Problem Report page
What is a DMCA takedown notice? (Cyber Law Facts)
Whois Lookup Service

Proving a website copyright

As mentioned earlier, websites are copyrighted as soon as you create them, and you can register the copyright with the appropriate intellectual property office. However, if other people dispute your copyright, then you will want to have evidence to prove that you are the real creator of the disputed material.

This is where that "Copyright [Insert creator's name here] 2009" phrase printed on so many items, though legally unnecessary for material to be copyrighted, comes in handy. The reason it is on books, CDs, DVDs, etc., is so that when a first edition is published, the fact that so many people can testify they had a copy of it with the copyright holder's name and year of creation on it creates good evidence of that person's ownership of copyright.

On a website, however, the copyright phrase by itself is insufficient because it can be readily modified at any time. Both the copyright phrase and an archiving service should be used. To have a website archived for a free, a webmaster can submit their website to the "WayBackMachine" at http://www.archive.org/. Archive.org will crawl the website within a few weeks, and add it to its archive. If there's ever a dispute over copyrighted content, a person might boost their case by showing that their website was archived as existing first.

If you are a copyright holder, keep in mind that you do not need to put your name on a website as the copyright holder if you do not want to give up your privacy. There are ways to still establish that the archived website belongs to you, such as getting a registered business name in your jurisdiction linked to your real name, and posting the registered business name as the copyright holder. If you are running a website with your own top-level domain name, use your real name but buy a WHOIS privacy feature, and if it should become necessary you can prove you owned the archived website in court by showing your domain registration documents.


RELATED LINKS (Open in new window)

Internet Archive: Wayback Machine