There are many tips to help your home look like it’s not alone:

• Put lamps and your TV and/or a radio on timers.
• Have a neighbor pick up your mail and newspapers, or have a temporary hold placed on them.
• Hire someone to mow your lawn.
• Ask a neighbor to park their car in your driveway a few times while you’re gone, or leave one of your cars in the drive.
• Don’t post pictures and information on social media about your vacation (share it when you are back home).

In addition to vacation, there are other times that your home is not alone. If you travel a lot for work, you might be gone a few days at a time. If you’re employed, you’re most likely away from home at least 8 hours a day. If your kids are active in sports activities and travel teams, you’ll be away from home more than you are there!

In addition to vacation, all of these are times when your home is alone for more than a few hours at a time. The tips above are very helpful to make it appear that you are home. But the inevitable happens – people are being burglarized every day!

We were burglarized twice. Once all of our items outside were taken while we were sleeping! Patio table and chairs, umbrella, bicycles, chaise lounge, gas grill – all gone! The 2nd time was while we were at one of our sons’ baseball games. They had plenty of time that day! It was this 2nd experience that encouraged us to create our home inventory and eventually begin our home inventory service. You know the old saying…happens once, shame on them – happens twice, shame on me. That second time of feeling the financial loss was enough!

Burglaries are on the rise. Before you get busy with your summer-time activities, prepare for the times you’ll be gone. And also prepare in case you are the one chosen to be the next victim of theft. A personal property inventory will help you remember what you owned, which means you’ll be able to provide a very thorough, complete insurance claim.

A few days later, I checked the URL and the home page had an “under construction” notice. This made me believe that they had complied with our request to cease and desist the copyright infringement of our home inventory service website and all was settled.

For some reason, though, a few days later I felt a need to do a little more digging. Unfortunately, I found that the site was not taken down, nor even edited at this point. The only change made was the home page!

This proved to me that they still had the intention to use our site and content as their own. At this point, I notified our webmaster, as her name and contact link was in the footer of this website. Though we have the copyright, she didn’t want her name associated with someone who was not willing to abide by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

This has been a process that I hope to never have to go through again. And unfortunately, it’s not over. I will continue to watch for their site to go live – hopefully with new content!

There is one other issue I must mention here. We also own a turnkey business package company, Hartman Inventory Systems. Similar to a franchise, we provide, among many other items, a complete marketing package which includes a website. Our Hartman Inventory service company website is the template for these sites, which means that our Group Members purchase the right to this website. We must pursue those who infringe on our copyright for ourselves, but also for those who have properly and legally invested in the rights to this design and content!  Additionally, if others use our site and/or content, the confusion of association could happen. In essence, we are protecting our Group Members’ rights as well as our own.

With the plethora of information on the internet today, this will remain an issue. All business owners must be diligent in fighting this cyber theft. We spend too much time and effort building our companies to allow anyone to steal our most important asset – our intellectual property!

The first thing I did was call our business coach, J.Sewell Perkins. She is a great mentor and advisor and exactly what I needed. It is important to handle this type of issue – and any issue for that matter – properly and professionally.

We decided that it’s possible this person didn’t know that it was illegal to copy others’ information (I’m surprised to learn that many think if it’s on the internet, it’s fair game!). We wanted to give this new business owner the benefit of the doubt, so we chose to contact her.

When looking at WhoIs.com, the only name available was the technical advisor. Therefore, I sent a letter to him via email and registered letter stating our findings and requesting that the site be taken down in accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. We requested that he sign and return the agreement by a specific date. He emailed and stated that he was creating this site as a favor for a friend who is starting a home inventory business. He admitted that it was a shoe-string operation, that they liked our site design and decided to use it as a basis to start from. He continued to state that they did not respect our privacy, and hoped that it wasn’t compromised. He also promised to return the signed agreement promptly.

I don’t know about you, but if I got a letter of this type, I would take it seriously! We didn’t hear from him by the deadline, so additional research was my next step. I was able to locate the owner of the company through a search on the internet that took me to a LinkedIn page. A second letter was sent out with a request for immediate response, letting the owner know I had not heard from the web developer.

Rather than hire an attorney, we chose to handle it this way because, based on the words the web developer used (shoe-string), we had to assume that funds were at a minimum. And, as with others who have experienced copyright infringement, all we wanted was to have the site taken down and that they create – and pay for – their own material. It is not just the copied work that is at issue here. The time and money spent on creating the website, writing the content, etc., runs into the tens of thousands of dollars. This is theft, plain and simple.

At the same time, I also notified the hosting company that this site was infringing on our copyright. I was required to provide proof of our date of copyright and also send screen shots of both websites, validating my claim.

By this point, this was taking up a huge amount of my time, which would be much better spent working on our business! I see why others pay a company to handle these issues! (We now have all of our websites protected and monitored by DMCA.)

We finally received the signed agreement, stating they would cease and desist using our website code and content. They also promised to take their site down immediately. But did they?