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One of the best ways to find a good host is to visit a good review site which can at least shine some light on these companies and help you to make a decision that will not cost you time, money and aggravation down the road. It is difficult to move a website, so a hosting decision is almost like taking the decision to get married!

UK web hosting has been particularly problematic, as the prices and costs tend to be higher than elsewhere. Thankfully, there are some good inexpensive web hosts with great service levels. The best way to find them is via a comparison site where you can see the various hosting companies rated, compared and even find hosting articles.

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Check out the hosting company reviews before you buy!

The Japanese trojan virus installs itself on computers using a popular file-share service called Winni, used by up to 200m people.

It targets those downloading illegal copies of games in the Hentai genre, an explicit form of anime.

The website Yomiuri claims that 5500 people have so far admitted to being infected.

What starts out looking as a very ordinary game installation, a screen soon requests the computer owner’s personal details – this is where the trouble begins.

The trojan then takes screenshots of the user’s web history and publishes these screenshots online in their name. Then the trojan either sends the victim an e-mail or launches a pop-up screen demanding a credit card payment of 1500 yen (£10) to “settle your violation of copyright law” and remove the webpage.

Ransomware

The website that the history is published on is owned by a shell company called Romancing Inc. It is registered to a fictitious individual called Shoen Overns and is a known name with investigators who have seen it before with the “Zeus” and “Koobface” trojans.

Kenzero is similar to previously seen ransomware, that infects a computer and encrypts the documents, pictures and other media stored upon it, then demands the payment of a fee for a decryption key.

Similar Incidents In Europe

A fictitious organization calling itself the ICPP copyright foundation issues threatening pop-ups and letters after a virus searches the computer hard drive for illegal content – regardless of whether it actually finds anything. Much like anti-virus rogue-ware.

This scam offers a “pretrial settlement” fine of $400 (£258) payable by credit card, and warns of costly court cases and even jail sentences if the victim ignores the notice.

As above, rather than take the money, the outfit sells on the credit card details to credit card fraud crime rings.

Lessons:

• If you encounter pop-ups demanding payment in order to settle copyright infringement lawsuits or liability, ignore them and use a free online anti-malware scanner immediately to check for malware. If you were in danger of a copyright lawsuit, a lawyer would be sending you official correspondence.
• Do not steal intellectual property! If you want some content from the Internet, pay for it from a reputable site!

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The firm has published numerous articles you can download for free on immigration subjects such as:
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The Department of Labor (DOL) reports an over 60% approval rate for PERM labor certification applications. Under PERM, applications are being denied routinely for simple mistakes as common as one typographical error!

The immigration law firm, Darren Silver has filed over 400 PERM cases and more
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Some of Darren Silver’s successfully filed PERM applications have been for folks with occupations such as:
Teacher
Finance Manager or Controller
Accountant
Market Research Analyst
Architect
Computer Engineer
Civil Engineer
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Attorney
Medical Doctor
Architectural Designer
Management Analyst
Systems Analyst
Purchasing Agent
Reporter Photographer
Financial Analyst
Graphic Designer
Occupational Therapist
Medical Technologist
Mechanical Engineer
Software Developer
Plumber
Cook
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Loan Consultant
Sales Manager
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Architectural Draftsperson
Social Worker
Computer Specialist

As a creator of original content, this is very frustrating – however, thanks to a number of very good tools, such copyright violators, plagiarists and intellectual property thieves can be very easily uncovered and eventually dealt with.

First, how to find them. There are a number of tools – some even free – that you can use to find if your work has been stolen. The free tools enable you to do a one time search. For a fee, you can have your prized blogs or sites monitored on a daily basis.

If you zealously guard your intellectual property, you can really sock it to the thieves in court. Under US Law, you have three months to register your intellectual property with the US Copyright Office. Most people will not bother to register every blog post as it costs some $35 to do so (electronic filing rate.) However, if you find that someone has copied your material, you should register the copyright immediately and then go after them. If your copyright was registered within the three month time frame, you can not only sue to make them immediately remove the stolen intellectual property, but you can sue for damages and attorney’s fees. These damages can be substantial and ruinous for the plagiarist.

If you do not register your copyright (in the US only), then you cannot sue for attorney’s fees or damages, but can make them remove the offending material. Yes, this is in clear violation of the Berne Convention, but you are not going to fix that, the US Copyright Office is not likely to go away.

1.) CopyScape: One of the first, and free for the basic search.

CopyScape has more advanced services as well.

• Premium Search: For $0.05 per search, a higher quality of search that allows you to check the originality of content before publishing it online. This service will make unlimited searches for copies of your pages. Use the premium service to scan your entire site Batch Search.
• CopySentry: Offers professional protection for your site against online plagiarism.
  This service automatically monitors the entire web for copies of your pages. As soon as they find a copy you receive an email and can respond accordingly.

2.) CopyGator: Searches millions of feeds as well as nearly 200 million (and counting) blog posts for infringements. Best of all, CopyGator’s service is free as of this writing! You simply paste their code into your site and an RSS feed is created to monitor your site for thieves.

3.) CopyRightSpot: CopyRightSpot’s service is the most simple and they only provide a simple search very similar to the two previously listed services. They do not offer any monitoring as of this writing.

A widely circulated strategy in the USA to avoid the cost of copyright registration is referred to as the “poor man’s copyright”. In the US, they still use an outdated “Copyright Office” to shuffle papers – something the rest of the world has done away with long ago thanks to the Berne Convention.

The “Poor Man’s Copyright” proposes that the creator send the work to himself in a sealed envelope by registered mail, using the postmark to establish the date. There is also a “Poor Man’s Patent”, where this method is used to ‘prove’ “first art”, or that you were the first.

For the rest of the world, this should work fine and hold up in court – if they abide by the Berne Convention. This technique has not been recognized by any United States court. The United States Copyright Office makes clear that the technique is no substitute for actual registration. The United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office discusses the technique, but does not recommend its use. There are now electronic archiving services which do the same, but to protect intellectual property in the USA, you must register with the copyright office or you cannot sue for damages and/or attorney’s fees.

The Berne Convention made copyright offices obsolete, but the US does not want to close theirs. Copyright attorneys – by and large – are also happy with this arrangement. To ask a copyright attorney if copyright law needs fixing is like asking a fox if the hole in the chicken-coop should be repaired.

The United States is a signatory to “The Berne Convention”, which requires its signatories to recognise the copyright of works of authors from other signatory countries (known as members of the Berne Union) in the same way it recognizes the copyright of its own nationals, regardless of where the intellectual property was originally created.

Copyright under the Berne Convention must be automatic; it is prohibited to require formal registration. The United States joined the Convention in 1988, and to this very day in the United States, you can only claim (sue for) statutory damages and attorney’s fees if your work was registered with the US Copyright office. It is normally enough to give “constructive notice” by adding the copyright symbol ©, the date, and the copyright holder’s name to the document. This requirement was in fact even removed and so it is usually enough to be able to demonstrate being first.

My questions:

• Why did the US sign the agreement if they had no intention of abiding by it?
• How can they continue to get away with this?

The US Copyright Office

The United States Copyright Office has a long and illustrious history, but remains a relic of a bygone era – when large bureaucracies were needed to register paper documents.

Most other countries in the world get along just fine without a copyright office, and in fact, authors are better protected than in the US – where you cannot sue if you did not register your copyright and pay an extortionate $45.00 fee (Now you can do it online for an extortionate $35.00.) [US Copyright Office fees]

Since you have three months to pay this fee and formally register your copyright, a typical blogger in the US who does not register each post (nobody does) can enjoy a 3 month effective copyright term in the USA. Compare this to the various time-frames in the EU – where creators of intellectual property enjoy copyright protection which lasts a guaranteed minimum of 50 years after their death! (See also global copyright durations.)

Just Another Tax

In the US, copyright fees are in fact, just another tax. One that writers and creators of intellectual property are not forced to pay in other countries. The Berne Convention provides adequate protection. The only thing one needs do, is prove that their creation was the first. An electronic archiving service could handle this just fine and could be built by a fresh college graduate in a week.

There is a huge organization which must be fed, since it is run by the government, it will never be shut down, its budget will continue to grow, it will develop new ‘products’ (taxes) and continue to flout the Berne Convention.

A Bureaucracy, Once Created – Can Never Be Dismantled

For the US to remove the requirement of Copyright Registration for persons wishing to collect damages and attorney fees from an infringement lawsuit – a totally unnecessary and bureaucratic step – it would be the end of the Copyright Office. This is an office which generates millions and millions of dollars and provides thousands of feather-bed jobs for bureaucrats who do basically nothing useful whatsoever.

Unfortunately, creators of intellectual property suffer from this unfortunate situation, since the status quo effectively has changed the term of protection for a US Copyright to 3 months. I will not file a copyright application for this blog entry, so you are free to steal it in the US – but you have to wait three months. It would take me 10 times longer to fill out the form, arrange the payment, send the payment to the copyright office through their website (which they only wanted to work with IE – I use FF) than it took me to write this article.

I live in Europe, so if you want to steal this blog post, you will have to wait until I am dead for at least 50 years… but if you are in the US, you are free to swipe it three months from today! Do me a favor, at least give me a backlink.

Copyright in the EU is different than in the United States – and unusually, much less rigidly controlled by the government. In the United States, there is an official Copyright Office which registers copyrights – unnecessarily so.

Even though the USA is a signatory to the Berne Convention whereby a work should be protected without such registration, nobody has ever won damages in the USA for infringement where a copyright was not filed with the copyright office according to their procedures.

In the United Kingdom and elsewhere in the EU, commercial services provide a registration facility where copies of work can be lodged to establish legal evidence of a copyright claim. In the UK, there are also requirements to file certain published works with the British Library and, on request, the five legal deposit libraries. This site will help those who wish to copyright their intellectual property in the European Union.

All of the countries of the European Union are signatories to the Berne Convention.