Imitating a legit website - risky? (11)
For landing pages, how risky is it to copy a legit article webpage, - lets say from buzzfeed - tweak it and use it for a landing page.
Even if I tweak everything (logo, font style, and such), but am still using the fact that it looks somewhat similar to the actual webpage, would I be at risk?
Thanks
Of course it is risky... but lot's of people will still do it because it greatly improves ROI.
You'll probably get a C&D first instead of a lawsuit. That's the moment when you nuke everything and run away.
If you pissed them of enough though, they'll chase you down through your affiliateID.
People have been sued for this in the past.
Always make a risk-reward analysis and hide your ass if you are still going to do this.
Another idea would be to start launching with a copy of BuzzFeed to look for the profitable targets agressively and then change it up to "FuzzFed" or whatever when you found what's working.
In my opinion its not risky at all. A lot of affiliates do this all the time and only in very rare circumstances would you get in trouble because of it. Anyways you'll first receive a warning to take it down (if it even comes to that).
Depends exactly how blatant you're being. If you actually rip their logo or something, that's a bad idea. But just using a design strongly reminiscent of their design, without any actual copyrighted / trademarked elements should be fine.
However, if you're doing an advertorial style page there are other risks. Make sure you've got a disclosure element and you're up on the relevant legislation about what is and isn't OK when you're doing advertorials. Things have tightened up a lot since 2010 or so.
Its true the risk is very low, but it is there, so I wouldnt just say there is no risk at all involved when doing something like this. You are effectively miss-using an established brand here, so if you happen to be EXTREMELY unlucky you might attract the attention of some lawyer. The risk is bigger if youre in the same country as the company behind the website you would copy obviously.
I see. Yeah the plan is to use the look of one of those sites for an advertorial page.
I'll probably use the same color design of the logo but change the wording/letters.
Thanks for the information guys.
Pretty simple story in the end:
- if you're using something copyrighted (think copying the google logo like some people do right now with antivirus landers or amazon on sweeps), it can get very risky. You'll most likely stay under the radar running a couple of hundreds of thousands of pageviews a day, even 2-3 million a day is probably not big enough to really catch attention, but as soon as you start scaling, hit mainstream sources (e.g. pornhub network if you're running on adult), you're begging for trouble. The same stuff running months on plugrush will cause you complaints within a couple of days of running on the mainstream adult sources (just an example with adult, same applies to mainstream, shit you can run on torrents.to or other torrent sites is different to what you can run on TMZ)
- if you run advertorial style, make sure to have some disclaimer on it. Times are over you put a 'as seen on NBC & CNN' logo on and run for months.
- using "design" style layouts is different to ripping something. Nobody's gonna sue you for using black/white/orange as amazon does, but having the google colors with a typo like 'googel' is more likely to get you in trouble
- check local laws. For example it's forbidden to advertise gambling implying there's a chance to achieve longterm profits (make money style) in the UK, while in some other countries it's not forbidden
- last but not least, what cbrughmans said 'Anyways you'll first receive a warning to take it down (if it even comes to that).' is bullshit. There's enough people who had issues without any kind of warning, so I cannot follow his point at all here, especially considering he's representing an affiliate network.
PS: don't forget there's a whole industry focused on finding copyright infringements and they're doing pretty decent...
Originally Posted by fjk87
I think we need a thread on potential risks / reward for different scales of grey / black advertising in the EU / US...
'you will probably be fine' can end up VERY expensive. Personally, I'm not into playing these games.
unless you're doing massive amounts of volume, you likely aren't but a blimp on a radar...wouldn't over concern yourself with it unless you plan on never changing the page in the event it does convert well for you and you scale up with this style of page and choosing to leave it as is. you may lose sleep at that point, one eye always open...not a good feel.
You will probably be fine, thats true, but there is a small % that means mega trouble.
Im gonna give you a small example from real life, it happens to be adult related : there is a certain type of sites called babelogs - owners of these sites trade traffic between their sites by linking to picture galleries on their sites. Its done in such a way that you grab a picture from the gallery, decrease its size, you post it on your site and link to the original gallery on the other babelog. The other guy does the same. Couple years ago, one babelog owner posted a gallery with random selection of girls, other babelogs linked to that gallery by using the first photo in the gallery.
Now an extremely unlikely thing happened - the girl on the photo that was used for linking went after those guys, asking for money because at the time she posed for those pics, she wasnt 18. She asked for $ or threatened to sue. The photo wasnt even nude and the whole series was posted on numerous amateur adult sites. How likely was this to happen? Who would have thought that even by using a sample thumbnail for linking purposes you could get into trouble? Still, I know one of the guys paid $25.000 to that girl as he happened to be in a jurisdiction where she could reach him. Because of one small thumbnail.
This was a very unlikely event, but it still happened. All it takes is one lawyer who has the ability to reach you. And its the same with this case, you will probably be fine, but what if ...
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