Warning to End-Users & Content Developers that Illegally Use or Sell ART Copyrighted Materials

PUNITIVE MEASURES AT OUR DISPOSAL. Please do not force us to have to resort to any of these punitive measures, simply to enforce our copyright:

Shutting down your website by informing your web hosting service that you are violating the terms of your contract with them, which usually requires that you do not violate any laws, including copyright laws.

Notifying various social media and search engines to remove you from any search results following queries related to your firm's website. Most search engines respect copyright laws, and violations of copyright are grounds for a website being removed. Please note that if your firm is not in the USA, most search engines based in the USA do recognize US copyright law, even if the violator is not in the USA. Do you really want to cause your firm to be banned from search engines worldwide and in all languages?

Informing the local press in your city or country. Especially in a difficult economy, the press might find it interesting to cover unethical behavior of a recruitment firm. Most people are aware that the internet is filled with copyright violations due to "copy and paste," but perhaps the press in your city might find it an interesting story to hear our very effective advice about how to stop someone anywhere from violating one's copyright. Your copyright violation could be highlighted in the article and you would have to answer many embarrassing questions about your lack of ethical behavior. Please note that ART proudly counts among our candidates around the world people who are journalists, editors, publishers, and broadcasters. Are you prepared to have to explain your unethical business practices in the court of public opinion?

Informing your local society of human resources professionals, because a firm that misrepresents itself and violates copyright laws might not be a firm to do business with.

Informing relevant industry groups that your firm is likely to deal with, because a firm that misrepresents itself and violates copyright laws might not be a firm to do business with.

Informing relevant government and law enforcement agencies in the places where you operate, because a firm that misrepresents itself and violates copyright laws might also violate other laws and be a danger to society. Copyright violators whose recruitment business involves the obtaining of work visas, such as USA H1-B's, or Canadian skilled worker visas, should note that ART will have no problem whatsoever in contacting relevant national or provincial immigration bureaus to complain that your firm violated copyright laws and that your businesses might be perpetrating fraud by doing so. Such a complaint might affect your ability to do business, not only the name of the website in which the violation was spotted, but in all of your businesses identified by us as belonging to you. Please note that ART proudly counts among our candidates around the world people who are at the ministerial and sub-ministerial levels in their respective governments.

Contacting your firm's current, past or potential clients and/or candidates and informing them of your violation of international copyright law.

Nearly every country on earth is a signatory of the Berne Convention on Intellectual Property, and ART's friends in your country can be very helpful to us, in seeing to it that there is no place on earth for copyright violators to be safe.

ART has successfully stopped copyright violators around the globe, including individuals and firms in countries said to be "untouchable" or even "lawless" as far as copyright law enforcement is concerned, but typically within 24-48 hours, our violated material has been removed from the violator's website, either by them or by us.

In our experience, EVERY SINGLE FIRM OR INDIVIDUAL that has been confronted with our "Cease and Desist" letter, sent following our discovery of their violation, quickly has understood that compliance with copyright law is greatly to their benefit. We have been successful in enforcing our copyright over and over again in countries as diverse as the following (listed in order of frequency of violations):

India Canada China USA Hong Kong Singapore UK Indonesia Philippines Sweden Belgium Germany Mali Benin Serbia France Malaysia Nigeria Egypt Turkey Czech Rep. Australia Mexico Netherlands Greece Russia Lebanon Dubai Latvia Japan Korea UAE

IMPORTANT: A firm that is found to have violated our copyright cannot claim that they have a right to publish our materials simply  because they paid a third party content provider for this material. This is like buying stolen merchandise and claiming a right of ownership. The violator's first obligation under the law is to cease violating our copyright. If they wish to pursue the web content developer to return fees paid, that is their business, but such action does not take priority over ending their violation of our copyrighted materials.

When first presented with our evidence of their firm's having violated our copyright, many violators claim that they had hired an outside contractor to provide content to them. Our question is this: when you read the content that they sold you, why did you not change the material when you saw, quite clearly, that the marketing language did not accurately describe your firm's business operations, methods or capabilities? In our findings, most violators of our copyrighted material do not in any way imaginable do what we do, and they do not in any way have the resources or abilities that we do, yet in their theft of our language, they quite brazenly claim to do what we do. So when our investigators confront a CEO of such a firm and he says, almost invariably, that he did not know that the material was stolen, our next question is: "So at what point, when reading your website, did it occur to you that your website was describing a firm that does not do what your firm does, and when did this seem odd to you?" Of course, another obvious question to pose is, "For what reason did you hire the content provider, and how could that person possibly be knowledgeable of executive search practices to a degree worthy of  hiring him?"

If asked these questions in a courtroom or by a journalist, how would the CEO of that recruitment company answer? The fact is that he did hire someone to go out and steal another company's copyrighted material. One company CEO told our investigator that he had hired a person to "mirror" two mass staffing company websites, since they were his direct competitors, but he was "surprised" that they took ART's material, since ART was an executive search firm and not an employment agency. Apparently the ethics of "mirroring" in the first place had escaped the conscience of this gentleman!

Any third party web content vendor that violates our copyright and then sells it to another firm will make themselves subject to prosecution and/or severe punitive action, not only by ART, but possibly in conjunction with the firm to whom you illegally sold our material. At our discretion, ART might decide to inform the content developer's potential and/or present clients and partners of their violations. Any reasonable firm should not want to risk the future of their business with content stolen and provided by such a person or company.

Any party that is discovered to have used ART's copyrighted materials for any criminal purpose will be subject to investigation and legal prosecution. It should be noted that this firm in the past has taken extraordinary measures to identify perpetrators to authorities with the goals of ceasing their activities and/or bringing them to prosecution, no matter where their location on earth.