The small company that I run at the moment was started when I was at university. For one of the terms we had the chance to spend 100% of our time exploring the business ideas and trying to come up with the shell of the company.
One of the things we produced, or I should say my friend David produced, was a very good infomercial film which showed why someone should use our service (though the product was just loosely defined as we hadn’t made it yet). That was 2 ½ years ago…
Today when searching on an American competitors homepage, I saw that they had embedded some video which described their service. “That looks familiar” I thought…
It was exactly the same video which they had found on Google Video, complete with me and the other co-founder extolling the virtues of the service. Times are hard enough without me making and appearing in my competitors marketing material. 
I’ve spent the last 30 mins seeing if I can edit that video in some way and still leave it embedded, but unfortunately not. Just going to have to take it down off Google, but still think I’ll write them an email giving them pelters!
Me and Graeme were talking about that last night. Do you not know any lawyers who could write up a document threatening to sue their ass. The septics are always running scared of lawyers.
At least that way you would feel better and would be able to have a good laugh at their expense!!
Everyone I’ve spoken to has said “You should sue them for a million dollars!!!”, but I have a funny feeling that if they have to steal marketing material off me, then they don’t have a million dollars…
I think that it’s quite funny and it says a lot about them, so I’m not taking it too seriously.
We’ve blocked embedding of the video through Google and now they just have a video that doesn’t work on their homepage. We’ll see how long it takes them to realise.
As Gordon said, sue them. Ofcourse you have to be able to prove that it is indeed you own work but still…. Even a first letter to them should have them running and the very least apologising.
I see that they have realised now that the video has been disabled and have reworked their homepage.
This “company” had the tagline: “If you can think it, we can do it”
They should change it to “if you can do it, we can steal it”