by Tony Chen

Ah, the joys and travails of the wild wild west of the healthcare blogosphere.

This past week, I discovered a website (I won't dignify it with a link) that was squatting on hospital impact. They copied hospital impact content, the hospital impact design and likeness, and created a site with a very related url. All the on-going links on the site were to hospital impact. Except that they added a few ... shall we say... "not safe for work" pictures and links.

So you could imagine my dismay when I saw my thoughtful post on Cleveland Clinic's Chief Executive Officer "by Tony Chen" on their site accompanied by very suggestive pictures and links.

I emailed some blogging and lawyer friends for advice. I went to DomainTools to figure out who the culprit was (someone from Istanbul). So I emailed them, their web hosting company, as well as the Turkish Embassy. I was also about to email Google to see how to get their site de-indexed.

Nonetheless, the site was completely changed within 24 hours - all of the hospital impact content/likeness was removed. In my opinion, it was the email to their hosting company threatening legal action that did it.

Word to the wise blogger: check out this link about bloggers FAQ and IP protection.

I guess lots of popular blogs go through this, it's almost a rite of passage. So maybe I should be honored that hospital impact was popular enough to rip off!