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Dear Sir:
I saw that there were a couple of positive posts on your behalf at the same site where the complaints were posted, this is good for you. However, you may want to post your own rebuf. It is important that prospective customers hear from you directly. Also, if you can, get a law firm to draft a letter of "Cease and desist" to the guy/company spreading the false accusations. Post a letter, signed and sworn by you, in a separate page of your website were a prospective customer can, with the use of a password that you provide at the "rip-off post site", access or read the special sworn letter by you in which you attest to the truth about your honesty, good reputation, etc. and place testimonials from satisfied customers there. Don't forget to write your rebuf at every website were this guy is trashing you at.
Hope this helps.
Fred

Post a complaint through http://www.ic3.gov. This site is specifically set up to investigate criminal activity on the internet and is part of a joint effort including the FBI on internet crime. Our taxes pay for it.

They may also tell you to contact your lawyer. However, I have had to use them in the past to deal with false online statements and threats and they act pretty quickly. It never hurts to have someone from the FBI or local police contact a libelous poster to demand that statements are removed from the internet.

The link you posted does not work.

The full address should be http://www.ic3.gov/default.aspx

I also tried linking through my post. For whatever reason, it did not want to link.

The suggestions above are all great. One point hasn't been mentioned yet: As a business owner, something you'll want to be doing right now is gathering and documenting evidence of your damages. The process of contacting the other business, involving attorneys, etc. will result in one of two things -- those folks will either stop what they're doing or they won't. If they don't, the FBI isn't going to haul them off to jail for trash-talking. You'll have to file a lawsuit (a tort claim) -- at which point you'll have to prove your damages (i.e., show conclusive evidence of the business revenue that they have stolen from you as a result of those web postings). If you intend to pursue this matter, now is the time to start collecting that evidence.

I have found that gathering evidence of damages helps you choose (and fight) your battles more wisely. For instance, from time to time, I see something that I wrote or that my firm published posted on the net verbatim with someone else's name on it. That's copyright infringement, plain and simple, and it makes me angry. I ask them to take it down or add the proper citation. If they ignore the request, I have to gather evidence of damages. If I can't really come up with much (in other words, if them claiming to be something they're not isn't taking any real money out of my pocket), then I have let "karma" deal with it. Believe me, it doesn't make it any less frustrating when I see my work posted with someone else's name, but ultimately it's a business decision. Of course, if they do eventually generate revenue as a result of having used my work, then I'll already have what I need to lay claim to it.

Good luck with this matter.

Thanks for the info MotorDoc. I have quite a few registered copyrights (some dating back over 40 years), so my attorney and I have more than a casual knowledge of copyright law. A federal prosecutor is the person who must file the type of felony infringement suit you're referring to, and will generally only do so if the copyright owner can show that the infringement was willful, done for the purpose of commercial gain, and resulted in more than $2,500 within a 180 day period. There are only 93 federal prosecutors in the U.S. and all its territories, and in my experience, they won't investigate unless the complaint offers solid evidence of all those conditions up front -- and even then, it's an understandably low priority (considering every other type of federal case they have in their backlog). Yes, the law is there, but in reality, it's the civil case that gets action. Either way, the business owner has to collect the evidence to even HAVE a case -- which is all I was suggesting in my initial post. Thanks again for the comments.

I googled your company and came up with the posts you were talking about... He also claims that http://www.masterweaversny.net/services.html is the same company as Oriental Rug Care NY. I would hope that it is not, as on that page, Master Weavers NY didnt even bother to remove the other company's name when they copied and pasted.