Someone copied my website. What now?

Work out whether this is actually copyright

This is the step almost everyone skips, and it is the one that decides whether a notice helps you or hurts you. Copyright protects original expression. It does not protect facts, ideas, prices, specifications, short phrases, or the general idea of a business like yours.

• ✓Protected: the particular words you wrote, your photographs, your layout and design as expression, your illustrations.
• ✓Not protected: your prices, your product specifications, your business model, your company name, a page title, a single headline.
• ✓Possibly not yours: manufacturer copy you pasted in, stock images you licensed rather than own, text a freelancer wrote without a written assignment.

That last point catches more people than any other. If a contractor wrote your copy and there is no written agreement assigning the rights, the law generally treats the contractor as the owner. You cannot send a notice as the owner of something you do not own, and the sworn statement in a notice makes getting that wrong consequential rather than embarrassing.

If what was taken is your brand name rather than your words, that is a trademark matter and a copyright notice is the wrong instrument. Filing one anyway is the fastest way to weaken your own position.

Prove you published first

Copyright exists from the moment you create something, with no registration required. But if the other side claims they wrote it, you need something dated. In rough order of strength:

A copyright registration

The strongest evidence, and the only route to statutory damages in a US court. Registration before the infringement, or within three months of publication, matters for what you can recover.

An archived copy predating theirs

A Wayback Machine capture of your page from before their site existed. Free, independent, and usually enough for a host.

Original files with metadata

For photographs especially. The camera-written capture date and the raw file are hard to fake and easy to show.

Your own publishing records

CMS timestamps, git history, draft emails. Weaker because you control them, but useful alongside the above.

You do not need all of these. You need one that a reasonable person at a hosting company can look at in thirty seconds and believe.

Send the notice to the host, not to them

The instinct is to email the person who copied you. Sometimes it works. More often it tells them to change a few words, move the page, or hide it — and you have spent your one surprise for nothing.

The leverage is with the hosting provider. Under 17 U.S.C. § 512(c), a host keeps its legal safe harbour by acting expeditiously on a valid notice. That is a real incentive, and it is why a correctly addressed notice to a host usually outperforms months of emails to a site owner.

Finding the host is a DNS and RDAP lookup, and our host lookup tool does it free. One wrinkle: if the site sits behind a proxy such as Cloudflare, the proxy does not host the content and will not remove it. It forwards the complaint and tells you who the real host is. That is an extra hop, not a dead end.

Write a notice that cannot be dismissed

A notification that substantially fails to comply with the statute is not a weak notice. Legally it is not a notice at all, and the host keeps its protection as though you had never written. Six parts are required: a signature, identification of your work, identification of the infringing URLs, your contact details, a good-faith statement, and a statement of accuracy and authority made under penalty of perjury.

Our notice generator assembles all six in your browser, free and without an account. Before you send it, read the good-faith statement carefully: it says the use is not authorised by the owner, its agent, or the law. Fair use is the law. You are expected to have considered it.

That is not a technicality invented by lawyers. In Lenz v. Universal the Ninth Circuit held that a rights holder must form a good-faith belief that a use is not fair before sending a notice, and § 512(f) makes a knowing misrepresentation actionable for damages and legal fees. Our fair-use check walks the four factors and gives you a written record.

What happens after, and when it is worth paying someone

Most hosts acknowledge within days and the fast ones act before replying. There is no statutory deadline — the word is “expeditiously”, and it has never been given a number. Anyone who quotes you a turnaround is guessing.

If the content comes down, verify it yourself rather than trusting the email, then check again a week later and a month later. Pages get removed from one URL and reappear at another. If the other side files a counter-notice under § 512(g), the host must restore the material in 10 to 14 business days unless you file a court action.

Doing this yourself is entirely realistic for one page on a cooperative host. It stops being realistic when there are a dozen URLs, when the host ignores you, when the site is proxied, when ownership has to be assembled because a freelancer wrote the copy, or when the same content needs removing from search as a separate notice.

That is the point at which hiring makes sense — and the honest version of that offer is one where you pay if the page comes down and not if it does not.