It happens more than you would think and it always stings: somebody has copied your website. The copy, the photos, sometimes the whole structure with the names of your services. The first instinct is to write an angry message; the second is to do nothing. Neither works, and there is an order that does.
How you find out, almost always by chance
Nobody goes looking for this. It turns up when a customer says «I saw a site just like yours», when you are checking a competitor for something else, or when you paste one of your own sentences into a search engine and two results come back.
That last one is the fastest check there is: take a sentence from your site that is genuinely yours, put it in quotation marks in the search box and see how many websites have it. If more than one comes up, you know where to start.
Save the evidence before you say anything
This is the step most people skip and the one that costs the most later. The moment you write to whoever copied you, the usual thing is for the page to be deleted or changed within hours. If you did not save it first, you have nothing to show.
The four things to save today
- Full-page screenshots of every copied page, with the address visible.
- The page printed to PDF, which keeps the date and selectable text.
- The archived copy: the Wayback Machine stores old versions of websites and lets you show when your text first appeared and when theirs did.
- Your own drafts: the document where you wrote that copy, with its creation date, is worth more than you think.
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What is protected and what is not
This is where half the anger gets discarded. What the law protects is how you wrote it, not the idea. Somebody else having a services page, a frequently-asked-questions section or a pricing page is not copying you: it is building a website.
Copying is your paragraphs turning up word for word, or nearly, somewhere else. It is also taking your photos, your videos or your illustrations. Bare facts — an opening time, an address, a price — are not yours in that sense.
You do not have to register anything to have rights
This is the most repeated misunderstanding. In Spain protection begins the moment you create the work, with no paperwork at all: that is what the consolidated Intellectual Property Act says. You do not need to register your website copy for it to be yours.
WIPO explains it the same way for the rest of the world on its copyright page: the right exists from creation, and registration is a separate matter.
Registration is not compulsory, but it puts a date on it
What the Intellectual Property Register does give you is an official date and a presumption in your favour if there is ever a dispute. Hardly anybody does it for a whole website, and it is not needed.
For day-to-day purposes, having dated drafts, the invoices from whoever wrote your copy and archived copies of your own site puts you in good shape.
Photos are the easy case
With text there is always room to argue about whether it «looks similar» or «is the same». With a photo there is not: either it is the same file or it is not. And if it is yours, taken on your premises with your people, the matter settles itself.
That is why we push so hard for your own photos instead of stock, as we explain in photos for your website. And if people appear in them, with permissions in order: that is in photos with people and permissions.
What is fair to copy
Worth accepting, so you do not fight windmills. The general structure of a services site, having a WhatsApp button, a reviews section or a short form belongs to nobody. Good practice is public and gets copied constantly.
The line is at your words and your images. If those get taken, you are right; if they copy the order of your sections, you have a sharp competitor.
What happens to your rankings when two sites match
Google does not hand out fines for repeated text, and that idea is both widespread and wrong. What it does is more awkward: it picks one of the two versions to show in results, and it does not always pick the original.
If the site that copied you is older or has more links, you can end up disappearing from your own sentences. How to check that is in why your website does not appear on Google, and the role of the title and description is in title tag and meta description.
The first step is not a lawyer, it is an email
In most cases we have seen, whoever copied is not a pirate: it is a small business whose site somebody built in a hurry, or a relative who «took things off the internet». A civil email sorts it in two days.
What to put in that email and what to leave out
- Who you are and what is yours, with the address of your page and theirs.
- Which specific paragraphs or photos are copied. A short list, no speeches.
- What you are asking for: that they take it down or rewrite it, and by when.
- No insults and no strange threats. A calm email gets answered; an aggressive one gets forwarded to a lawyer and drags on for three months.
If they do not reply, the notice to the host
When the email goes nowhere, the next rung is the company hosting that website. Hosts have a procedure for content notices and tend to act, because once they know what is going on it is in their interest to.
To find out who to write to, you look up who holds the domain and where it is hosted, which is the same thing we explain in who owns your domain.
Getting it out of the search results
In parallel you can ask search engines to remove from their results the page that reproduces your content. It is a separate procedure from the one above and it works even while the site is still up.
The two places you complain to
- Whoever hosts the site, so the content comes off the internet.
- The search engine, so it stops showing it in the meantime.
Both ask for the same things: exact addresses, what is yours and why. With the evidence you saved at the start, it takes a few minutes to fill in.
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When going further is worth it
This is not legal advice, and the next step really is a lawyer's. Our experience is that it is worth it when money is involved: they copied the whole site, they are near you and you are both after the same customers.
If it is a site in another province that lifted two paragraphs, the email and the notice to the host usually do the job. Fighting costs time, and time gets paid for too.
The awkward case: the agency that reuses your site
It happens, and not always with bad intentions. Somebody builds a site for you and months later puts up a very similar one for a business in the same sector, with the same copy half changed.
What decides it here is what you signed. Which is why it is worth putting in writing from the start that the copy and the photos are yours, along with the domain. We say it plainly: the material belongs to the client.
How to protect a website without losing your mind
There is no way to stop somebody selecting your text, and chasing that is a waste of time. What you can do is make it harder and leave a trail showing you got there first.
Four measures that do work
- Write things only you could write. Real cases, street names, the way your business actually works.
- Your own photos instead of stock, which look better anyway.
- Publish with dates: a blog with dated entries records when each piece of text appeared, which is what a business blog is about.
- Check once a year by pasting two or three of your sentences into a search box.
What is no use at all
Blocking right-click, disabling copy and paste, or covering photos in huge watermarks. The first is bypassed in two seconds, the second annoys customers trying to copy your phone number, and the third ruins the photos you went to such trouble to take.
Nor does a «all rights reserved» line in the footer help: your rights exist either way. What does belong in the footer are the legal pages your website needs.
And if the one who copied is you, without knowing
We see that too. An old site built by somebody who «took things» and copy that has been sitting there for years with nobody looking at it. If a notice reaches you, the sensible answer is to take down whatever it is, reply and rewrite it. It costs less than arguing.
How to write that copy from scratch, without copying anyone, is in website copy: what to write.
What redoing the copy and the photos costs
If we run your website, redoing the copy on one page is part of maintenance and is not charged separately. If the whole site has to be redone, it goes by project with a closed written quote before starting.
In our prices, Tu Landing is 100 € a month and Tu Web 200 €, plus VAT and with no lock-in, with domain, hosting, email and maintenance included; the presence plans run at 400, 750 and 1,500 € a month. If what you want is to publish your own content regularly, that is the articles for your website service.
From Sant Antoni de Calonge, with businesses across Girona and Barcelona
If you have just found your own sentences on somebody else's site, run the quotation-marks test in the search box, save the screenshots and send them to us through the contact form or by WhatsApp. We will tell you what is arguable, what is not, and what the next step is without spending money.
Tell us what you need and we'll give you a price
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