How to Protect Website from Copycats? What to do When Someone Steals your Site?

There are billions of websites in the whole world, with thousands launched every day. In such a scenario, if someone copied your website & you are not tracking your digital media, then, you will probably not even come to know of it.

However, it is important to take precautionary steps for protecting your website from copyright infringement. In this blog post, we will tell you:

• How to find people who copied your website?
• What to do if your entire website has been copied?
• How to protect your website from being copied?
• How to take down a website that stole your whole website?
• How to start the process of copied website takedown?

Before you could take down website copycats, you need to find out who copied your website.

How to find if your website is stolen or copied?

As we mentioned above, there are billions of websites online. In such a scenario, looking for copycats could seem a herculean task. But with right set of tools, you can easily locate website copycats. Below points will help you find people copying your content, graphics or entire website;

Simple Google search – Complete website theft means everything starting from design and content is stolen. Running Google search based of phrases unique to you and scanning result pages will help you locate people that might have stolen your content as well as design. Make it a habit to run such checks on weekly basis.

Use online tools – There are multiple tools that help in checking content and web page plagiarism.  Use CopyScape to find websites that have copied your content or design. While the tool is free, it also offers premium services that help in monitoring web regularly for plagiarism.

Similarly TinEye and ImageRaider are image search engines that help people in discovering similar or modified copies of an image. It also tells how it is being used.

There are also web service providers that offer web monitoring services to help businesses and organizations track their online content & usage. Now that you know how to find content & website scrapers, let’s learn what to do if it happens.

Also Read: How to bring down a negative review about my business?

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What to do if someone copied your website?

While website graphics and images are often ‘borrowed’ without any actual intention of unfair use, it is not possible to nip the whole website by mistake. Hence, you must be informed and ready when that happens.

Below points will help you in dealing with complete website design & content theft:

1. Find the owner :

It is acceptable to be angry on coming across a website exactly similar to yours but this doesn’t mean you should rush straight to your lawyer. Your first step should be to learn about the owner and search for contact details. There is a fair chance that contact details will be given somewhere in the website. Once you have it, make contact.

2. Get in touch:

There are various instances where a website owner is unaware that his site design, graphics or content is stolen. Hiring an amateur or unprofessional for your website work brings such risks. So, the best approach would be to make the website owner familiar about the issue. In case it all had been a mistake, the issue will be resolved without involving any threats.

However, if the party doesn’t respond, it is time to shoot a more-serious mail.

3. Second contact:

If you don’t hear from the copycat for few days, it is time to send the second mail stating the repercussions of copyright infringements and legal action. Most parties usually take down the website and copied content to avoid litigation. However, there are few that will still choose not to reply. For such parties, below points do the trick.

4. DMCA take-down notice to hosting service provider:

www.whoishostingthis.com will help you discover who is hosting the website that stole your design or whole website. Fill the formal DMCA notice and send it to the service provider. If there are proofs asserting your claim, most hosting firms will take down the copycat to avoid getting pulled into a legal brawl. Learn how to file a notice.

5. Take legal action:

In case the stolen digital content is very valuable for you and you are determined to take down the culprit at any expense, then, hire an attorney and let him do the rest. Just a single letter from your lawyer will shake the very ground beneath the offender but we would recommend you to take the legal path only if none of the above works.

The process of taking down a copycat is time consuming and can sometimes even take months. Hence, it is always better to prevent people from copying your website design, graphics or content.

How to protect website from copycats & infringement?

You must have heard ‘prevention is better than cure’. The saying is very much true when it comes to avoiding content and website copy-paste complications. Below portion of the article lists points that will help you protect website from copycats;

• Secure your code – To protect your unique website features, you require encrypted code and extra layers of protection. Expert team of developers can easily add such security layers and protect you from design & code theft. Discuss the same with your hired designers & developers.
• Disable copy-paste – Your web development team can easily protect your website content from copy-paste by making script additions in your web pages. This option is especially recommended to photographers, artists, designers, exclusive sellers, etc who display their work on their website. While this will stop most of the users, someone with code understanding can pass through this layer of security.

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• Put copyright details on website – Warn people beforehand that your website content is your copyright material and using it without your permission will attract legal action. This will turn away most of the copycats.
• Get professional help – There are various tech companies that offer solutions to help brands in managing media content and protect digital resources. www.civolution.com is a firm that offers content recognition solutions. www.digimarc.com is a company that specializes in image safeguards.
• WordPress protection – In case your website runs on WordPress, the platform offers a plugin to protect images and text. Get more details at wordpress.org/plugins/wp-copyright-protection.

Above listed points will help you in protecting your website design, content and graphics from 99% of the web users. For the other one percent, you can either prepare for a long legal battle or learn to ignore.

As a team of website designers and developers, we realize the true worth of online brand identity, and thus are determined to help clients and business owners to protect website from copyright infringement.

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