Nothing is more aggravating then spending a good bit of time and money on your website only to discover someone has 
scraped all or part of it. This begs the rather obvious question of what do you do if someone copies your website?
Deep Breath
The first step is to take a deep breath, calm down and really look at the offending piece in question. You might just discover the “theft” is a positive for your business. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked to look at copied images or written content only to find the content is being used to positively portray my clients offerings.
If someone has borrowed an image of one of your products to write a glowing review, do you really want to accuse them of copyright infringement? Why? What do you gain from killing off positive publicity?
Mind you, there can be situations where you prefer they don’t use that particular piece of content. If this is the case, then contact them and ask them nicely to change to something else. Turn it into a win-win by offering to do an interview they can publish on their site. Don’t just fly off the handle. There may be no reason to.
War Footing
Unfortunately, most people copying sites are doing so for nefarious purposes. If you find this to be the case, it is time to become aggressive. Many attorneys will suggest you send out a cease and desist letter to the person in question. While this can certainly be done, my personal belief is you end up wasting a good bit of time when there is a far quicker approach.
With my clients, I use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 ["DMCA"] to deal with the problem. The proper approach is to investigate and identify the hosting company for the site in question. This can be a bit of a challenge at times since a person copying websites will try to hide any information about themselves, but it can be done.
Once the host is identified, the next step is to serve a DMCA takedown notice on it. The host then must take down the pages or site in question. If the host does not, it can be held contributorily liable for the copyright infringement. As you can image, hosts prefer to avoid such an outcome.
At this point, the host will contact the person listed on the hosting account for the offending website and notify them of the takedown notice. That person can then contest the takedown complaint. I’ve never had a single situation where this has occurred in with a copied website. There is simply no basis for doing so.
The end result is the offending website is taken down and stays down. The process typically takes three days or so to play out.
International Hosting
If you are unlucky, the person who copied your website will be using a host outside of the United States. The DMCA is a U.S. law, so it is ineffective in most cases involving a host located outside of the country.
Does this mean you have no options? Not at all. There is simply much more footwork involved in making the copied site useless. The first step is to file DMCA takedown notices with Google and Bing/Yahoo. The goal is to get the offending site kicked out of these search engines. Doing so, in most cases, is sufficient to make the site worthless to the scammer and they will simply drop the website.
If the site remains active, the final answer is to pursue an investigation to identify the parties controlling it. Depending on their specifics, a plan can then be put in place to attack them in an effort to have the site taken down. This can be an expensive proposition, so it is usually wise to pursue all other options available before going down this road.
In Closing
There are plenty of steps that can be taken if someone copies your website. The important thing is to understand the logical process and then follow the technical requirements of laws such as the DMCA. When done correctly, the removal of the offending site is the likely outcome.
If someone has copied your website, contact me to discuss your options and the steps that can be taken to remove the copied content. The offending site can often be taken down in 1 to 2 business days.
Richard A. Chapo, Esq.
@richardachapo