Copied Word for Word: What to Do When a Competitor Lifts Your Website

The giveaway was a spelling mistake.

A stonemason in Clare had written his own service pages a few winters back, in the evenings, describing how he repoints a rubble wall in lime mortar and why cement traps damp behind the stone. Halfway down the paragraph about breathability, he had typed "morter". The typo was still sitting there, years later. It was also sitting, in the same sentence, inside the same paragraph, on the website of a company operating two counties over.

This is a composite case, assembled from jobs we have worked through more than once. The shape of it rarely changes. Whoever does the copying takes the pages that took the longest to write, because those are the pages that are hard to produce and easy to lift. And the owner almost never finds out on purpose.

His first reaction was the normal one. Ring a solicitor. Get it stopped by Monday.

That is not where this ended up.

The First Instinct Is a Solicitor. That Is Rarely the First Move.

Copyright in Ireland does not work the way most business owners assume it does. There is nothing to file and no register to join. The Intellectual Property Office of Ireland puts it plainly: "There is no system of registration for copyright protection in Ireland as copyright arises automatically on the creation of an original work." You do not need to publish the work, add a symbol, or tell anyone. As the same page states, "protection is free and automatic" ^[1].

So the stonemason already owned those words. He owned them the evening he typed them.

Owning them and being able to demonstrate, on a specific date, that you published them first are two separate jobs. The second one decides everything that follows. A solicitor's letter is a fine instrument once you have that second job done, and an expensive one before.

There is also a practical problem with leading with the letter. The moment the other side knows you have noticed, the page can be reworded in about ten minutes. Now the letter describes text that no longer exists, the screenshots you did not take are gone, and you are the one who looks like they have made it up. You have paid for the letter either way.

Freeze the Evidence Before You Say a Word

I got this wrong once, years ago. I told an owner to email the other company the same afternoon, before we had captured anything, because it felt like the decent thing to do. By the following morning the page had been reworded just enough to muddy it. Capture first, contact second. I have not reversed that order since.

Three things to capture, in this order.

The copy as it stands today. Do not rely on a phone screenshot. Print the page to PDF from a desktop browser, which records the full URL and the date in the footer, and do the same for the copier's home page so the site is identified as well as the page.

An independent, dated record. Anyone can request a capture at the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, including a capture of somebody else's page. Do that for the copied URL. It moves the timestamp out of your hands and into a neutral third party's, which is worth considerably more than your own screenshot when someone disputes the date.

Proof of your own timeline. The published date on your WordPress page, the post revision history sitting quietly in your database, and, best of all, your backups. Most owners have never thought of a backup archive as an evidence trail, but that is exactly what it is. A nightly backup from eighteen months ago containing that page in that wording is a dated copy of your work, held on infrastructure you do not control the clock on.

That last point tends to land. If your backup regime is vague, or it is a plugin you installed once and have not verified since, it is worth an hour of your time to sort out. Our complete guide to WordPress security and backups for Irish websites sets out what a proper regime actually looks like.

What Google Actually Does About a Copied Page

Most owners assume Google spots the copy and punishes the copier. It is a reasonable assumption. It is not a reliable one.

Google's spam policies do treat this as a violation. Scraping is defined there as "the practice of taking content from other sites, often through automated means, and hosting it with the purpose of manipulating search rankings", and the listed examples include "republishing content from other sites without adding any original content or value, or even citing the original source" and copying content and modifying "it only slightly (for example, by substituting synonyms or using automated techniques)" ^[2]. That is a fair description of what happened to the stonemason.

The stated consequence is real, and it is conditional: "Sites that violate our policies may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all."

May. Not will.

Detection is automated in the first instance, human only as needed, and nothing about it is quick. Google also has no perfect way of knowing which version came first. If the copier's site is older, better linked, or simply crawled more often, it can be their page that Google decides to show.

Which is where this stops being an abstract irritation. Someone in the county searching for lime mortar repointing reads a paragraph written by the stonemason and rings the number at the bottom of it, which is not his. He never sees that enquiry. There is no alert for the job you were not asked to quote on, and no way to count them afterwards. That is the actual cost, and it accrues quietly for as long as the copy stays up.

Two Routes That Do Not Involve a Courtroom

Ask Google to delist the copy

Google runs a legal removals process that is deliberately separate from ordinary spam reporting, and it says so directly: "reporting content through a content/product policy path does not substitute for reporting it through a legal path" ^[3]. Reporting the page as spam and reporting it as a copyright infringement are different actions with different outcomes. Do the second one.

The process asks you to confirm that you are the copyright owner or authorised to act on their behalf, to identify the work, and to point at the specific URLs. There is a counter notice route for the other side, so expect the possibility of a reply rather than a silent win.

One sentence is worth reading twice before you pin your hopes on this route. Google states: "We can restrict access to content that appears in Google products and services, but that content may still exist elsewhere on the web" ^[4].

Delisting is not deletion. The copied page stays online. It simply stops being findable through the channel that was doing the damage.

Notify the company hosting the copy

The second route goes to the hosting provider. Under the EU's Digital Services Act, providers of hosting services have to give any person a way to notify them about content believed to be illegal, the mechanism has to be straightforward to use, and the provider has to confirm receipt and tell you what it decided. That is a meaningful shift from the days of emailing an abuse address into a void.

Finding the host takes a WHOIS lookup and a look at the site's name servers. Send the same evidence pack, state plainly that the material is an unauthorised reproduction of your copyright work, and identify the exact URLs.

Whether that goes anywhere depends entirely on whether there is a real operations team at the other end reading notices. Which is, in fairness, the same question worth asking about your own provider on the day you need logs, a restore, or a straight answer from a person. It is why we run Web60 on Irish infrastructure with a support team you can actually reach in your own timezone, rather than a ticket queue in another hemisphere.

Where Both Routes Run Out of Road

Now the honest part, because both of these have limits and you should know them before you rely on either.

Coimisiún na Meán is Ireland's Digital Services Coordinator, and it is the body you would escalate to if a provider ignores a properly made notice. But its own guidance notes that for a complaint under the Digital Services Act, "we need to make sure the platform is established in Ireland" ^[5]. If the copy is sitting on a host in Arizona, that escalation route is closed to you. The notice to the host still stands. The regulator behind it does not.

Copyright also protects the expression, not the idea. A competitor can read your page, understand exactly how you position the work, and write the same substance in their own words. That is entirely lawful and there is no route that touches it. What you can act on is the wording, the structure, and the images.

And sometimes the right operational call is to let it go. If your website is a few contact details and a photo gallery, a copy of it is not costing you enough to justify four weeks of your attention and a folder of PDFs. Spend the time on the pages that earn. This process is worth running when the copied material is genuinely the thing customers choose you for.

The Photographs Were a Separate Problem

The stonemason's pages carried photographs of finished walls, and he assumed they travelled with the text as one complaint. They did not.

The images he had taken himself, he owned outright, and those went into the removal request alongside the wording. The two supplier photographs on the same page were different. He held a licence to use them, which is not the same thing as holding the rights, so he had no standing to report those at all. That distinction catches people out constantly, in both directions, and it is the reason somebody owns the copyright to every photo on your website is worth understanding before you need it rather than after.

Check who actually owns each image before you list it. A removal request that overreaches is easier for the other side to push back on than one that is tightly drawn.

The Four-Step Response to a Copied Page

Capture. Print the copied page to PDF from a desktop browser and request a Wayback Machine snapshot of it, before you contact anybody at all.

Verify. Confirm you actually own each element you plan to report, checking the licence position on every photograph separately from the text.

Notify. File the legal removal request with Google for the specific URLs, and send the same evidence to the hosting provider serving the copy.

Escalate. If the host ignores a properly made notice and is established in Ireland, take it to Coimisiún na Meán. If it is not, that is the point at which formal legal advice starts to earn its fee.

Conclusion

The stonemason's copied pages came down. Not on the Monday, and not because of a letter. It took a delisting request, a notice to the host, and a fortnight of nothing appearing to happen, which is the part nobody warns you about.

What made it work was the order of operations. He captured before he contacted, so when the other side went quiet, the record did not depend on anyone's goodwill or memory. The free routes did the work. The solicitor he had budgeted for on day one was never needed.

If you have ever wondered whether anyone has taken your pages, the check costs nothing: paste a distinctive sentence from your best-performing page into Google, in quotation marks, and see what comes back. Do it once a quarter. Most of the time you will find nothing, and that is a good ten seconds spent. If you do find something, you now know what to gather before you pick up the phone.

Frequently Asked Questions

Someone copied my website content. Is that illegal in Ireland?

Original writing on your website is protected by copyright from the moment you create it. The Intellectual Property Office of Ireland states that there is no system of registration for copyright in Ireland because protection arises automatically on the creation of an original work, and that protection is free and automatic. Copying your text without permission infringes that right. What copyright does not protect is the underlying idea or the facts, so a competitor is free to describe the same service in their own words.

Will Google penalise the site that copied my content?

Not automatically, and not always. Google's spam policies treat scraping as a violation and state that sites which violate the policies may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all. The important word is may. Enforcement is largely automated, it is not instant, and there is no guarantee Google will correctly identify which version came first. Reporting the copy through Google's legal removal process is a more direct route than waiting for the spam systems to act.

How do I prove I wrote my website content first?

Build a dated evidence pack before you contact anyone. Capture the copied page as a PDF that records the URL and the date. Request a Wayback Machine snapshot of the copied page so an independent third party holds a timestamped record. Then assemble proof of your own timeline: the published date in WordPress, the post revision history, and your backup archive. A nightly backup from a year ago containing that page in that wording is a dated copy of your work.

Does a Google copyright removal actually delete the copied page?

No. Google is explicit that it can restrict access to content that appears in Google products and services, but that content may still exist elsewhere on the web. A successful removal takes the copied page out of Google Search results. The page itself stays online until the person who published it takes it down, or until their hosting provider acts on a notice. For most small businesses the search result is where the damage happens, so delisting still matters.

Should I send a solicitor's letter first?

Usually not first. A letter costs money, takes days, and is easy to blunt, because the other side can quietly reword the page so your complaint points at wording that no longer exists. Capture the evidence first, then use the free routes, which are a legal removal request to Google and a notice to the hosting provider serving the copy. Keep formal legal advice for the cases where those routes fail, or where the copying is extensive and commercially serious.

Who do I report the copied website to if the free routes do not work?

Under the EU Digital Services Act, hosting providers must offer an accessible way to report content you believe is illegal, and must confirm receipt and tell you their decision. Start there. Coimisiún na Meán is Ireland's Digital Services Coordinator, but it notes that for a complaint under the Digital Services Act it needs to establish that the provider is established in Ireland, so a host based outside the country falls outside that route.

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