Copied content: proving the work was yours
Your own photographs, or a paragraph you wrote yourself, sitting on somebody else’s website is one of the few problems of this kind that is obvious on sight. The instinct is to write and say so. The awkward part is the question that comes back: show us it was yours.
Copyright in the United Kingdom is not registered. There is no certificate to produce, no office that recorded when the work came into existence, and nothing for either side to search. The right arises on creation, without application or formality. Because nothing outside your own business marked the making of the work, the only record is the one your ordinary habits left behind.
That alters the shape of the argument. These disputes are rarely disagreements about whether copying occurred; where text or images have been lifted, that is usually apparent from putting the two pages beside each other. What is in dispute is origin and title: who made this, when, and under what arrangement.
Whether the work is yours at all
Work made by an employee in the course of their employment usually belongs to the employer. Work commissioned from outside the business does not. In most cases the freelance photographer, copywriter, agency or developer keeps the copyright in what they produced, and the client has bought a service and an implied permission to use the result for the purpose commissioned. Title normally passes only where it is assigned in writing.
Photography is the usual casualty, because it is the material most often bought in from a specialist and least often documented afterwards. It is also, in a copying dispute, the material most likely to be the thing that was taken.
That combination produces a particular kind of difficulty. A business moves to complain about its own images and discovers that the person entitled to complain is a supplier it stopped using years ago, whose cooperation it now needs and whose price is about to be informed by the dispute. An assignment can be taken after the event, and a former supplier on reasonable terms will often sign one, but what that signature costs tends to rise once they learn something is attached to it. Settling title before raising the copying with anybody is the whole of the difference.
What a record of provenance has to show
Both sides hold a copy of the work, so possession shows nothing. What has to be shown is that it passed through your hands before theirs, and that it was made rather than obtained.
Which is why discarded material carries more weight than the published version. Drafts and rejected variants, a layout that never went live, the frames either side of the shot you chose: a copyist holds the finished item and nothing that preceded it, because for them nothing did.
Almost nobody assembles this deliberately. The businesses in a strong position are usually those whose ordinary habits left a trail, with camera files kept after retouching and a content system quietly dating every revision. The position is weakest in the months after a site migration or rebrand, when the old site and the files behind it left with an account nobody kept open.
The record also has to be capable of being produced by somebody other than the person who made it. Provenance held in one designer's personal storage, or in a former agency's archive, is provenance you may not be able to reach on the day it is wanted, and a business that cannot lay hands on its own originals is in much the same position as one that never kept them.
The copying itself needs preserving before the other party knows it has been noticed. Copied material has a habit of being quietly amended once a complaint lands, and a record made afterwards invites argument about what was there.
Putting a name to the work
One measure is open to everyone and almost universally neglected. Where a person is named as the author on copies of a work issued to the public, the law will usually presume they are the author, and it falls to whoever disputes that to displace it.
In practice that means a credit line beneath a photograph, an ownership notice in a site footer, a named byline, and authorship information left intact in the file rather than stripped out. That last point is where good intentions fail: the export settings a web team uses to compress images for page speed commonly remove that information unless somebody has asked them not to, so a year of careful crediting vanishes at publication.
None of it creates a right you did not have, but it moves the starting point of any later argument.
Copying, and mere resemblance
Copyright protects the expression of an idea rather than the idea itself.
A rival selling the same products, arranged the same way, in the same reassuring tone, may be doing nothing unlawful. Layout conventions, functional page structures and factual specifications are thin material for a claim. What matters is whether a substantial part of your particular expression has been taken, and substantiality is a question of importance rather than length: a short passage carrying the distinctive part of the writing may qualify where a long stretch of flat description does not.
That has an awkward commercial edge. The pages a business is proudest of, written to a house style and tuned for search, are frequently the flattest of everything it publishes, while the writing that would carry a complaint is the odd paragraph nobody optimised. Working out which of your material is actually worth defending is a different exercise from working out which of it has been taken.
Photographs and original artwork tend to be the firmest ground, followed by written copy with a voice of its own. Look and feel is weakest, and a complaint framed around it invites an argument you need not have had. Where the copying extends to your name or the get-up of your products, different rights are engaged and the analysis is not this one.
When to spend nothing
A good deal of copying does not repay pursuing, and saying so plainly is more useful.
A dormant site abroad that has scraped a paragraph of your text and competes with you for nothing costs you nothing measurable. Removal through the host or the platform is often available cheaply, and that is where it should end. Taking such a party further turns a small annoyance into a substantial bill.
There is a harder version of the same judgement. The copyist is frequently not a stranger: a reseller recycling your listing text, a distributor who lifted your photography for a marketplace listing, or the agency that built both sites and reused your wording in the next brief. You are usually in the right. A channel partner who receives a formal complaint tends to stop being a channel partner, and the revenue lost that way is rarely recovered by the claim that caused it. Permission on stated terms, or the contract amendment that should have covered this, often costs less than being proved correct.
What justifies real expenditure carries commercial weight: a competitor using your material to win customers you are bidding for, a departed employee who took the catalogue, or a copyist devaluing something you intend to sell or license. Deciding which of those you have is the part to do first.
Asserting ownership in writing before establishing that you own it. If the photographs were taken by a freelancer who never signed an assignment, you have claimed a right you do not hold to the one person with a reason to check. And what might have been a removal becomes an argument about title, run while you still need that freelancer’s signature.
This guide is general information about how these matters usually run. It is not advice, and nothing becomes advice until terms are agreed in writing. Brandleys Legal Ltd delivers reserved legal activities alongside regulated partners.