Someone stole your content. Here's what recovery looks like

First: don't tip off the thief

The instinct when you find your work on someone else's site is to fire off an angry email. Resist it. A warned infringer can strip identifying details, backdate posts, move hosting, or file a fraudulent copyright claim against you before you've preserved anything. Professional recovery starts silently: archiving every infringing URL with timestamps, capturing the evidence that establishes you as the original (publication dates, drafts, raw files, EXIF data) and mapping how far the theft has spread. Stolen content is rarely in just one place; scrapers syndicate, a single stolen article often propagates to content farms within days, each copy linking the others into a web that search engines struggle to untangle.

Only once the record is locked do we make contact, and usually not with the thief at all, but with the platforms and providers who are legally obliged to act.

How stolen work actually gets recovered

Copyright gives the creator of an original work powerful removal rights the moment the work exists. Our specialists use them in sequence: takedown notices to the site's hosting provider, platform-level filings where the theft lives on YouTube, Etsy, Amazon or social networks, and de-indexing requests that pull the stolen copy out of Google, which matters enormously when a scraped version is outranking your original and siphoning your traffic. Search engines also accept evidence of which version came first, and presenting that well can restore your rankings even before the copy comes down.

For sites built entirely on stolen content, single-page takedowns are the wrong tool. We escalate to the infrastructure: registrars, hosts, ad networks serving the site's revenue, and payment processors if they're selling your work. When theft is commercial and ongoing, we document everything to a standard your attorney can use. We're not a law firm, but our case files are built so legal escalation is a step, not a restart.

Two honest caveats. First, not every copy is worth chasing: a dead blog with no readers and no rankings may deserve nothing but a line in the evidence file, while a single scraper outranking your original deserves the full sequence, and part of our job is telling you plainly which is which. Second, speed changes everything: copies breed copies, and the same theft addressed in week one is a fraction of the work, and the damage, it becomes by month six.

And then make sure it doesn't restart

One thief usually means your content is exposed to all of them, scrapers work in networks. After the cleanup, our monitoring watches for your text, images and video fingerprints resurfacing anywhere new, and files fast while a fresh copy is still one URL instead of fifty. That's the recurring layer our Protection Plans provide for writers, photographers, brands and store owners.

It also changes how theft feels. Clients consistently describe the discovery moment as violating: your work, with your name stripped off it, earning someone else money. Handing the problem to a team that documents, files and reports back turns an open-ended grievance into a managed process with statuses and end dates, which is worth almost as much as the removals themselves.

If you've just found your work somewhere it shouldn't be, book a free Exposure Scan. We'll find every copy, tell you honestly which ones matter, and map the fastest route to getting them down.