One morning you search your business name and find a page you did not create. A competitor is selling a course built from your video modules. Your product photos are sitting on a marketplace listing under someone else's brand. A paid template is circulating in a private Facebook group with your logo cropped out. However it surfaces, the pattern is the same: content you invested time and money creating is being copied, shared or resold without your permission, and customers can no longer tell who made it.
Under Australian law this is usually copyright infringement, and the law is on your side more than you might expect. The Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) gives the owner of an original work the exclusive right to reproduce it, publish it and communicate it to the public. Copying your photos, re-uploading your videos, distributing your downloads or republishing your text without a licence each engages those rights. Protection is automatic: copyright comes into existence when an original work is created, and there is no registration system in Australia. The problem is rarely whether the law protects the content. The problem is whether you can prove you own it, capture evidence before it disappears, and pick a removal route that actually works.
The two pressures that matter are time and evidence. Pirated content is re-uploaded in minutes and deleted just as fast, usually the moment you complain. A court, a platform's copyright team and a web host all act on what you can show, not what you suspect. If you spend days building the perfect legal argument while the copy spreads, or if you fire off an angry message and the page vanishes before you have captured it, you have made enforcement harder for yourself. The response that works is a sequence: confirm what was taken, preserve proof, take the fastest removal route, then escalate in proportion to the damage.
A five-step response to online content theft
The steps below follow the order a business owner actually experiences them. Steps one and two can be done in the same sitting; the rest branch depending on what you find.
Confirm what was taken and whose copyright it is
Before you contact anyone, identify the content and the right you are relying on. Copyright protects original literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works, which in practice covers your written copy, product photos, illustrations, designs, videos, audio and software code. For each piece of copied content, ask four questions:
- What was taken: a photo, article, video, PDF, template or piece of software. This tells you which exclusive right is engaged: reproduction, publication or communication to the public.
- Where it is appearing: a marketplace listing, social media account, website or file-sharing forum. This tells you which removal route is available.
- How it is being used: free sharing, resale, impersonation or SEO copying. This tells you whether copyright is your main claim or only one of several.
- Who owns it: can your business prove ownership? This is the question that most often blocks enforcement.
Australian copyright law starts from a simple position: the author of a work is its first owner (s 35 of the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth)). Two exceptions matter to small businesses. If an employee created the work as part of their job under a contract of service, the employer owns the copyright. But if a contractor, freelancer, photographer or designer created it, they own the copyright unless the engagement agreement assigns it to you in writing; an assignment of copyright has no effect unless it is in writing and signed by the assignor (s 196). Paying for work does not by itself transfer copyright. If you cannot show a written assignment, the other side can answer your complaint with "prove you own it" and you will be stuck.
Copyright is also not the only claim available. If the copying involves impersonation or lookalike branding, the conduct may be misleading or deceptive under s 18 of the Australian Consumer Law, which is Schedule 2 of the Competition and Consumer Act 2010 (Cth). Registered trade marks and the common law action of passing off can support a brand-based claim, and if the person copying is a customer, your website terms may give you a contractual claim as well. The right mix depends on what was copied and how it is being used, and a lawyer can map it quickly.
Preserve the evidence before it disappears
Capture everything before you tell anyone. The moment an infringer learns you are onto them, pages get taken down, accounts are renamed and files are deleted. Evidence that existed at nine in the morning is frequently gone by lunchtime.
What to gather:
- Screenshots: showing the full URL, the page content and a visible date and time where possible
- Screen recordings: for video or interactive content that a still image cannot capture
- Downloaded copies: where they are legally and safely accessible
- Your original source files: with creation dates and edit history intact
- Proof of first publication: such as the original page on your own site or an archived post
Keep everything in a folder with consistent naming, and do not edit the captures. Two habits cost people enforcement later: relying on memory instead of screenshots, and contacting the infringer first and capturing evidence second. If the loss is significant, have a lawyer review the evidence before you send anything, because some capture methods produce material that is harder to use later.
Take the fastest removal route first
The quickest win is usually removing the content from where it is hosted rather than chasing the person who put it there. Three pathways exist in parallel, and you can run more than one at a time:
- Platform reporting tools: every major marketplace, social media platform and video site runs its own copyright reporting process with its own evidence requirements. These are often faster than a legal letter, and repeat reports build a pattern that platforms act on.
- Web host and domain complaints: if the infringing page sits on its own website, find who hosts it and complain to the host or the domain registrar about the infringing material.
- Search engine removal requests: where copied pages are ranking and pulling your traffic, removal requests to search engines address the SEO damage even if the page itself stays up.
For piracy hosted overseas, Australian law provides a bigger hammer. Under s 115A of the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth), the owner of a copyright can apply to the Federal Court for an injunction requiring internet service providers to disable access to an online location outside Australia whose primary purpose or effect is infringing copyright. Courts have made these site-blocking orders, for example in Roadshow Films Pty Ltd v Telstra Corporation Ltd [2016] FCA 1503, and the section also lets the court order search engines not to return results that point users to the location. This is not a DIY route: it is a court application prepared by a lawyer, and it is worth it only where a site is repeatedly hosting your content.
Send a formal letter if you can name the infringer
If you can identify the person or business behind the copying, and the copying looks deliberate, commercial or repeated, a letter of demand is the next rung. Its job is to put the infringement on the record and give the other side a clear, face-saving way to fix it: remove the content, stop selling, provide an undertaking not to do it again and confirm compliance within a set timeframe. A well-drafted letter states your ownership, identifies the specific works copied, sets out the infringement, and reserves your right to escalate. It does not make threats you are not prepared to follow through on.
The letter also matters for a less obvious reason: damages. If infringement is proven, the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) gives a court power to award an injunction plus either damages or an account of profits, with additional damages available where the infringement is flagrant and where deterrence, the infringer's conduct after being notified and the benefit they gained justify it (s 115). But a defendant who was not aware, and had no reasonable grounds to suspect, that they were infringing is not liable for damages, only an account of profits (s 115(3)). A written notice converts "innocent" into "on notice", which is a large part of why the letter earns its keep.
Escalate only where the numbers justify it
Some infringers ignore letters, re-upload content the moment a takedown completes, or operate anonymously from overseas. Before you escalate to litigation, do the maths. Federal Court proceedings for copyright infringement can deliver an injunction, damages or an account of profits and, in flagrant cases, additional damages, but they cost time and money and they take months. They make sense where your business depends on the content: a course library, a software product, a subscription site or a media operation. They rarely make sense for a single photo copied once.
Where content keeps reappearing on a platform that ignores your reports, one more legal lever can matter. A person or platform that authorises infringement is itself liable, and the Act says that in deciding whether someone authorised the infringement a court considers their power to prevent it and whether they took reasonable steps to do so (s 36(1A)). Persistent, documented reports to a platform that does nothing can shift liability onto the platform itself.
Two further points are worth knowing. First, an author's moral rights survive independently of the copyright owner's rights: creators have a right of attribution and a right of integrity, so stripping your branding and republishing altered versions of your work can engage those rights as well (Part IX of the Act). Second, negotiation remains an option at every stage: undertakings, a share of the infringer's profits or a settlement can resolve matters faster and cheaper than a judgment.
When to bring a lawyer into the response
The steps above are ones most business owners can start themselves, but three situations change the calculation. First, if ownership is unclear because a contractor or agency created the content: the enforceability of everything that follows depends on a written assignment existing or being obtainable. Second, if the infringement is commercial scale or repeat: the difference between a takedown and a damages claim is the quality of the evidence and the framing of the claim. Third, if the content is hosted overseas and a site-blocking application is on the table, which only an owner's application to the Federal Court can achieve.
If you bring the situation to us, a practitioner would start by reviewing your ownership chain: engagement agreements, assignment clauses and employment arrangements for whoever created the content. They would then map which rights are engaged, copyright, misleading or deceptive conduct under the Australian Consumer Law, trade marks, or a combination, and advise which claim is strongest and cheapest to run. They would prepare the letter of demand, negotiate any undertakings, and review your evidence for admissibility. If escalation is justified, they would assess the cost-benefit case for Federal Court proceedings and, where the infringer is overseas, prepare an application under s 115A for site-blocking orders. On the way through, they would also close the gaps that made you vulnerable: assignment clauses in contractor agreements, website terms that restrict copying, and access controls on paid content.
Proving you own the content
The single thing to remember tomorrow is this: most online piracy responses are won or lost on paper before the infringement ever happens. Copyright is automatic, so the law is rarely the problem. Ownership is. If you cannot show a written assignment from the contractor who built your website, your course or your product photos, every later step, takedown, letter, court application, stalls on the same demand: prove you own it. The cheapest fix is a written IP assignment in every engagement agreement, signed before the work is created.
For the response itself, the sequence holds together as a whole: confirm what was taken and whose copyright it is, preserve the evidence before anyone is told, take the fastest removal route, write a letter that puts the infringer on notice, and escalate only where the numbers justify it. In parallel, close the obvious gaps: clear terms for website users and customers, access controls and watermarks on paid content, and a lawyer's review of your ownership documents. Each layer makes the next infringement cheaper to fix, and most infringers move on when the response is organised, documented and consistent.