Copyright Takedown Defense: Protecting a Small Business Website

For many small businesses along the Colorado Front Range, a professional website is how new clients find them and decide whether to make an appointment or hire their services. So when a business owner receives a demand letter accusing them of stealing intellectual property, they’re forced to take it seriously. 

Our client, a Colorado business owner, received a demand letter accusing them of plagiarizing a competitor’s entire website and stealing its intake forms. The opposing party demanded that our client take the site down entirely and threatened to sue for copyright infringement, trademark violations, and related business torts. 

Fortunately, our firm understands that copyright disputes are rarely as clear-cut as they sound. Generic industry language, standardized templates, and common layouts often lack the originality that copyright protects. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) provides “safe harbor” protections for website service providers against claims of copyright infringement when registered with the U.S. Copyright Office. The demand letter failed to identify a specific infringing page or URL, and its DMCA claims did not meet statutory requirements—facts that may otherwise be overlooked without an intellectual property attorney’s close attention to detail. 

Our attorneys began by searching the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and the Colorado Secretary of State's records to determine whether the opposing party’s claims had any legal basis. We verified that the opposing party held no registered copyrights or trademarks. This significantly weakened their position, so we went on the offensive. We advised them to file their own USPTO trademark application and use our firm as a registered agent. These actions would bolster our client’s standing and could require the unregistered opposing party to rebrand, thereby limiting any common law claims to the state level.