A website turned your video into an article

The pattern is consistent. A social account posts a clip or your thumbnail with a teaser caption, and the link goes to a website. On that site, an article retells your video’s story, often following your narration line by line, surrounded by adverts. The social post brings the visitors and the website earns from them.

That makes the website a separate problem from the social post. Reporting the Reel or TikTok removes the signpost. The article, the adverts and your thumbnail stay up until you deal with the site itself.

Often, yes. This is general information, not legal advice, and every case turns on its facts.

• Your narration is a literary work, and so is your script. A close rewrite that follows your wording and structure can copy a substantial part of it. A site that uses the same facts in genuinely its own words usually doesn’t, because copyright protects expression, not facts or ideas.
• Your thumbnail is an artistic work. Re-hosting it is copying, and publishing it on a web page is “communication to the public” under section 20 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, which covers making a work available online for people to access when they choose.
• Stills and clips from your video copy your film.

The site’s likely defences are weak. Section 30(2) allows fair dealing for reporting current events with any work “other than a photograph”, so it can’t cover a photograph you took. Criticism, review and quotation need genuine commentary and a sufficient acknowledgement. GOV.UK’s guidance says fair dealing depends on whether the use substitutes for the original and costs the owner revenue, and whether the amount taken was necessary. An article that retells your whole video for ad money scores badly on both.

Hosts have a legal shield, and a good notice is what removes it. Under regulation 19 of the Electronic Commerce (EC Directive) Regulations 2002, a hosting provider isn’t liable for damages over material its customer stores, as long as it doesn’t have actual knowledge of the unlawful material, or, once it does, it acts “expeditiously” to remove it.

Your notice creates that knowledge. The regulations tell a court to consider whether the host received a notice, and how far it gave the sender’s full name and address, where the material is, and what makes it unlawful. So the notice that works is the one that leaves no room for doubt: exact addresses, your original, what was copied and a clear statement that it’s unauthorised. A one-line “this is mine, take it down” gives the host an excuse to wait.

• The article’s exact address, and every other page on the site that copies your work.
• The thumbnail’s own address. Right-click the image and copy its address. It’s often on the site’s own server or a separate image service.
• Your original video link and its publish date.
• Evidence of the page as it is now. Save it as a PDF with the date and address visible, and take screenshots. A copy in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine gives a third-party dated record.
• Side-by-side passages. Put three or four of your narration lines beside the article’s sentences. Unusual phrases, and your own mistakes copied across, are the strongest evidence.
• The registrar and host details from a domain lookup, covered below.
• A business name and email address for the notices.

1. 1

   Look up the domain

   Use ICANN Lookup for most domains. Since 28 January 2025 ICANN has required gTLD registries and registrars to provide RDAP, which is replacing WHOIS. For .uk names, Nominet says its WHOIS is being phased out in favour of RDAP. Note the registrar, its abuse contact and the name servers.

2. 2

   Identify the host

   The name servers and the site’s IP address usually point to the hosting company. If they point to Cloudflare, the site is using Cloudflare as a proxy, and the real host is hidden behind it.

3. 3

   Send your notice to the host

   Use the host’s abuse or copyright form, or its abuse email. Include every address, your original, what was copied, your contact details, a good-faith statement and your signature.

4. 4

   Use Cloudflare’s route if it’s proxied

   Cloudflare says that for sites it only proxies, it forwards copyright complaints to the hosting provider and the site operator rather than removing content. For content Cloudflare hosts itself, such as Pages, Workers, R2, Stream and Images, it removes it on a complete notice.

5. 5

   Report the image separately

   If the thumbnail sits on a different image service, send that service its own notice with the image’s address.

6. 6

   Escalate to the registrar if the host goes quiet

   ICANN’s 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement requires registrars to publish an abuse contact and to take “reasonable and prompt steps to investigate and respond appropriately” to abuse reports. Include your earlier notices and dates.

Registrars aren’t copyright courts. Their abuse duties are written for illegal activity broadly, and they rarely suspend a domain over copyright alone. They’re the escalation, not the first stop.

Google’s legal removals hub is the starting point: report content for legal reasons. Google is clear about what it can and can’t do: “We can restrict access to content that appears in Google products and services, but that content may still exist elsewhere on the web.”

• Delisting cuts traffic. People searching for your story stop landing on the copy.
• It doesn’t delete the page. Visitors from social links still reach it, and the site still earns from them.
• It can reach the adverts. According to Google’s AdSense publisher policies, publishers may not show Google ads on pages with content that infringes copyright. If the page carries Google ads, say so in your notice.
• Your notice may be published. According to Google’s transparency help pages, removal notices for Search can be shared with the Lumen Database, a public archive. Use a business name and email.

Keep it formal and complete. This is an example to adapt:

I am the owner of the copyright in the video I wrote, narrated and published on my YouTube channel on [date]: [link to your original]. The page at [article address] reproduces a substantial part of my narration, rewritten sentence by sentence, and displays my thumbnail image, also hosted at [image address]. I have not authorised this use. I have a good faith belief that it is not authorised by me, my agent or the law, and the information in this notice is accurate. Please remove or disable access to this material. [Your name, business address, email, date]

Add two or three side-by-side passages beneath it. Don’t claim the facts of the story, other people’s photos or your video’s title.

Neither the regulations nor most hosts set a fixed timetable. The legal test is that a host acts “expeditiously” once it knows. In practice:

• Hosts usually acknowledge and pass the notice to their customer, who may take the page down, edit it or argue.
• Cloudflare forwards complaints about proxied sites to the host and the site operator. It doesn’t remove content it only proxies.
• Google reviews delisting requests against its own policies. A delisted page can still be reached directly.
• Some sites swap the image for a slightly edited copy or move the article. Check again a few days after anything comes down.

• They’re vague. No exact address, no original, no explanation of what was copied.
• They’re sent to the wrong party. A notice to Cloudflare about a proxied site is forwarded, not acted on. A notice only to the registrar may go nowhere.
• They claim the facts. A true story told in genuinely different words isn’t a copy of your narration.
• They over-claim. Claiming stock photos, archive footage or a title weakens everything else.
• They’re missing contact details and a statement. A host needs to know who’s complaining and that you stand behind it.

Some sites work through a creator’s whole back catalogue. Log every article, notice and response with dates. A host that keeps receiving well-founded notices about the same customer is harder to ignore. Moral rights are a weak tool here: the right to be named must be asserted first and has exceptions for news and periodicals, so lead with ordinary copyright.

If the host and registrar won’t act and the site profits from your work, UK law offers more. This is general information, not legal advice.

• A letter before claim sets out what was copied and what you want, and gives the operator a reasonable time to reply. It often ends things.
• The IPEC small claims track hears copyright claims of £10,000 or less. Hearings are informal, parties often represent themselves, and the loser seldom pays the winner’s legal costs.
• A solicitor is worth it when the operator hides behind privacy services and needs identifying by court order, when the scale runs across many videos, or when you need an urgent injunction.

Farm articles often re-host thumbnails to break the link back to the original. With the image on their own server, nothing on the page points to your channel, so we report the image’s own address alongside the article and show the two side by side. If a site like this is copying your videos, the free pack at the top of this page is where to start.