A couple of years ago someone on this forum alerted me to the fact that a business similar to mine in London had basically plagiarized my entire website. He'd substituted a couple of his own images, changed the contact details (obviously) and given the artwork a different color palette. I was pretty angry about it, not least of all because duplicate content can hurt your search ranking with Google, so I called the guy up to ask him to remove it. He was actually very apologetic and admitted that he was just too lazy to come up with his own site, and after talking to him for a while we came to the agreement that he could keep some of my modified artwork as long as he completely rewrote the copy. Looking at the site now it's clear he did make some kind of effort, but it still seems way too similar to mine. I do tend to cool off and forget about these things though. 
 
Tonight it all came back to me and out of curiosity I thought I'd try and find any other examples of sites plagiarizing my content. So I Googled a little bit of the copy and found a ton of sites which have stolen my copy word for word. I even found one in Canada that had translated it into French. On the one hand it's kind of flattering and funny. On the other, why how dare they!
 
I'm wondering what my legal position is. Do I have any legal power to demand they remove my content? Or is this something I can report to Google and have them removed from search results? 

Hi,
 
I do not know for sure, and this might be an even bigger issue, if, for example, you use a program and take their "pre-sets" and then that person uses the same program and pre-sets.
 
I remember Front Page (still use it ... simpler to just type!!!!!) and it was nice to see all those frames, but navigating through them and setting them up was a huge arpthenic pain. I still don't use frames!!!! I might get someone to clean things up, but all in all, I just want it to be me, and I'm not the slick type to show off anyway!
 
This is the "internet" and everyone takes and grabs and steals something. I'm not sure that any "legal" solution is going to help, while also making it worse ... think of musicians using the same set of 10 notes and Big Shot Schmue suing for royalties! Or Petty Sam Boy! Or Marvin the Somebody! or worse, some rap this or other that uses guns instead of a legal system!
 
Careful what you ask for? I don't know ... I have had a screen play stolen, but it will never be used in my time ... and the bigger issue? They are not me! They will never make that film work. It will be a curse that they will regret to the end of time!

Yes people steal and borrow and suchlike, and believe me I would have no beef with someone using my site content as "inspiration" as long as they were going to put it into their own words, but this is about people copying and pasting my advertising copy into their own site word for word. I'm no SEO expert but I do believe that if your site's content is duplicated enough over the web, then site engines like Google are going to see that content as less unique, less relevant and potentially "spam." A single place in Google's site ranking can quite literally cost you thousands of dollars in revenue. I used to be 3rd place in Google's ranking for the most common search term for my business type in New York, and over the last couple of years I've seen myself fall to something like 8th or 9th place, along with a corresponding loss of revenue. Now I'm not going to accuse the plagiarizers of being 100% responsible for this, but if it turns out they might be partly to blame then I'm going to try and do something about it.

Did a quick search for 'website plagiarism' and this came up, don't know if it'll help;
 
http://www.copyscape.com/plagiarism.php

Yeah I saw that and tried running my URL through it. It came back with a few examples but nowhere near as many as the number I found Googling for it myself. I think there is a paid version though, so maybe if you pay them it gives you more.

When I used to do web design this came up a lot. Legally it is plagiarism but hard to enforce, especially internationally. We typically resorted to public shaming, and the more extreme colleagues resorted to hacking.

I was hoping that maybe there was a way of reporting sites to Google, after all it's easy enough to prove that your site was there first. 
 
All this has gotten me to thinking I might as well just make a new website anyway. Mine is looking dated (2010) and I'm seeing a lot of very funky new Wordpress themes which look great and would make designing a new site a breeze by comparison. My current one was done entirely with Notepad++, the HTML and CSS, with graphics designed in Illustrator. It took me freaking ages considering it's only a small site, but I was busy with a lot of other things. 

Wordpress or any other CMS that allows dynamic content update is definitely the way to go. Makes redesign so much easier, especially for large sites.

Yeah the trouble with bodging together a site yourself (as an amateur - I read a book on CSS and off I went ) is that it's hard to incorporate dynamic content and you end up with a fairly static design that would require all sorts of fiddly rearrangement to change on a daily basis. I used a CSS framework (960) to make life easier for myself in terms of layout and browser compatibility, but it was still a frustrating ordeal. 

You have stumbled upon the weak link in the intellectual property chain. Unless you are a major player, like a movie studio, recording company, or Fortune 500 software developer, no one will enforce your rights unless you do. Even the leviathans in the intellectual property business often have to do their own diligence and investigations and present a complaint on a silver platter to the FBI before anything will happen. You have the right to fly to the moon, but do you have the resources?
 
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act actually gives you a low cost opportunity to pursue illegal copying on the internet, and if this is a serious issue, you have the same right as Sony Pictures to issue a takedown notice, assuming that the infringing site is under its jurisdiction. If someone were recording your songs to CD and selling them, you would have a much harder (more expensive) time doing anything. 
 
http://copyrightalliance.org/2012/03/in-plain-english-a-quick-guide-to-dmca-takedown-notices
 
Although the original content of a website is copyrighted when it is created in tangible form, if you are going to get involved in litigation in the US, it will need to be registered.  The takedown notice or cease and desist letter probably, does not require registration, although it may be taken more seriously if you can cite your registration. And if the infringer contests the takedown, you will need to actually file suit within two weeks in order to prevent the Website from just putting it back up. If you need to litigate, it is probably not going to be economically feasible. So this action can be seen as mostly a more or less convincing bluff.
 
http://copyright.gov/circs/circ66.pdf
 
https://www.venable.com/dmca-takedown--not-without-a-registration/