How can I add free Copyright to my website?

Is our website content protected by copyright UK Law?

• We publish a website http://www.autoebid.com and own all of our own content including a directly or European car dealers amounting to around 40,000 international dealers as at http://www.autoebid.com/autoenews/car-dealer-directory. We paid many thousands of pounds to acquire this data ourselves a few years ago. Last month our IT team noticed our server was being bombarded with requests for information from our dealer directly where an organisation was clearly running a script to copy our entire dealer directly. We traced the company by their IP address to a company in the UK and I contacted them and they first denied and stated they could legally take any data from our website as it was public information. They then sent an email that stated: “Further to our conversation just now I wanted to confirm that any data that had been extracted from your website (in, I should add, good faith) has been deleted. As I said earlier, there has been a misunderstanding and we won’t bother you any further. Apologies for any inconvenience.” Am I able to sue this company through the small claims court for breach of copyright for stealing our data or can I only sue them if they sole it AND then published it as their own data? Regards

• Answer:

  It's usually copyrighted by the domain and website provider as long as the stuff is you're own on the website and you have not copied anything from any other website. example images sound writing then you should be fine. If you have copied them then i would remove them and make your own stuff because that is illigal and you could be sued if the company/person found out