Don't be afraid to send a DMCA Takedown Notice

Edit: The following link is a great resource which includes links directly to who to contact for numerous entities ranging from Advertising Networks to Video Sharing Sites.
http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/dmca-con ... formation/
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For the longest time I was afraid to send DMCA takedown notices because they seemed like more trouble than they were worth. I recently discovered that's far from accurate though. I've never spent more than 5 minutes tracking down a host and sending one out.

Here's the simplified steps I've been taking in order to get my DMCA takedown notices honored by website hosts.

1) Determine the websites host
I do this by tracing nameservers. Since I'm using Ubuntu Linux, I do this by opening a terminal and starting with the following command.
I could also visit a site like whois.net or domaintools.com with my browser and get the same information.


Usually, the nameserver domain will be the name of the host I need to contact, something along the lines of "ns1.offending-host.com" where I would go to "www.offending-host.com" and see if they look like a hosting provider.
Sometimes the nameserver domain is the same as the offenders domain, which in a case like "wordpress.com" isn't bad because wordpress has a DMCA help link at the bottom of their site and I've already had my requests honored by them.

Luckily I've not run into a situation where the host domain is the same as the offending domain where I've not found a DMCA help link somewhere on the site, and past sending the request to the domain registar, I really don't know how to deal with the situation if it did come up.

2) Prepare the needed information
If you don't already, you need to display a copyright notice in your sites footer. I've seen people say these notices are no good, but apparently they're wrong because that's exactly what hosts have wanted to see when I've sent my DMCA takedown notices.

Here's the five simple things I've needed to include in my requests.

1. Description of content nature and link to offending content -- describe the content, is it a blog post, a song ? Include a link to where it has been republished on the domain they host.
2. Claim to Copyright -- This is the copyright notice in your site footer. Include a link and instructions on where to find this on the page.
3. Your name, address, telephone number and email address -- Don't spoof anything, you'll be sorry. It's fine to use a P.O. Box or to leave the unit number off of your address, only giving the street/city/state/etc
4. A statement by you stating that you believe in good faith, that the offending author does not have permission to republish the content in question. Here is an exact copy of such a statement that I've sent in the past for a blog post.
   Quote:
   I believe in good faith that the author of the infringing blog does not have permission to reproduce my copyrighted work.
   I swear under penalty of perjury, that all of the information contained in my Infringement Notice is accurate, and that I am the the copyright owner.
5. Electronic Signature -- At first I thought this was going to require me to sign a piece of paper and send in a fax or photocopy of my signature. However simply typing my full name at the end of the request was fine.
   Quote:
   Thankyou,
   My Full Name

3) See if the host has a special DMCA form
Some hosts may already have special DMCA forms or email addresses you should use, take a few minutes to look over the site and see if you can find one. A good thing to start out with is searching for "DMCA site:offenders-host.com" at Google, this will most likely turn up such a form/address as the first result if they have one.
Otherwise, look for an administrative email address in the whois information you get the nameservers from. (make sure it's the whois information of the host, not the offending domain)

4) Send and wait
Send in your notice and wait. Some places may take longer than others, but I've found that for instance with Wordpress blogs I can send out a notice on Sunday and get back a removal confirmation on Wednesday.

how do you find people who use your copyrighted work?

I usually stumble on it just out of dumb luck.

I keep a lazy eye on the keywords people have used to get to my site, occasionally I will look through the logs and notice a drop in traffic comming from certain keyword combinations, which prompts me to search for those keywords myself, which in turn occasionally leads me to a site that's republished my content.

heh, neat technique. simple and effective

true
but I have simple checker domains
parsers rullllle ^_^

Thanks for the warning


I'm kidding. I'll never steal your content.

Added a great list of relevant contact details to the original post, considering I had to go through this process again today.