Responding to Stolen Content with a DMCA Take-Down Letter

Having your original, creative content used online without your authorization is a common problem. In a recent posting, I addressed potential responses you can take if your content is stolen. While the suggestions are in a posting entitled “Bloggers’ Legal Problems”, the discussion is relevant to anyone whose content is stolen. As discussed in that posting, options for fighting against scraped content include the following:

• Sending a cease and desist letter

• Sending a DMCA take-down notice

• Filing a copyright infringement lawsuit

A Few More Words about Sending DMCA Take-Down Notices

To be effective, your take-down notice must have the proper information. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) insulates interactive service providers (e.g., companies like Google, GoDaddy, and YouTube) from claims of contributory copyright infringement for material posted by their customers and online visitors. Promptly removing infringing material upon the request of the copyright owner is a requirement to getting that insulation - so interactive service providers generally respond fairly quickly to take-down requests.

However, if your take-down request – which you can send via email – does not have the proper information, the interactive service provider can just ignore it.

A Real-Life Example

Recently, a blogger of a popular cooking blog discovered that another site had duplicated all her content without her permission. After searching on Whois and locating the site’s webhost and domain registrar, the blogger sent them an email explaining the site’s theft.

The blogger’s email didn’t conform with DMCA take-down requirements so it produced no results except for an “I’m sorry. There’s nothing we can do” from the webhost and a form letter from the domain name registrar indicating in very opaque, unclear language that it could do nothing based on the current request. Once the blogger put her request in proper DMCA take-down format and sent it to the domain name registrar, the knock-off site was taken down almost immediately. A happy ending!