They say once something’s on the internet, it is there forever. While that may be true, you are not powerless to fight against the redistribution of your content. Leak sites pose the greatest threat to the income and well-being of our hard working content creators. This article will provide those content creators with the means necessary to report these sites for their burglary, and to the fullest extent of the law and policies of services these leak sites may be using, ensure that the content is removed, and these leak sites cannot easily continue their immoral practices on our other fellow content creators.

DMCA Takedowns

DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedowns are among the most successful in protecting the rights of copyright holders. Any copyright owner is capable of issuing a DMCA notice of their own accord, and BuiltByBit encourages everyone whose content is being unrightfully redistributed, protect your rights through lawful means. That said, the legal weight of a DMCA notice does not apply only to the receiver. It’s important that the issuer understand the responsibilities and implications that issuing a DMCA notice has.

Firstly, it should be known that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is U.S law, and therefore applies only to the United States. However, Copyright law is international. The WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) Copyright Treaty provided the foundation for the US DMCA. As such, any OSP based in a WIPO member state has strong reason to comply with a formal copyrighted material takedown request, such as in a DMCA compliant format.

https://www.copyright.gov/title17/

https://www.wipo.int/members/en/

Countries outside of the WIPO may still have similar laws in place to protect copyright holders from the theft of their property. If you do not have the time or money to speak with an attorney on how to protect your rights in the country where the offence is occurring, you may consider hiring professionals who are familiar with the practice, to act on your behalf. https://www.dmca.com is a very successful resource for this purpose, and they provide a 100% money back guarantee if they are unable to get your content taken down, with their full service package.

If you’re confident in your ability to write and deliver the DMCA notice on your own, know that your DMCA notice is only effective if it has all of the following:

A physical or electronic signature of a person authorised to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed, or, if multiple copyrighted works at a single online site are covered by a single notification, a representative list of such works at that site.
Identification of the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity and that is to be removed or access to which is to be disabled, and information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to locate the material.
Information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to contact the complaining party, such as an address, telephone number, and, if available, an electronic mail address at which the complaining party may be contacted.
A statement that the complaining party has a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorised by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorised to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

Searching online, you can find many DMCA notice generators and formats at your disposal. Do look at examples if you’re having trouble wording your notice.

Once you have your notice written, you need to know who to send it to.

Most websites will have a “support” email, which you can email them at, however, there’s no reason to rely solely on their willful cooperation. Use abuse email lookup tools to find the best emails to contact to report their abuse, and always check WHOIS. You’ll want to send the DMCA notice to both their server host, as well as their domain registrar.

If they refuse to cooperate with the demands of their own host and registrar, their service will be suspended, which means the leaks of your peers’ work are also taken down.

You may also consider sending the DMCA notice to various search engines to get the content deindexed. Though, if the content is already removed from the website itself, this will likely happen automatically next time the search engine crawls the site.