The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and Your Web Copy: Part II
In Part I of this topic, I told you what the DMCA is, how it protects you and what to do when someone steals your web content and posts it as their own?
In this part, I have a sample letter you can send to the person/company you think has infringed upon your copyright.
It’s a format that my client uses and, given the topic, I’ve asked her to let me use a modified version of it here. It usually scares the offender into compliance.
Dear Company Name:
It has come to our attention that you have made unauthorized use of copyrighted content from COMPANY NAME’S website, www.yourdomain.com.
On your website, the content on this page regarding TOPIC, http://infringingsite.com/contentpage.html, has been plagiarized from our page at, http://www.yourdomain.com/contentpage.html.
You have used our content verbatim without permission and have consequently violated federal law.
Please be advised that COMPANY NAME has reserved all rights in these works and has registered copyrights therein.
In addition, we have the handwritten notes, dated rough drafts, and various versions of this document edited by the principals of our corporation as supporting evidence that these works were created by COMPANY NAME.
We also have dated file transfer logs that indicate when these pages were added to our website.
As you neither asked for, nor received permission to use our work on your website, you have willfully infringed upon our rights under 17 U.S.C. Section 101 et seq. and could be subject to substantial penalty fines.
We demand that you immediately remove from your website ALL of the infringing works derived and/or copied from COMPANY NAME materials.
If we have not received an affirmative response from you by DATE at TIME, indicating that you have fully complied with our request to remove the plagiarized material from your website, we intend to take further legal action against your company and to prosecute to the fullest extent of the law.
We have already taken screen capture images of your site with our copyright material and have forwarded these images to our lawyers to maintain as evidence in our legal action against you.
Regardless of your intent to comply, we will also immediately file a Notice of Digital Millennium Copyright Act Infringement with Google, Yahoo, MSN and all other search engines demanding to have your website removed and banned from all search results.
You can read more about our rights under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) at http://www.google.com/dmca.html.
We will be monitoring your website closely for other copyright violations of our materials.
Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.
Very truly yours,
NAME
TITLE
COMPANY
www.yourwebsite.com
you@yourwebsite.com
(010) 555-1212