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How To File A DMCA Copyright Infringement Violation
By: Gina Hoover © 2007

Have you found a duplicate of your website, text from your website or your downloads on another website that you did not give permission to? If so your rights are being infringed on and you have to act to stop the infringement. You should always contact the offending website first. Here's an example of what your email message might say to them,

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Copyright Infringement Notice - Sample Email Communication Letter

Click here to get a free copy of this form

Dear Website Owner,

It has come to my attention that you are displaying copyrighted content from __________________

(yoursite name)           

on your website ________________. The page in question is ____________________. This content

                          (offending website)                                         (url of the infringing page)

came from ___________________. As you know, displaying copyrighted content without the

          (your url where the content came from)

website owners permission can get you into legal troubles. I did not give you permission to copy my

content.

Kindly remove the content from your website or I shall have to take legal action against you and also notify your web host and the major search engines of your copyright infringement.

Sincerely,

Webmaster, __________________

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Hopefully the siteowner will remove the copyright infringing content to avoid legal problems. Try to be a friendly as possible. In some cases the siteowner might not know the content was stolen. I had a problem a few years ago where someone copied my website design, text and hotlinked to my graphics. I contacted the website owner and found out they had purchased a website design from some "web designer". (You gotta be careful when selecting a reputable web designer.) I showed the person my website and where the design, content and text came from and they deleted it all right away. I didn't have to go any further than that.

I had another instance where someone took free web templates from my website that I give away to my site visitors and offered them for download on their website. I suppose the person disregarded the notices asking that you NOT redistribute the templates...or maybe they didn't care. I took the time to create the web templates myself and want them given away explicitly from my website. This is what makes my website unique to the thousand of other sites on the Internet. Anyway, I asked that the templates be removed and she did but not before calling them "rather ugly". LOL Some people do get sore when you confront them about their wrongdoing. So be prepared.

If contacting the offending website does not work, your next move is to send a DMCA Infringement Violation to their web hosting company. To find the web hosting company of a website go to http://www.betterwhois.com to perform a Whois lookup. Type in the domain name and the web hosting companies name should come up with an email to contact them. The web hosting company will investigate your claim and can delete the page with the copyrighted content or delete the offenders hosting account altogether.

You should also file a DMCA infringement violation with both Google and Yahoo. You would not want your website to be punished for duplicate content because someone else copied your content. Here are Google and Yahoo's, the most popular search engine's DMCA links:

http://www.google.com/dmca.html

http://info.yahoo.com/copyright/details.html

Now you have to be patient and wait to see what happens. If none of that works you'll need to consider if it's to your advantage to sue the offender in court.

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