How to Send a Short Fiction DMCA Takedown Notice

Over my last couple of posts I've being discussing my own experience of trying to get my copyrighted work, in this case a short story, removed from an infringing site ...which were a whole lot of time-consuming and messy to say the least.  It would be remiss, though, not to share how I actually went about sending a DMCA Takedown Notice, because I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one in this industry who could do with that knowledge.

Lest I do something awfully similar to what I've just spent two posts grumbling about, I should state clearly that I got all of this information from attorney Carolyn E. Wright's excellent and thorough post on the topic here.  But Carolyn talks specifically about photography, and I figure the following will save fellow writers the slight effort of adapting her form letter to cover written fiction.

First up, then, you should work out who hosts the website in question; you can find this through a service such as Domain Tools or Whois.net.  Once you know who to contact you then need to send them some legalese letting them know that copyright law is being broken on their watch and that you expect them to do something about it.  Below is the e-mail I sent; just change the parts in bold and you're away.  This assumes you've already contacted the website's owner and gone through the process of asking them to remove your work ... for why this absolutely the right thing to do go read the two posts I linked to at the top there.

Good luck!


To: [E-mail Address of ISP Host]

Re: Copyright Claim

To the ISP Hosting Company: 

I am the copyright owner of the work of short fiction being infringed at: [http://webaddress.co.uk].
This work is being used without my permission and in breach of copyright.  I have asked the website's owner to remove my work from their website and they have failed to do so.  

This letter is official notification under the provisions of Section 512(c) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) to effect removal of the above-reported infringements. I request that you immediately issue a cancellation message as specified in RFC 1036 for the specified postings and prevent the infringer, who is identified by its Web address, from posting the infringing work to your servers in the future. Please be advised that law requires you, as a service provider, to “expeditiously remove or disable access to” the infringing work upon receiving this notice. Noncompliance may result in a loss of immunity for liability under the DMCA.

I have a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of here is not authorized by myself as the copyright holder, or the law. The information provided here is accurate to the best of my knowledge. I swear under penalty of perjury that I am the copyright holder.

Please can you contact me at [youremailaddress@you.com] with a prompt response indicating the actions you have taken to resolve this matter.

Sincerely,

[YOUR NAME]

Adventures in Copyright Infringement, Part 2

[For the first part of this post, see here.]

One of my resolutions when I quit my day job at the end of last year was to start fighting my corner a little harder.

In part one of this post, for those too busy piloting jumbo jets or wrestling tigers to go back and read it, I talked about how I'd stumbled upon one of my stories on a web magazine I'd never sent it to, had asked the editor in question to take it down and, when they tried but failed miserably to do so and didn't reply to my e-mail explaining that this was what had happened, decided to give up on the whole sorry business and just live my goddamn life.

Six months later I realised that this wasn't fighting my corner.

To put that arbitrary-seeming decision in perspective, I found myself in a position where the copyright of that particular story was suddenly significant again, and - I'm being honest here - where I was itching to see if there was anything I could actually do about someone ripping off my work.  And, being now a full time writer, I had both the time and the motivation to see the thing through to its bitter, bloody end.

All of that put together made me think that rather than get in touch with the editor yet again, (this would, after all, be my fifth e-mail), I'd go down the more dramatic route of a DMCA Takedown Notice.  After all, it was pretty clear that they didn't entirely understand either copyright or how to take pages off their own website.  But - and still being really honest, and maybe just a little bit like a five year old with an atom bomb - I also really wanted to see what would happen if I sent a DMCA Takedown Notice.

What I'm saying is, I possibly didn't think through all the ramifications of what I was doing.

At any rate, things got off to a disappointing start.  The company I'd pegged as being  the web host in question wrote back to say it wasn't them at all and pointed me elsewhere.  The company they'd identified didn't have a dedicated e-mail address for such things like the first one had so I had to contact their sales team instead, and was already feeling disillusioned with the whole endeavor.  But they did get back to me too, albeit not so quickly, and promised to look into the matter.

After that nothing happened for a few days, and the matter slipped my mind, mostly because by then I'd gone away on holiday.  It was perhaps a week from when I'd last heard anything that I got a somewhat panicked and accusatory e-mail from the editor, asking why on earth I'd raised a DMCA Takedown Notice against him and told his hosting company he'd failed to respond to multiple requests to take my work down when the matter had been settled months ago?  Now the hosting company had taken not only the website in question offline but all of his other websites too.  My behaviour, he suggested, was akin to opening a door with a hand grenade.

At this point I felt horribly guilty.  In so much as I'd considered it, I'd assumed the hosting company would just delete the offending content (I'd given them the precise URL) and maybe do a bit of minor wrist slapping.  What had actually happened was far beyond anything I'd intended.

On the other hand, I quickly reasoned, I had asked four times for my story to be taken down.  I wrote back explaining this, copying the hosting company in, and said that so for as I was concerned there'd been no malicious intent and that as long as my content vanished from the site that was the matter settled.  The editor wrote again, still grumbling, and then almost immediately after sent a somewhat more apologetic e-mail in which he admitted that the story had indeed been left up and that he'd finally checked and confirmed I wasn't the one who'd sent it to him in the first place.  He contacted the web designer who managed his site, managed to get the change made within the twenty-four hour slot his host allowed him, and that - thankfully! - was the end of the matter.

But it could have gone a lot worse.  And if I had it all to do again I'd certainly have done things differently.  That said, then, my conclusions are a) that DMCA Takedown Notices do indeed seem to work, and are taken very seriously indeed, at least by legitimate web hosting providers, and that b) this means that, like any other potentially dangerous thing that can wreak havoc in someone's life, they should be used with care.

Put it this way ... if I ever go down that route again it will be because I think someone's maliciously abusing my copyright, and not because it's a wet Tuesday and I can't be bothered to write another e-mail.

Adventures in Copyright Infringement, Part 1

There aren't many careers these days where people can rob you so casually, so effortlessly or so unapologetically as fiction writing.

To put that in perspective, the first pirated e-book copy of my first novel Giant Thief went live on the evening of the day it was released.  (I know this because I got an e-mail from the the Google alert I'd set up while I was drinking celebratory champers with Lee and Marco from Angry Robot.  Cheers, pirates.)  Now I'm not going to get into the piracy debate here, partly because it's not what I want to talk about and partly because if you happen to be pro-piracy and ever find yourself in a position where your livelihood depends on people having the decency to not steal your work then I'm confident you'll come round to my way of thinking pretty quickly.  No, this post and it's sequel - because, be warned, this is a long story I'm about to tell here! - is about one particular incident, and I'm telling it for educational purposes only.

The lesson is: writers are not powerless to defend their work.  And also, if you're a writer then yes you have powers but use those powers carefully, and for good rather than evil, lest the whole thing explode in your face.

Late last year I stumbled across one of my stories on the internet.  It was one I'd sold to a good market a few years before - actually, I don't know why I'm being coy here, it was The Desert Cold in Flash Fiction Online - and the place I'd found it was certainly not the one I'd sold it to.  Oddly, it was accompanied by the bio I'd used back then, which was some years out of date, and more worryingly the webpage attributed copyright to the site rather than me and had buttons encouraging readers to share my story through a variety of online routes.

I wrote a polite e-mail to the publisher asking that they either take the story down or pay me appropriate for using it.  The publisher wrote back and said that it was okay because another page on their site gave the contradictory information that copyright remained with the author and that when I'd submitted my story I'd chosen to waive the option of payment.

I wrote back and explained that I hadn't submitted my story and explained how and where it had originally been published, explained too that the bio was desperately out of date, explained that the copyright notices were at best contradictory and stated that (having checked their pay rates and found them to be a princely sum of $3 a story) I'd rather have my copyright not being infringed than be paid.

When I week and a half later I hadn't had an answer, I wrote again.  The publisher wrote back apologizing and said that they'd removed my story.  I checked and all they'd done was take the link off their home page, leaving the page with my work on untouched.  I wrote back explaining this.

This time I didn't get an answer, and just couldn't be bothered at the time to press any further.  I'd written four e-mails, I  dislike writing e-mails at the best of times, and writing e-mails to people who are pirating my work and claiming my copyright and don't understand piracy, copyright or how to take things off their own website is just a whole lot of a slog when you have better things to do.

I mention this only as partial justification for what I did next ... which we'll cover in part 2, when the kid gloves come off, doors are opened with hand grenades and lessons are learned, not all of them for the better.