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DMCA Counter-Notification

Have you received a letter accusing you of copyright infringement, or asking you to remove certain information from your website? Are you worried about being liable for information that someone else posted on your forum?

Know your online rights, and fight back with a DMCA Counter-Notification.*

Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA):

• Anticircumvention provisions – makes it illegal to “circumvent” a technological measure protecting access to or copying of a copyrighted work
• Gives web hosts and service providers a “safe harbor” from copyright infringement claims if they follow certain guidelines

Congress passed the On-Line Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act (OCILLA) in 1998 in an effort to protect service providers from liability for the activities of its users. The law exempts service providers – that meet the criteria set forth in the “safe harbor” provisions – from claims of copyright infringement made against them that result from the conduct of their customers.

A DMCA Counter-Notification must contain the following:

• The subscriber’s name, address, phone number and physical or electronic signature
• Identification of the material and its location before removal
• A statement under penalty of perjury that the material was removed by mistake or misidentification
• Subscriber consent to local and/or federal court jurisdiction, or if overseas, to an appropriate judicial body.

If it is found that the copyright holder misrepresented their claim of infringement, the copyright holder is then liable to the service provider for any damages that resulted from the improper removal of the material.

* In order to ensure that copyright owners do not wrongly insist on the removal of materials that actually do not infringe their copyrights, the safe harbor provisions require service providers to notify the subscribers if their materials have been removed and to provide them with an opportunity to send a written notice to the service provider stating that the material has been wrongly removed. If a subscriber provides a proper “counter-notice” claiming that the material does not infringe copyrights, the service provider must then promptly notify the claiming party of the individual’s objection. If the copyright owner does not bring a lawsuit in district court within 14 days, the service provider is then required to restore the material to its location on its network.