Posts Tagged ‘Intellectual Property’

You have discovered that a web site contains content that uses original text, artwork, photography or software that you created or commissioned.  You dutifully do some research (including using a “WHOIS” search on the web) to determine who owns the web site, but the site owner has hired a third party (such as Domains By Proxy) to hold the domain name so that the owner’s identity is not publicly available. There is no other identifying information on the web site and it is therefore impossible as a practical matter to figure out who is responsible for copying your creative content.

What can you do?  Fortunately, U.S. copyright law provides a remedy, in the form of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or “DMCA”, as it’s known.  The DMCA contains provisions, called “take-down” provisions, which provide a quick and easy remedy to copyright owners of content that is infringed (that is, copied) on the web.  Under these provisions, you, as the copyright owner or licensee of copyrighted content, may notify an “Internet Service Provider”, or “ISP”, such as the host of the web site containing the infringing material, of the infringement.  You may couple this notification with a demand for “take-down”, that is, removal, of the infringing material.

Read the rest of this entry »