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By Root 4107 0

about this is that you don't actually have to go to court and get a judgment against these companies in order to file a "DMCA takedown notice"; you need only make a statement to the person in charge of DMCA at the corporation that the image is yours, and they will remove it. This does not preclude you from bringing suit against the person or company that did the infringing, but it does give you the tools to get the infringing to stop. Further, the people at each of the corporations that own those computers approach DMCA compliance very seriously, unlike the people who are posting images with reckless abandon and disregard for your intellectual property rights.

Here is one example. The corporation that owns the computers is Google, the infringer is a blogger, and the copyrighted photos are mine.

I happened to stumble upon my images on a blog hosted on the Blogger platform. The first thing you do is go to Network Solutions and do a WHOIS search, as shown in Figure 18.1. You can find Network Solutions at www.NetworkSolutions.com.

Figure 18.1

A WHOIS search at Network Solutions.

At WHOIS, you are able to determine who owns a particular website address, but most importantly, you are able to determine the name of the server where the entire website is stored, sometimes referred to as domain server. Enter the top-level domain name plus the .com/.org/.net extension, as shown in Figure 18.2. The top level is the information working backwards from before the .com, .org, or .net to the first dot. So, the top-level domain for johnharrington.com is johnharrington, and the top-level domain for widgets.xyzcompany.org would be xyzcompany. As a result, you want to look at the information under NAMESERVER (or Domain Server) near the bottom. In this case, the nameserver listed is ns2.google.com with backup servers ns1.google.com, ns4.google.com, and ns3.google.com. Those are the servers that would send the website in the event that the first nameserver— ns2.google.com—is down.

Figure 18.2

Enter the top-level domain name plus extension.

Figure 18.3

Information about blogspot.com.

With the nameserver information, head over to copyright.gov. At the homepage, visit the link for Online Service Providers, as shown in Figure 18.4.

Figure 18.4

Choose the Online Service Providers option.

Once you click there, you will see the page that talks about DMCA and explains why every nameserver owner interested in limiting their liability has listed themselves in this database (see Figure 18.5). Some ISPs may be resellers or under a parent company's ISP, so you may need to do some research.

On that page, you can click to browse the directory of the agents that each of the companies has designated to take your DMCA takedown notice. In this case, I clicked that link to locate Google, as shown in Figure 18.6.

There, a few scrolled pages down, is Google, Inc. Clicking on that link brings up a PDF that Google submitted to the Copyright Office with their contact information. Figure 18.7 shows that PDF. The Copyright Office redacted the actual signature that was on the document, and I redacted the person's name.

Figure 18.5

Information about DMCA.

Figure 18.6

Locating Google in the directory of agents.

Figure 18.7

Google contact information for a takedown notice.

Although I've made this a very detailed step-by-step process, it is really easy and quick to do. Now, with the contact information, I begin my dialogue with the point of contact at Google:

Within 24 hours, Google's contact responded with the following e-mail:

It is important to note what Google is saying. Google is warning you against making false claims, and moreover, with items 4 and 5 you are swearing to the truth of your claim. So, I copied my e-mail into a Word document, added in the two statements they required, and sent it, signed:

Again within 24 hours, I received the following e-mail:

Then, within less than an hour, I received this:

The end result? The page was immediately gone, as shown in Figure 18.8, and, to date, that page has not returned,