You people and your DMCA notices...

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subigo

subigo

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I know having your landing pages ripped off is a pretty big deal, but do any of you have problems with competitors sending out DMCA notices to your host/datacenter?

As a host I've been getting a few every week, but over the past ten days or so I've seen about 15 come in. Normally I don't take down the site/content (in fact I've only taken down content once after getting a call, email and fax from a law firm), I just send an e-mail to the account owner and ask them to switch out the offending content when they have time... but I started noticing that the notices this week were all targeting sites in the same niche.

And sure enough when I went to check the IP of all the DMCA e-mails they all came from the same place. However, they used different names, e-mails, phone numbers, etc... It's pretty obvious it's just some douche bag trying to get his competitors sites taken down because he can't be original enough to make money by himself.

So from now on I'll be calling the phone number on every DMCA notice that gets sent to me and if you don't answer your e-mail goes in the trash.

I'd be interested to know if this is a problem for any of you...
 


subigo said:
And sure enough when I went to check the IP of all the DMCA e-mails they all came from the same place. However, they used different names, e-mails, phone numbers, etc... It's pretty obvious it's just some douche bag trying to get his competitors sites taken down because he can't be original enough to make money by himself.
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I know someone that trys to do something like. He likes to jack other people's landing page and afterwards send out a DMCA to get try to get the person's landing page that he jacked taken down.
 
subigo said:
So from now on I'll be calling the phone number on every DMCA notice that gets sent to me and if you don't answer your e-mail goes in the trash.

I'd be interested to know if this is a problem for any of you...
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But as a hosting provider, can you legally reject a DMCA notice just because the person doesn't call to confirm?

I've sent out a few DMCA take town notices before (but for photography reasons), from my understanding even if just by email, the hosting provider is required to contact the client in question and notify them of the take down request. At which case the host give them ample time to take it down, or to appeal the notice. If they don't bother appealing then...

Also if the notices you are getting are saying 'within 24 hours', I don't think that's within reasonable legality for them, I think the min is 2 weeks.

I guess you could just create an autoresponder for the DMCA notice email, that says 'you will need to call to confirm this request' and maybe that'll at the very least be enough to deter them from bothering with further emails. But I was just wondering if you legally had the capacity to ignore a request.
 
kblessinggr said:
But as a hosting provider, can you legally reject a DMCA notice just because the person doesn't call to confirm?

I've sent out a few DMCA take town notices before (but for photography reasons), from my understanding even if just by email, the hosting provider is required to contact the client in question and notify them of the take down request. At which case the host give them ample time to take it down, or to appeal the notice. If they don't bother appealing then...

Also if the notices you are getting are saying 'within 24 hours', I don't think that's within reasonable legality for them, I think the min is 2 weeks.

I guess you could just create an autoresponder for the DMCA notice email, that says 'you will need to call to confirm this request' and maybe that'll at the very least be enough to deter them from bothering with further emails. But I was just wondering if you legally had the capacity to ignore a request.
Click to expand...

"Sorry Mr. Lawyer, my spam filer must have caught it. I don't know why though, it clearly isn't spam with fake contact info."
 
kblessinggr said:
But as a hosting provider, can you legally reject a DMCA notice just because the person doesn't call to confirm?

I've sent out a few DMCA take town notices before (but for photography reasons), from my understanding even if just by email, the hosting provider is required to contact the client in question and notify them of the take down request. At which case the host give them ample time to take it down, or to appeal the notice. If they don't bother appealing then...
Click to expand...
A host does have the right to verify the claims being sent. When I used to run a host, I was caught in a DMCA war between two companies, one of which stole source code of the other company's script, and then proceeded to try and have the original company (hosted with me) taken offline. Between contact with my client, and independent research, I requested more information from the party that issued the DMCA before acting, and none of what they provided proved anything. Never heard back from them again...
 
johu said:
A host does have the right to verify the claims being sent. When I used to run a host, I was caught in a DMCA war between two companies, one of which stole source code of the other company's script, and then proceeded to try and have the original company (hosted with me) taken offline. Between contact with my client, and independent research, I requested more information from the party that issued the DMCA before acting, and none of what they provided proved anything. Never heard back from them again...
Click to expand...

But are you able to legally just ignore a DMCA takedown notice. ie: not even verify, not even take down, just ignore them. I understand that a host has the rights to verify a claim, but I was wondering bout the opposite, not even caring and not even taking down when in the US.
 
kblessinggr said:
But are you able to legally just ignore a DMCA takedown notice. ie: not even verify, not even take down, just ignore them. I understand that a host has the rights to verify a claim, but I was wondering bout the opposite, not even caring and not even taking down when in the US.
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You can't just ignore the claim... that's why I'll call the number (and e-mail) to verify it. If it's legit, the sender won't mind talking to me on the phone or sending a fax, but if it's fraudulent I doubt they will bother replying. It's not really to hard to distinguish the fake ones from the legit ones.

However, claims that all come from the same IP and use different (free) e-mail address can suck my balls.

I've also seen a lot of notices come in that claim ownership of things like content, yet don't give a link to where to content was taken from. I had one a few days ago that said the entire page was stolen. I e-mailed him back and asked for a link and he never replied...

Anyway, it's just annoying that people even do this. I guess that's what I get for promoting my site mainly on WF, but seriously, if people would put the same amount of effort into building their own pages as they do sending out fake DMCA claims they would probably make a lot more money.
 
I've only ever had 1 DMCA request for a site I host, and it was an image hosting site. It looked like some one uploaded a porn screen cap and some porn copyright hunting company sent me the DMCA. I sent it to the client, and they just removed it.
 
i get fake emails and notice for a private game server i use to host, if it was real then ill just transfer my server to my buddy in china
 
the host has to verify... if they didn't any jackass could file a DMCA against every site on the internet.
 
Oh boy oh boy, I have a great story about this with Acai LPs... Gotta have some fun with it first and I'll post about it...
 
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