How DMCA takedown notices work, step by step

Who can send a notice

A notice can come from the copyright owner or from someone authorised to act for the owner, such as a content protection company. The sender states that they are authorised, so the first thing to settle is who holds the rights to the work and in which territories.

Licensed use is common. A partner, a broadcaster or a platform may be allowed to show the content. Before any notice is written, the list of licensed partners needs to be checked, because a notice about a licensed copy is a mistake that costs trust.

What a valid notice contains

The law lists the elements a notice needs (17 U.S.C. § 512(c)(3)). A notice that leaves one out can be set aside by the host.

1. A signature, physical or electronic, of the owner or the authorised agent.
2. A description of the copyrighted work that was infringed.
3. The exact location of the infringing material, normally the URL of the page or file.
4. Contact details for the sender: address, email and, where possible, a phone number.
5. A statement that the sender believes in good faith that the use is not authorised by the owner, its agent or the law.
6. A statement that the information in the notice is accurate and, under penalty of perjury, that the sender is authorised to act for the owner.

Precision matters most in the third item. A link to a site's home page does not identify infringing material. A link to the specific page or file does.

Where the notice is sent

Hosts that want the legal protection register a designated agent with the US Copyright Office, and many publish an abuse or copyright form. The notice is sent to that agent or form, and not to the site operator who uploaded the file, who may not respond.

For a site that hides its host, the sender looks up who provides its servers, its content delivery network or its domain name. Each of these parties can often act on a notice, and each has its own contact route.

What the host does next

On receiving a complete notice, the host must act quickly to remove the material or disable access to it in order to keep its protection. The host then normally tells the user who uploaded it.

Hosts also have to run a policy for repeat infringers. Accounts that collect several valid notices can be suspended or closed, which is why tracking the same uploader across many links is useful.

Counter-notices

A user who thinks the material was removed by mistake can send a counter-notice (§ 512(g)). It has to state, under penalty of perjury, that the removal was a mistake or a misidentification, and it has to consent to a US court's jurisdiction.

The host passes the counter-notice to the sender. If the sender does not file a court action within the legal waiting period, the host may restore the material. This is the reason a notice should be accurate and based on a reviewed match.

Accuracy and misuse

Section 512(f) makes it unlawful to knowingly misrepresent that material is infringing. Beyond the law, a high error rate harms a sender's standing with hosts, who will treat their notices with less trust.

Good practice is to have a person confirm each match, keep a record of what was seen and when, and take licensed or fair-use cases out of the queue before anything is sent.

After the removal

Removing a link is not always the end. The same file can be re-uploaded under a new URL, and the same site can be listed again in search results. A complete process checks that the link is down, records the outcome and watches for the file returning.

For search results, a separate request to the search engine removes the listed URLs from results even when the host is slow to respond. See our guide to search delisting.

Outside the United States

The DMCA is US law, but the idea travels. The European Union's Digital Services Act requires hosting services to run a notice-and-action mechanism, and many countries have comparable rules. The content of a good notice stays the same: who you are, what the work is, where the copy is, and a statement that the use is unauthorised.