Tuesday, April 24, 2012

DMCA Notices And US Websites And Intermediaries Response

Copyright and trademark violation is common in cyberspace. You work really hard to generate original and unique contents and unscrupulous individuals and organisations pick up the same without your consent. Either you can remain silent about such blatant copyright violation and violation of your rights or you can fight back against such unscrupulous individuals and organisations.

If such an individual or organisation belongs to India, you are better situated as he/she/it can be hauled as per Indian Copyright Act, 1957 and other laws. However, if such an individual or organisation is located outside India, that make the whole equation complicated. In such cases you have to invoke laws of foreign jurisdictions.

In United States (US), the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act (OCILLA) primarily cover copyright issues of cyberspace. They confer a “safe harbour” upon US online service providers (OSPs) and intermediaries if they exercise due diligence and remove the offending contents upon proper intimation to them. 

On similar principles, Internet intermediary liability in India has been prescribed through the cyber law of India. The Internet intermediaries in India are required to remove an offending material within 36 hours of sending of the intimation to them in this regard.

Perry4Law and Perry4Law Techno Legal Base (PTLB) have been sending DMCA notices and Intermediary notices to US and Indian websites and companies for long. Till now we have sent more than 100 successful DMCA notices to US websites. All of them have been duly complied with by US websites and companies.

In this article we are discussing about those US websites/companies that have been very supportive and cooperative regarding DMCA notices for alleged copyright violation, trademark infringement and removal of other objectionable contents. We have arranged them in alphabetic order (with no preference or priority).

These US/foreign websites/companies are:

(1) Google/Blogspot

(2) Hostgator

(3) Maars Net

(4) Posterous

(5) Singlehop

(6) Typepad

Further, we also found Facebook very cooperative while resolving a copyright violation matter with a third party.

All you have to do to get desired results is to send the DMCA notice in proper format to the most appropriate person in the best possible manner. We would cover this issue subsequently.