The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is an important way of protecting your company’s digital content. The act was signed into law in October 2019 to prevent copyright infringement. This act has solved many copyright issues encountered by online service providers.
Online providers have benefited from the online protection offered by DMCA. In this post, we have discussed how you can stay in compliance with the DMCA provisions.
Table of Contents
1. Submit an online service provider agent designation
The US Copyright Office has changed from paper to online service provider agent designation on January 1st, 2018. The paper-based system was replaced with an online directory of contact to provide DMCA infringement claims to online service providers.
To get an infringement claim, you should provide a piece of updated contact information to the Copyright agent. To register or re-register for online infringement claims, visit DMCAAgentService.com. This claim will protect your copyrighted materials.
2. Establish notice and takedown procedures
After you might have registered for an online Copyright infringement claim, you can file any alleged infringement of your online content. For instance, you can upload a 3,000-word blog post on your website. To your surprise, you may find three other sites with the same article title published on Google. You will realize that the other three websites have stolen your content, and some other two have outranked you. If this happens to you, you can file a DMCA takedown notice with the DMCA agent of all those sites. The takedown notice is a very effective way of taking down the infringing content from other sites. In the best practice of this act, all the infringing sites’ accounts will be terminated.
3. Avoid using other copyrighted resources
DMCA takedown notices have been sent to many companies because they were alleged to have used copyrighted material without seeking permission from the owner. Many companies have escaped the DMCA complaints when displaying others’ copyrighted material on their site by affording copyright notices.
So, before you upload any content on your website, you should check for copyright infringement. If you do not check for copyright infringement, you may expose your company to debt.
4. Refer your website through links
If you use a referring link when infringing a copyrighted material, DMCA’s claim will not hold you because of the DMCA safe harbor provision Section 512(d). To avoid both monetary and website damage, you should refer to the original content through a link.
5. Monitor your content and file takedown notices
It was reported from a reliable source that Google has received over a billion takedown notices in the year 2019. This shows that the DMCA claims have not yet solved the copyright infringement act. You should monitor your content on Google.
Whenever you encounter any other websites with your content, you should file a claim to get your copyrighted content. Stay away from any form of copyright infringement by checking all contents posted on your website before posting, and by using a referring link to the source of the content.
