Simons Pirated works removal guide

[Plexus]

So you have found a site and its hosting your work(s) for anyone to download and you want them to stop. Regardless of your stance on piracy, this article is here to help artists. This article is useless against torrents, Peer to peer stuff and such. Its only useful against sites who offer your works for download, unlicensed, direct from their site.

Theres a few things to try to see if things can be done. First thing first, go to the offending site and see if they have a way to contact the authour/webmaster - maybe a contact link or an email. In my experience, about half of websites will remove your tunes at your request when you just email them and politely ask them to do so in a non threatening manner. An example template I use is this;

Dear Sir/Madam,
Your website at <address here> is offering pirated copies of my works for download. I kindly request you remove links to my works from your site as you are distributing them without my permission. Im a small artist and dont make very much money from my works and in order to keep producing I need all the financial support I can get.

Some example URLs of my works are

http://their.site.com/path/to/mp3.1.mp3
http://their.site.com/path/to/mp3.2.mp3
(etc)

Please let me know when you have removed my copyrighted works from your site.

Kind Regards
<you>

Give it a week or two to get a reply. If the website has no contact function or your polite email has received no response after some time, then all is not lost - we just need to step up a gear. Time to do some investigation. Is the site hosted on something like blogger.com? go to the blogger.com helpdesk and notify them.

If its not, go here and put in the sites name without the http or path (eg 'google.com' instead of 'http://google.com/search'). You want to search for type 'A' and click resolve. You will then get a response which should have something like this at the bottom

some.site.com. A 2400 83.123.123.123

You now know that the site hosting your material is on IP 83.123.123.123. But what use is this? Lots - we now try to find out where this IP is located and who owns it. Go again to http://www.dnswatch.info/ and select the 'location' tool. Put in the IP address you got before to find out where exactly in the world your pirate material is being hosted. Ive just found out that the site im looking at is located in the USA.

If the pirate material is located on a server in the USA you have a massive advantage - the DMCA takedown notice. If its not, dont fret most companies will work with you once you tell them a customer of theirs is hosting pirated material and damaging their good corporate image. You also have the added benefit that servers IP/s located outside of the USA may be owned by a USA parent company so they tend to respond to DMCA takedowns. I have in the past had fasthosts in the UK respond to USA style DMCA takedowns.

So now we need to know who owns that IP address in order to talk to them. Go here and put in the IP address you have. It will return a long list of text, search for 'abuse' and you will see an email address. This is who we are going to talk to next.

If the IP is located in the USA, then send a DMCA takedown notice. A template is

Subject: DMCA Takedown notice

Dear <name of ISP>,

I am the copyright owner of the works hosted on your servers at:

http://www.host.com/path/to/file
http://www.host.com/path/to/file
http://www.host.com/path/to/file
(LIST ALL OF THE URLS YOU CAN FIND TO ALL OF YOUR WORKS, THEY ONLY HAVE TO REMOVE ONES YOU SPECIFY)

This letter is official notification under the provisions of Section 512(c) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) to effect removal of the above-reported infringements. I request that you immediately issue a cancellation message as specified in RFC 1036 for the specified postings and prevent the infringer, who is identified by its Web address, from posting the infringing works to your servers in the future. Please be advised that law requires you, as a service provider, to “expeditiously remove or disable access to” the infringing works upon receiving this notice. Noncompliance may result in a loss of immunity for liability under the DMCA.

I have a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of here is not authorized by me, the copyright holder, or the law. The information provided here is accurate to the best of my knowledge. I swear under penalty of perjury that I am the copyright holder.

Please send me a email response indicating the actions you have taken to resolve this matter.

Kind Regards

A US based server *MUST* reply to a DMCA takedown notice and remove your works. Normally they will email their customer and if they get no reply within 4 days, they just turn their whole server off. Ooops

If the server is outside of the USA, something like this usually works;

Subject: Piracy on your servers

Dear <name of ISP>,

I am the copyright owner of the works hosted on your servers at:

http://www.host.com/path/to/file
http://www.host.com/path/to/file
http://www.host.com/path/to/file
(LIST ALL OF THE URLS YOU CAN FIND TO ALL OF YOUR WORKS)

I kindly request that you remove all unauthorised copies of my works from your servers, identified by the web addresses in this email. Can you also let me know how you intend to prevent your customer from posting copyrighted works (with a view to assisting copyright infringement) to your servers in the future. I am a small artist and piracy is really hurting my ability to continue producing. Id therefore very much appreciate your help in resolving this matter. Im sure your company is not one that wishes to be associated with piracy and that your terms and conditions require your customers to own/have rights to distribute any content they publish via your servers or your network.

I have a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of here is not authorized by me, the copyright holder, or the law. The information provided here is accurate to the best of my knowledge. I swear that I am the copyright holder of the works available via the links specified above.

Please can you send me a reply to this email address outlining any steps you will be taking to remove the links to my copyrighted works, or if you do not intend to remove the copyrighted works your justification for doing so.

Kind Regards

In 90% of cases where the original website owner didnt get back to you, one of these two emails should result in the content being removed from their servers. Ive used this method time and time again and it tends to work.

I wont say this method is iron clad and it is clearly time intensive. Worth it tho imho. One less link to a full tune is more potential sales.

I hope it helps you.

[moderate]

Good stuff Simon!

[Jung]

What if someone pirates my mode?

[alex_virr]

Nice one Simon thats awesome.

[moderate]

What if someone pirates my mode?

write a letter to your mp_

[mourinho]

www.zippyshare.com

[breakbeat-news]

what about DB9, What.cd, Waffles.fm, torrentech, funkysouls and another 100 - 200 unlegal pages?
nice work Simon, who don't know anything about internet..
for three months, we are dealing with the artists and from their words clear that the Internet is not good, but still not as bad as you are speaking about this. The last example of the word elite force and many more..

I can offer you to publish your article on our Breakbeat News site.

[Plexus]

what about DB9, What.cd, Waffles.fm, torrentech, funkysouls and another 100 - 200 unlegal pages?

Well as I said, this isnt going to work for torrents. If your works are directly hosted on a website, then this guide may help. For example, if the owners of a website ignore you, then you can use this guide to talk to their ISP or even as far as the owners of the IP address themselves. In many cases, this is useful.

nice work Simon, who don't know anything about internet..

Im hoping thats just a language barrier thing as opposed to sarcasm - because clearly I know nothing about 'internet'. Last I heard it was a collection of tubes that Al Gore invented, is that correct?

As i said in the original post, if your works are hosted directly on a site then this method has worked very well for me in the past. Sometimes the site owners ignore such communications, but their suppliers (the ISP's, co-lo/dedicated server/bandwidth people) tend to work well with rights holders. All this article really does is show people how to contact the abuse team of the supplier behind the website in question and how to phrase things when talking to them. While that may not be a sledgehammer blow in the overall fight against piracy, small steps taken by many people add up.

[Walter Odington]

I can offer you to publish your article on our [url=http://breakbeat-

This maybe makes me think it was supposed to be a compliment that came across a bit wrong

[George601]

Very useful Simon thanks

[willrjmarshall]

FWIW, this only works in a jurisdiction with secondary liability for ISPs.

ISPs in places like New Zealand, who are not subject to secondary liability but are legally responsible to their customers are not allowed to pull down sites.

[breakbeat-news]

the problem is 1/5 price from beatport juno, etc. =)

[breakbeat-news]

I know some sellers

one of them ***LINK REMOVED BY ADMIN***/
/ (this is russian page) but you can use google translate

read some page, very interesting stuff )))) lol

[breakbeat-news]

another one Music From: Beatport, Junodownload, Traxsource, Audiojelly, DJDownload...[ Hq Tracks]
***LINK REMOVED BY ADMIN***/
$ 20 per month =) this is a BIG problem!!!

[BLista]

Mod Note: if you are going to post about the issues highlighted in this thread, please don't be so stupid as to post links directly to the MP3 sites

I have now removed the offending links.

[Plexus]

FWIW, this only works in a jurisdiction with secondary liability for ISPs.

ISPs in places like New Zealand, who are not subject to secondary liability but are legally responsible to their customers are not allowed to pull down sites.

This is sort of correct. What this method does is not 'pulling down' a site - its asking for certain files to be removed. While ISPs are,as you rightly point out, legally responsible to their customers you will find that 99% of ISPs in western countries have provisions in the contract with their customers that the customer will not host content they do not have rights to (usually contained in the 'Acceptable use policy'/'AUP'). Most ISPs will work with their customers to resolve the issues you raise without needing to use the sledgehammer blow of pulling a site.

Mod Note: if you are going to post about the issues highlighted in this thread, please don't be so stupid as to post links directly to the MP3 sites

I have now removed the offending links.

Lol cheers for the modding.

[soundmagus]

Where the advice above is great and does work to an extent in my experience your fighting a loosing battle.

I sell video tutorials on music production as my main livelihood and it never takes long for them to appear on the big warez sites and lots of the small ones.

I have battled with the sites to make them take down my stuff (and most of them have especially with the DMCA) but when they take it down another user puts it up.

I have seen me spending more time contacting these sites than actually working, by then its counter productive and a waste of my time.

My advice is this: If you have a digital product for sale and you have a forecast of say 100 sales in 3 months. Have a run up to the release date with teasers etc for about a month (2 weeks min) then when it comes to relase date people have their hands in their pockets gagging to buy so you aim to have your 100 sales in 1 month then if it gets warezed it makes no difference to you.

Also for the baove to work you need to have a greta marketign stratedgy and SEO.

hope this helps someone,

Mark

[rochan]

You also have the added benefit that servers IP/s located outside of the USA may be owned by a USA parent company so they tend to respond to DMCA takedowns. I have in the past had fasthosts in the UK respond to USA style DMCA takedowns. the problem is 1/5 price from beatport juno, etc.