Guides
Guides for creators dealing with piracy
DMCA takedown notices: what to include, a template, and where to send one
A DMCA takedown notice is a written request, under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, asking a host, platform or search engine to remove or stop linking to material that infringes your copyright. To be valid it needs six things: your signature, the work, the infringing material and where it is, your contact details, a good faith statement and a statement under penalty of perjury that you are authorized to act. Below is a plain template for a pirated video course and a list of where to send it.
How to remove a pirated course from Google search results
To remove a pirated copy of your course from Google, file a copyright removal request (a DMCA notice) through Google's legal removal form, listing the exact URLs of the pirate pages and a link to your real course. Google reviews each URL and, if it agrees, drops that page from its search results. That stops buyers finding the copy through Google, but the file itself stays online until the site, its host or the file host removes it, so do both.
Your video course was pirated. Here is what to do.
If your video course has been pirated, start by finding every copy, then ask Google and Bing to delist the pirate pages and send notices to the file hosts holding the downloads. Those steps cut off most of the traffic and break the links on every site that uses the same file. After that, report Telegram channels and compliant hosts, and set up regular searches so you catch reposts, especially after a launch.