Tips from the Abuse Department: DMCA Takedown Notices

If you are in the web hosting business or you provide users with access to store content on your servers, chances are that you’re familiar with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). If you aren’t familiar with it, you certainly should be. All it takes is one client plagiarizing an article or using a filesharing program unscrupulously, and you could find yourself the recipient of a scary DMCA notice from a copyright holder. We’ve talked before about how to file a DMCA complaint with SoftLayer, but we haven’t talked in detail about SoftLayer’s role in processing DMCA complaints or what you should do if you find yourself on the receiving end of a copyright infringement notification.

The most important thing to understand when it comes to the way the abuse team handles DMCA complaints is that our procedures aren’t just SoftLayer policy — they are the law. Our role in processing copyright complaints is essentially that of a middleman. In order to protect our Safe Harbor status under the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act (OCILLA), we must enforce any complaint that meets the legal requirements of a takedown notice. That DMCA complaint must contain specific elements and be properly formatted in order to be considered valid.

Responding to a DMCA Complaint

When we receive a complaint that meets the legal requirements of a DMCA takedown notice, we must relay the complaint to our direct customer and enforce a deadline for removal of the violating material. We are obligated to remove access to infringing content when we are notified about it, and we aren’t able to make a determination about the validity of a claim beyond confirming that all DMCA requirements are met.

Source : http://blog.softlayer.com/2013/tips-from-the-abuse-department-dmca-takedown-notices