Have you ever filled a DMCA complaint?

[MichaelCorfman]

One of the techniques webmasters can use when material is stolen from them and used on other sites is to issue DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) complaints. Frequent recipients of DMCA complaints are hosting companies, where the person filing the complaint is asking that the hosting company remove the offending material from their servers. And, of course Google, for complaints to remove stolen material present on other sites from inclusion in search results.

For this week's poll, I thought it would be interesting to find out how many webmasters have filed DMCA complaints, and whether the complaint yielded the result you wanted.

Besides answering the poll question, post your thoughts and/or experiences regarding filling such complaints and their effectiveness.

Michael

[gimmick]

No I have not done it.

[Gamer]

I have not done any DMCA complaints, up to now.
You never know, time will show.
When site become successful attracts small trolls willing to steal you a piece of success

[-Shay-]

I have no qualms at all about filing a DMCA. As I've stated many times before, my content is my content. Researching a brand or a market to find out "how other people talk about it/position it" does not constitute original work.

I generally find that while it is not the most "friendly" approach, it generates better results and less headaches by taking a "shoot first and ask questions later" approach to this. In the past, we went the "nicer" route, contacting webmasters to alert them that we believe their content is based largely on our content. More often than not, the webmaster we contact gets defensive and either denies copying or he resorts to personal attacks - only later to blame his "writing staff".

It is just easier and less headache to simply file a claim than it is to go through all that. Besides, it was either lazy webmastering or hiring a "cost effective, foreign writing staff" that resulted in copying our content (read: a shortcut), so why not pay them the same courtesy and just report as opposed to contacting them and then reporting.

If we know the webmaster well (from here, for example) and we believe they are a stand-up group, we're inclined to reach out first - but not in other cases.

[casinoSasa]

I have filled an complaint one month ago.
My site: casinosexplorer com
Site that copied me: casinoanalytics info
It was not fully successful because I didn't aware that if I only submit homepage it won't affect inner pages. Homepage was removed from index.
So if someone copy your site with 1000000 pages make sure to submit all 1000000 urls

[Renee]

I've filed a couple of DCMA complaints to have personal information about me removed and they were all successful, but only after a letter from my lawyer.

I've never filed any for copied content etc though.

[edgarf76]

I have filled a few but no success so far. Hopefully it will soon.

Best Regards

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[sweetbet]

I've never filed a DMCA complaint. I always found it more convenient to contact the affiliate programs listed on the offending site. If the thief has posted my content on multiple sites, then I don't want to file multiple DMCA complaints. Reporting the theft to the sponsors worked out well for me in the past. The other thing is that sometimes the person who has my content might not even be aware that the content is stolen, because he/she might have bought it from some dodgy salesperson on digitalpoint, fiverr or elsewhere.

[Christiaan]

Luckily I never had to file a DMCA complaint.
I hope that I never have to but I guess I'll have to do it one day...

[ocreditor]

I only find out about the DMCA this year, and never filed a complaint to DMCA so far, but I'll not hesitate to do it if my site copywriters will be violated.

I did used to contact directly dubious webmasters when I found my news/reviews on their sites but it was a clumsy process...and last event was over a year ago.

[danniee]

The DMCA complaint is useless in my experience. All it takes is for the counterpart to contest the report with some bull**** comment about how common it is to rewite other peoples work or borrow images, and that's that. In that case, Google requires you to bring in lawyers or take it to court. I had this happen to me. What's the point one has to ask himself, I might as well take them to court directly myself every single time if I had the resources, which I don't, hence why I turned to Google for help.

Don't bother with it. Turn to the affiliate programs instead, it is much more effective.

[Cash Bonus]

No, I’ve never done such a thing. I’ve never had a really good reason to.

[Thomasjohan]

No, I have never filled one.