Piracy & protection

DMCA takedowns: one bad listing to a sitewide sweep

The notice template, where to send it, and what to do when the host ignores you

Your book has turned up on a free download site. You do not need a lawyer, a subscription, or a monitoring service to get it removed. You need one letter with six specific things in it, sent to the right address.

Here is that letter, where it goes, and what to do in the fairly common case where nothing happens.

The six things a notice must contain

The requirements come from section 512(c)(3) of the Copyright Act. A notice missing any of them is not a valid notice, and a provider can ignore it without losing its safe harbour protection. All six:

1. Your signature, physical or electronic. Typing your name counts.
2. Identification of the work being infringed. Your book, by title. If several of your books are on the same site, a representative list is allowed rather than a separate notice each.
3. Identification of the infringing material, with enough information for the provider to find it. This means the exact URL of the page or file. Not the site's homepage.
4. Your contact information: name, mailing address, phone, email.
5. A good faith statement that the use is not authorised by you, your agent, or the law.
6. A statement under penalty of perjury that the information is accurate and that you are the owner or authorised to act for the owner.

The US Copyright Office publishes a free sample notice you can fill in, and states plainly that you do not need to hire an attorney or anyone else to send one. Any author who owns the work can do this themselves.

Where to send it

Not to the site's contact form, if you can avoid it. Every service provider claiming DMCA safe harbour must register a designated agent with the Copyright Office, and that agent is searchable in the public DMCA Designated Agent Directory. Look the site up there first and send to the registered address.

If the site offers its own DMCA webform, use it as well. Site-specific forms often process faster than email, since they route straight into an existing queue.

Most large platforms act within roughly 5 to 14 business days.

One thing you do not need, and one you do

You do not need to have registered your copyright to send a takedown notice. Ownership is enough, and ownership exists from the moment you wrote the book. Our guide on the copyright page, line by line, covers what the notice in your book does and does not do.

What registration does buy you is the ability to sue, which matters only if you intend to escalate beyond takedowns. For getting a file removed, it is not required.

What to do when the host ignores you

This is the part most guides skip. Plenty of piracy sites simply do not respond. When that happens, stop writing to the site and start working up the chain.

Go to the hosting provider. Look up who hosts the domain (a WHOIS or RDAP lookup will show the registrar, and often the host). Hosts have their own safe harbour to protect and are generally far more responsive than the site they host.

Go to the domain registrar. Slower and less likely to act on a single file, but registrars do respond to patterns of repeat infringement.

If the site sits behind Cloudflare, Cloudflare will not remove content, since it is not the host. It will forward your notice to the actual hosting provider, which is genuinely useful when the host is otherwise hidden.

Ask Google to delist the URL from search results. Understand exactly what this does: the file stays online, but it stops appearing in search. For most piracy traffic, which arrives via a search for your title plus "free pdf", removing the search result removes most of the harm. This is worth knowing because some paid services sell only this step while describing it as a takedown. It is a legitimate and useful action, but it is not removal, and you can do it yourself for nothing.

Accept that some hosts will not comply. Sites hosted in jurisdictions that ignore US notices exist and will keep existing. Time spent on the tenth notice to an unresponsive offshore host is usually better spent delisting the URL from search.

The one real risk to you

Section 512(f) creates liability for knowingly misrepresenting that material is infringing. In practice this means: do not send notices for material you do not own, do not send them for uses that are plausibly fair use such as a genuine review quoting a passage, and check that the copy really is unauthorised before you sign a statement under penalty of perjury.

Also worth knowing: the person you targeted can file a counter-notice. If they do, the provider may restore the material unless you file a lawsuit within roughly 10 to 14 business days. Counter-notices are rare from piracy sites, which tend to just go quiet, but they are common enough from people who believe they had a right to post the material.

Keep a log

One notice is administration. A recurring problem needs records: the URL, the date you sent the notice, where you sent it, and what happened. This matters if you ever escalate, and it is the difference between reporting one bad listing and demonstrating a pattern.

This guide describes what US law requires. It is not legal advice, and a lawyer is the right person to ask about your specific situation.