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If you operate a website, you may have to worry about copyright infringement claims. This is particularly true if you have a blog, or if you allow visitors to post photographs, music clips, videos, or written content. The visitors may be posting content that infringes on someone’s copyright, and you don’t want to be responsible.
Fortunately, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) helps website owners insulate themselves from copyright infringement claims. There are two steps to this process, and both are equally important and essential. Unfortunately, too many website owners focus on the first step, and overlook the second. Without both, the website owner has no protection under the DMCA from copyright infringement claims.
The first requirement is that your website terms of service should have a process for people to notify you of potential copyright infringement claims. This is typically called a “takedown notice.” The notice informs you that there is material on your website that may infringe a copyright, and has to conform to specific requirements outlined in the DMCA. Your process must cover taking down or disabling access to the potentially infringing material, and giving the person who posted it an opportunity to challenge the takedown notice. That’s the first part of insulating yourself from copyright infringement claims.
The second part, which is often overlooked, is registering an “online agent” with the US Copyright Office. The online agent is a person designated to receive notices of potential copyright infringement. You go to this page at the Copyright.gov website, where you can download, print out and mail in what’s called an “Interim Designation of Agent to Receive Notification of Claimed Infringement” form. On the form, you list the full legal name of your company. There is a base fee of $105 that covers that one name. Then you can list additional names under which you are doing business. For example, here you would list your website address, or if you operate more than one website, all your website addresses. For each group of 10 or fewer, there’s an additional fee of $35. So if you have a corporation, and you run one website, you would list your corporate name, and the website address, and pay a fee of $140. When choosing your designated agent to list on the form, you want to pick someone who you know is going to be in that role for an extended period of time, because you must pay additional fees to change your designated agent.
By following both of those two steps, website operators can take advantage of the protections from copyright infringement claims provided by the DMCA.
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