The DMCA is pretty useless when it comes to protecting the rights of creators.
The U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act passed in 1996 provides content creators with their only real means of having infringing files removed from the internet. Essentially, for each and every instance of copyright infringement one discovers, one must send a DMCA Notice to the responsible party. Not only can this be extremely time-consuming (just think, thousands upon thousands of links for our film) but there’s also no guarantee it will even prove successful. Depending on where the pirate web site is based, one may or may not find a cooperative recipient at the other end.
At any rate, in order to give you an idea about the process I’ve gathered screen-caps to document the DMCA process for links found on a single site (July 22, 2010). I discovered this site through using the search term “And Then Came Lola.” The site URL is: http://www.maktoobblog.com/sendPost/blog/161327/post/2199
Scrolling down on the page I find our film poster and below that a number of download links for the film. These are “mirror” sites meaning the same file is available via each and every “cyberlocker” link.
Our film poster with download links listed below.
Now, when I clicked on the links I was taken to another site which displayed advertising. Obviously the website operator is hopeful (as is Google) that you will choose to click on one of these ads and generate income for him (and Google). A supposed added benefit is that the links are protected from snoopy folks like me trying to find illegal copies of their film.
Click the go here to download, repeat, and voila! Success.
Round 2–Now the click thru for the download link is below the ads in the lower left corner. Note also it says the file has been download 600+ times from this one link. Not good (for us).
More Google ads and potential $$$ for pirates and Google.
Finally you reach the Rapidshare (cyberlocker) site which offers up our complete film for FREE! Good for you (not us).
OK, so now it gets fun (NOT) for me. This site has 12 download links for LOLA. Now it’s time to copy and paste each link into individual DMCA notices. I have to copy and paste the complete notice into an email or web-form and send it to the responsible (or not so responsible) party. Then it’s time to hope that it happens. I’ve compiled a video of the process below.
Here’s a list of all the links I found on this page for which I issued DMCA notices. I also sent a DMCA notice to Yahoo since it apparently served as some sort of host for the site. Hard to tell sometimes when one can’t read the language.
This is copied from the DMCA I sent to Yahoo.