In my previous post about Creative Commons, I did mentioned about DMCA, and promised that I will write about what is DMCA. Although I had delayed a few post, but now I had publish it now.
DMCA is actually stands for “Digital Millennium Copyright Act”. This website http://www.dmca.com is actually a service where they assist you in order to claim your rights of the contents you published.
So, what this DMCA service do?
When you found that someone had stolen some contents of your website, posted in their own website, and your contents are copyrighted, you can ask DMCA to do the necessary take down action on your behalf. They will either contact the copycat website owner to request to remove that specific contents, or if he/she refuse to remove it, then DMCA will contact the hosting provider to suspend/terminate that copycat’s hosting account to make sure the stolen contents are gone from other places on the Internet, and make sure only you, the rightful owner is hosting that particular contents.
Other than website contents, other things like songs, movies, pictures, etc. As long as they are copyrighted by you, you may request them to do the take down on your behalf in case you found them published to the Internet without your permission.
Of course, this take down service is not free. They will charge you for each time taking down the contents from those copycat’s website. Or you can subscribe monthly or yearly “Website Protection Pro” service where they will provide scanning tools for your to check whether someone is stealing your contents or not. This service also allow you to legally use the “Digital Millennium Copyright Act” to force the copycat to remove the contents yourself.