How to Use DMCASimple

The DMCA Safe Harbor is a legal thing. Best case, you should find a lawyer who can ask about your situation and give you tailored advice. Contributors to this website, on the other hand, won’t be professionally responsible to you, even if they practice law.

The United States Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act, which was passed as of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, offers online service providers protection or “safe harbor” from some claims of copyright infringement. To get that protection, you need to meet the DMCA’s requirements:

1. Qualify as an online “service provider” as defined in the law.
2. Register an agent to receive copyright claims through the United States Copyright Office.
3. Publish a policy, like DMCASimple, about how you will handle copyright claims and repeat infringers.
4. Follow your policy, as well as the law, when handling copyright claims.
5. Not interfere with “standard technical measures” that copyright owners use to identify and protect their rights.

To use DMCASimple as the copyright policy for your website, create a copyright policy page with content based on the following template and link to it from the bottom of every page of your site. Make sure to replace all the {placeholders}.

We follow the DMCASimple copyright policy at https://dmcasimple.com/1.0.0.

The website is {address of your website, e.g. example.com}.

The operator is {name of the person or company behind your website, e.g. "John Doe, resident of California" or "SomeCo, Inc., a New York corporation"}.

Our agent is {e.g. "Able Agent, 123 Main Street, Oakland, CA 12345, agent@example.com, 555-555-5555"}.

The first paragraph uses a legal technique called incorporation by reference. The later paragraphs provide information that the policy needs to work.