Summary: If you create enough videos and have them online long enough, chances are that sooner or later someone might "borrow" your videos and use them in ways you don't approve. So what should you do if that happens? Well first, if you have uploaded your videos to YouTube and someone swiped them from YouTube, there's actually not much you can do. That's because when uploading videos to YouTube you are consenting to their terms of service, which pretty much gives both YouTube and YouTube users a license to do with your videos whatever they want. But if that's not the case, what you'll need to do is submit a DMCA Takedown Notice to the offending website. Video theft is common enough that most places where they turn up (like YouTube and file sharing sites) have dedicated DMCA Takedown Notice links on their sites...just search the offending sites for these links. Or in the case of YouTube, you can go here. If the offending site has no such links, you'll need to submit your DMCA Takedown Notice to the website owner either via email or even regular mail. Of course to do that, you'll need either a valid email or mailing address. If the website doesn't list those items you can usually find them through a WHOIS lookup...here's a good WHOIS lookup site. Keep in mind that sometimes people do private registration with their domains so their email and mailing address won't show up. In those cases, you can send the takedown notice to their web hosting provider or domain registrar. What exactly should your DMCA Takedown Notice contain? Nothing fancy. Just the basics you'd expect...who you are, proof you own the copyrighted content, the URL's where the offending videos appear, your contact information and a declaration that everything you're saying is true. You can Google "DMCA takedown notice example" to find plenty of samples, or below is a sample DMCA Takedown Notice you can use: Hi, I'm the owner of copyrighted videos that someone has made available through WEBSITE NAME. I am contacting you to request they be removed from WEBSITE NAME. My name is YOUR NAME, the owner of YOUR DOMAIN. The videos on YOUR DOMAIN are copyrighted by my company, YOUR COMPANY, and theses videos appear on your website without authorization. The URL's where these videos appear are below: http://somedomain.com/somepage.html http://somedomain.com/somepage2.html http://somedomain.com/somepage3.html My contact information is: YOUR NAME BUSINESS NAME AND DOMAIN NAME ADDRESS CITY, STATE, ZIP, ETC. TELEPHONE EMAIL I state that the information I have provided is accurate. Neither myself or my company has authorized any of our copyrighted videos to be made available through your web site and we request these links be removed immediately.
