This is really bad.
Basically fan sites are indirectly causing every other type of site to be killed off by their models drowning us in false DMCA claims which eventually will hurt our hard earned Google listings. Amazing, it just keeps getting worse.
Most models have no idea about the relationship between sponsors and affiliates. I don’t think they can distinguish the pirated contents and promo contents from affiliates. Sending out DMCA is the job that OF/JFF should do. It’s dangerous that models have access of issuing DMCA, which will cause a lot of false DMCAs.
Remember that Chaturbate false DMCA drama happened in 2017. There was an impostor who sent out tons of DMCAs by automatic bots, which caused a big mess for sponsors and affiliates. My blog was targeted too, just because some comments from my readers contained the word “chaturbate”. Then that post was DMCAed.
Now OF/JFF cases look similar. The only difference is that these false DMCAs were sent out by ignorant models and this DMCA remove service company. Something should be done to stop this DMCA abuse, or we have more troubles later on.
Is that possible to have Brad Mitchell read this thread? So he knows what’s going on. Brad has an ID @GFY. It would be nice to have him in here as well. From our conversation before, I think Brad is a good CEO who knows adult industry.
I’ve asked Natalie if she or Brad would take a look at this thread. She’s already on it (before I could finish typing this).
Natalie will respond as soon as her account here is approved. Can one of the admins take care of that?
Done, her account is approved now.
Thanks for approving me so quickly! I’ve not been here for ages and must say GayDemon looks amazing! Way to go!
So due to my work I’ve had to figure out what DMCA is and how to work with it, and much of it was a revelation that was accompanied profusely with “Seriously?” and “WTF?” mutters. DMCA is a perfect example of a law made by people who didn’t really know what they are trying to regulate. I know many of you will know this, but just to make sure all readers are on the same page let me recount.
DMCA is called “Safe Harbor” as it was created to avoid millions of lawsuits against website owners who may not know they’re infringing on someone’s copyright. The idea is to give unknowing copyright infringers some time to take down content that violates copyright instead of going to court. The procedure set up can be summed up in these 3 steps:
Once you get the notice retracted or if there’s no response in 10 days, you can put the content back online. Note the little legal quirk here - that if we don’t hear back from the person who sent the DMCA, you’ll be able to restore it in “no less than 10, nor more than 14 days”. It is assumed the person will either retract or take you to court if they’re the owner, within that time span.
Is this ridiculous? Yes. Does this entirely mess up your SERPs? Yes. Is it the law? Also yes.
Our policy on the matter is described in detail here (can’t send links yet sorry) mojohost. com/digital-millenium-copyright-act-dmca/. The information on the policy page also gives useful pointers about what a DMCA must include and what a counter-DMCA must include. As we host over 12 hundred adult businesses, we encounter DMCAs often, and since all of our customers are legitimate businesses, many of those DMCA requests have no legal bearing and are false. We understand that, but unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do other than to follow the procedure set by law. The only way to go after getting a DMCA is to take down the content and send a counter-claim.
Thank you for responding, that’s very helpful.
So in short, the best solution is to simply remove the content? I always do anyway as it’s just one piece of content out if many so it’s no major loss.
My worry is more that if there is issues with losing hosting or something if we receive too many notices even if they are false?
We do not terminate customers when they act on DMCA claims and follow the procedure. You would have to have a very significant number of DMCA requests for that to even become a consideration. Having a history of successful counter-DMCAs is useful to show that you aren’t acting in bad faith or a repeat offender, so I suggest still filing that counter-claim.
Ok but in my latest example I have no idea of where to do a counterclaim. I got a notification through Mojo and Cloudflare with no reference to Google or anything else.
Sorry if that was confusing. Your counter-claim should be sent to whoever forwarded the claim, not directly to the claimant. So, you can simply send a counter-claim to your notification ticket with MojoHost, you don’t have to seek out the contacts of the original claimant.
there is another option to the counterclaim too, and that is to request it be withdrawn. With our systems, sometimes instances of legitimate use slip through. All it takes is a quick message and it can be withdrawn.
Other than that, I would always counter notify above removing the content. If you remove it, the problem goes away for now, but the notification stays on record as being valid.
I think the actual instance of malicious notifications would be really small, but having them withdrawn, or counter notifying draws the attention of the person sending it, and hopefully will result in a decrease of mistaken notifications.
Natalie, is there some order of notifications? If a site officially lists a dmca contact, and acts on a notification, can mojohost disregard any notification?
Not sure if I got your question fully, but we can not ignore any DMCA notice unless it is withdrawn/retracted, or acted on already, in which case we will notify the claimant that the content has already been removed. Ignoring a notice makes us responsible for content when it stays up. This said, only those who violate DMCAs (don’t remove content) and ignore our notifications will get flagged and face the possibility of having their sites shut down.
Notices that are not properly formatted can be ignored as well, but a better response is to reply stating the notice is not properly formatted and must be re-submitted in proper format. That screens out a bunch of the bot-generated notices and shows you are not just going to fall backwards with your legs in the air.
Great point Chad. There has been quite a few of those as well.
We lost our hosting company during that Chaturbate fiasco.
QueerClick was targeted and we got 50 DMCA notices that night and lost our hosting. The only thing that saved QueerClick from disappearing entirely that day is we had, for an unrelated reason, backed up the entire site elsewhere 3 days prior.
Our hosting company didn’t care that they were obviously false and there was tons of information online about what was going on. They knee-jerked, and deleted us.
What’s going on right now is very scary to me.
Yes, this is for sure starting to happen. They mistakenly believe they own the copyrights to their content and believe they can DMCA things. Many of the models becoming part of the JFF or OF sites has them learning about DMCA and mistakenly thinking they can DMCA anything they please, even if they don’t own the rights to that content.
We’ve had this happen on the straight side with one of our partner sites, where a model’s Lawyer was aggressively threatening our affiliates with federal lawsuits and $75,000 fines. We had already taken all her content down several years ago because she made a huge fuss about not wanting to be associated with “porn,” (even though she has an OnlyFans with tons of nudes), so we did the nice thing and just took her off the site. Then she came to us threatening lawsuits because her content was still on some affiliate sites. I had to tell the affiliates just to remove the content, since the time and money to counter all these claims when she wasn’t even on the site anymore was certainly not worth the trouble. It is definitely becoming more of a problem though.
Wow that is crazy Mary. Glad you guys had a good backup.