How to write a take down notice?

In this article we will be covering how to go about writing a take down notice once we have found that someone else is copying our material. 95% of the time bloggers will find that other legitimate bloggers will take down the offending material once issued with one of these. Spam sites might take it down but are less likely to do so. We have already covered how to locate the contact details to send one of these notices in a previous article. So if you haven’t found who to send the email to you might like to go back and review that article first.

None of the articles in this series are legal advice but rather a compilation of information and experience I have gathered over the years. If after reading any of these articles you feel you have a case please seek legal advice from a solicitor before proceeding.

Most other bloggers will tell you most bloggers who copy your work don’t even realise they are breaking the law or at least claim not to. Use your judgement on if the offending site is one of these sites or if it is a spam site. When dealing with another blogger try to keep things friendly but firm. Try not to offend them but give them a chance to back out of the situation without looking too bad. Just remember you still need to lay out the legal consequences of their action to ensure compliance.

To be legally binding your letter does need to contain the following information:

• That you are the copyright holder of the material in question
• The items that you are referring to. Include links to their articles as well as your copies of them.
• You need to state that they do not have permission to use the material and what actions you want taken. Whether this be the offending material removed or compensation etc. Try to stick to things like removing the articles, pushing for compensation is rather complex and you need to be in a position to follow through on your demands. Removal of content is the easiest and cheapest action to follow through on.

This is not a DMCA take down notice. This is more of a friendly request to take down the material in question. By including the above information it would still be legally binding in some areas. But for most courts a full blown DMCA notice would have to issued before going that far. For most bloggers this letter will be enough to induce them to take down the offending material.

Give them a reasonable time line to take the material down. Usually industry standard is around 24 hours. If you give them an hour most people won’t even have had a chance to read the email let alone remedy the problem.

If after this period you have not got a response or you’ve had a negative response then continue on to issuing them and other services with a DMCA notice. We will cover these in our next article.

Hopefully you have found this article helpful and we will see you again soon. This article is part of a much larger series on Copyright Infringement. The previous article was on How to contact someone to issue a takedown or DMCA notice and the following article is on How do I write a DMCA notice.