I am Matt Thomas.

In which I see how long it takes Dreamhost to remove my content from one of their customers’ sites

February 20, 2007

First off, I’m no fan of the DMCA. Unfortunately, it seems like nowadays you can’t get the attention of a hosting provider when your content’s being stolen unless you hit them over the head with a DMCA request.

Yesterday, I noticed that the contents of my recent article, The most frustrating computer problem I have ever had, had been scraped and re-posted on somdaj.com. It’s a very typical case of stealing content and re-posting it with copious advertising, trying to make a quick nickel off of someone else’s work.

So, I wrote to Dreamhost—I even used their contact form, and selected “Abuse Department” as the recipient of my email.

Hi there.

The domain somdaj.com is being hosted by Dreamhost. There is a spam site located at [url].

My content has been republished there without my permission: [url]
My original post is located here: [url]

I’ve received no response from the site owner, so I am requesting that you
remove the offending material from the site, per your Terms of Service.

Today I received the following response from sales@dreamhost.com:

Can you please get back to us with full headers and messages from what you believe to be spamming coming from this domain. We have yet to receive any further reports and without specific examples we can’t evaluate them versus our anti-spam policy.

If you believe that a DreamHost customer is engaging the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material, please have the copyright owner (or their legal representative) file a formal notification of claimed infringement as described in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (512©(3)(A)(i-vi)). The copyright owner should be sure to provide detailed and specific URLs/links to the content in question, not including any non-infringing material.

Once it is drafted, the DMCA Notification (text only and no attachments) should be sent to us at abuse@dreamhost.com. Upon receipt of a valid DMCA Notification, we will commence with the removal of such content in an expeditious manner.

I’m sorry we couldn’t be of more immediate assistance, but we are only able to respond to notifications sent to us from the impacted copyright owners themselves. You may, of course, feel free to contact them and have them contact us directly. If you have any questions, please let us know.

Well, a few things.

1. A response from sales? WTF?
2. I understand the importance and usefulness of a good automated reply for support requests, but it’s a bit too obvious when your first paragraph has nothing to do with the issue I’ve described.
3. The second paragraph was fairly relevant. Of course, it’s pretty clear from my original email that that’s exactly what I was doing—I provided direct links to my original article, and where it’s being hosted on the offending site. I guess I didn’t throw the DMCA around, so it wasn’t weighty enough.
4. While the half-hearted apology at the end is a nice touch, it should have been completely obvious from my email that I am, in fact, the original copyright holder.

1. If the person had even bothered to look at the two links I gave them, they could have discerned in less than ten seconds what the problem is.

   Alright. So, next up, I re-compose the same original email, copy and paste the initials DMCA around a few times, then fire it back off to see if I have any better luck the second time around.

   UPDATE: Aha! The trick was an impeccably-formed DMCA notice. Thanks to Shaun for pointing me toward a nice legalese template. Guess I’ll have to save it for the future, because it seems to work.

   Thank you for submitting a formal DMCA notice to us regarding this content. I have taken the website offline until the owner can remove the named article. They have been given specific instructions not to place their site back online until they have removed your copyrighted material. If they place this content back online, please let us know. They have also been put on notice that if we continue to receive complaints of this nature their account will be closed. If they continue to violate copyrights in the future, please be sure to let us know with another DMCA notice, and appropriate action will be taken.

   If you’d like, I’ve made my DMCA notice template available for the taking. And so no one sends me a DMCA notice, the original is available here and marked as “free to copy and use.”

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