Advertising networks are very important allies in the fight against plagiarism and content theft. As one of the most popular revenue streams for scrapers and other spammers, they often unwittingly bankroll many of the content thieves who plague the Internet.
However, advertising networks are not covered by the DMCA. Since they are not hosts and are [...]

I’ve done several updates to the DMCA Contact Information list, mainly adding companies that I’ve either gotten information from or have profiled in the “DMCA Seven” series but never added tot his list.
The companies added include Mahalo, Squidoo (special request), Zooomr, Break and about six other sites.
Also, I did a quick dead link check on [...]

For the next chapter of the “DMCA Seven” series, we take a look at the port of last resort for many copyright infringement cases, search engines.
Ideally, one would only send a DMCA to a search engine after other steps, such as cease and desist letters and DMCAs to Web hosts, have failed. However, since much [...]

For the next chapter of the “DMCA Seven” series, we take a look at a different kind of hosts, domain hosts.
These differ from most of the other hosts we’ve covered in that they are not free services, but rather, paid hosts that earn monthly or yearly fees from their subscribers.
Despite the apparent conflict of interest, [...]

For the next chapter in the “DMCA Seven” series, we’re taking a look at one of the most common types of hosts out there, blog hosts.
Many of these hosts have been copyright headaches for Webmasters. They are prime targets for spam blogs and scrapers and some have played a huge role in rise of [...]

On the surface, YouTube seems like a natural haven for fair use. The entire system is designed from the ground up to allow the posting of short, low resolution video clips and then embed those clips into blogs and other Web sites for commentary and criticism.
When you look up the four factors of fair use, [...]

For the next segment in our “DMCA Seven” feature, we will take a look at the “Darlings of the DMCA” as I’ve come to know them, the video sharing sites.
These sites, many of which have been sued or are operating under the constant threat of being sued, have their very livelihood centered around whether or [...]

For the next segment in our “DMCA Seven” feature, we will take a look at the DMCA policy on seven of the largest social networking sites including Myspace, Facebook, Bebo and more.
In each case we will evaluate their policy, look for weaknesses and, as necessary, recommend steps for improvement.
However, as you can see [...]

Previously on this site, I’ve talked about how the DMCA agent list suffers from decay and is slipping into antiquity. Already, I only reference the U.S. Copyright Office’s list when the information isn’t readily available on the host’s Web site due both to hosts who haven’t registered with the USCO and hosts who haven’t maintained [...]

Previously on this site, I reviewed the DMCA policies of the top 5 social news sites. I found, as might be expected, that the policies on the five different sites varied wildly both in terms of how they were implemented and how robust they were.
Differences between the sites became clear as sites with more money, [...]