Wanted: Your DMCA Horror Stories

When I started Plagiarism Today, one of the things I wanted to do was draw attention to hosts that were mishandling DMCA cases, either by not responding to legitimate complaints of infringement or overreacting to such claims, especially dubious ones.

Though the law provides legal mechanisms for dealing with such providers, as a small copyright holder, using those tools is impractical in the majority of cases and the site was an opportunity to get answers in a public arena when I couldn’t get them in a private one.

However, over the years, this blog has grown and things have changed. I work directly with many hosts as part of my copyright consulting practice and am fairly well known among abuse teams. Though I’m sure many agents and abuse personnel don’t know me, it’s grown difficult to know when my experiences are representative or when the fact I run this site has an effect.

So, I depend increasingly on readers to tell me their stories involving DMCA notices and other copyright/plagiarism issues when it comes to Web hosts.

On that note, I want to issue an open call, if you’ve had a bad experience with a host, one where you filed a proper notice or had a bad notice filed against you and your host treated you poorly, let me know. Please send me an email with the information and let me know about it.

Likewise, if you’ve had a particularly good experience, I’d like to hear about that as well.

To be clear, these stories will be for future articles on Plagiarism Today and I will need some verification as to their authenticity, most likely relevant emails. Also, I will try to talk with any hosts before calling them out on this site, in an attempt to understand both sides.

So, if you feel you’ve been wronged by a host, or even a search engine/ad network, now may be a good chance to get some answers. I’ve found that this site is a great way to get hosts to respond when they won’t in private and has been very effective at getting hosts to change some of their policies.

So what are your horror stories? I’m interested to hear them.