Fill in the fields and this builds a notice containing all six elements that 17 U.S.C. 512(c)(3)(A) requires, using the statutory wording for the two statements that have to be worded a particular way. Nothing is sent, stored or uploaded. The text stays in your browser for you to copy.
Last updated August 2026
Your notice
General information, not legal advice. Address and telephone fields are part of element (iv) and are shown as placeholders in the output so you can add them before sending.
A DMCA takedown notice is a written request asking an online service to remove infringing material, and 17 U.S.C. 512(c)(3)(A) says it must contain six specific things. Get all six in and a host that wants to keep its legal safe harbor has to act on it. Leave one out and the host is entitled to ignore you. That is the whole mechanism, and it is why the notice is worth building carefully rather than pasting from a forum thread.
You do not need a registered copyright, a lawyer or a paid service to send one. The Copyright Office is direct about this: a work is protected the moment it is created and fixed in a tangible form, and registration is voluntary. Registration changes what you can do in court later, not whether you can send a notice today.
The part almost nobody explains is where the notice goes. Sending it to a dedicated leak site and getting silence is not the DMCA failing. Those sites are built to ignore you. The notice that works goes to the company hosting the site, because that company has a safe harbor to protect and you have just put it at risk.
The middle column is quoted from 17 U.S.C. 512(c)(3)(A). The statute says a notification must include substantially the following, which gives you room on formatting and none on substance. The right column is what goes wrong in practice.
| Clause | In plain terms | What the statute requires | Where creators go wrong |
|---|---|---|---|
| (i) | Your signature | A physical or electronic signature of a person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed. | Typing your full legal name counts as an electronic signature. Most rejected notices are not rejected here. |
| (ii) | What was copied | Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed, or, if multiple copyrighted works at a single online site are covered by a single notification, a representative list of such works at that site. | This is the element templates drop most often. Point at your original: the post, the set, the video, with a URL if it is somewhere a human can see it. |
| (iii) | Where the stolen copy is | Identification of the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity and that is to be removed or access to which is to be disabled, and information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to locate the material. | Direct URLs, one per line. Not the homepage of the leak site. A host that has to go looking will close the ticket. |
| (iv) | How to reach you | Information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to contact the complaining party, such as an address, telephone number, and, if available, an electronic mail address at which the complaining party may be contacted. | The statute says address, phone and email. An email alone is often accepted in practice, but a host is entitled to insist on the full set. |
| (v) | Good faith statement | A statement that the complaining party has a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law. | Use the statutory wording. Rewriting it in your own words is how notices get bounced as non-compliant. |
| (vi) | Accuracy, under penalty of perjury | A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed. | Note what the perjury clause actually covers: that you are authorized to act, not that the material infringes. Creators misread this constantly. |
Elements (v) and (vi) are the two worth copying rather than rewriting. They are statements of fact whose wording the statute effectively fixes, and a host reading a hundred notices a day is scanning for that wording. Everything else, including the format of the letter itself, is yours to arrange.
Six routes, roughly in order of how often they work for creator content. Sending the same notice to two or three of these at once is normal and sensible, not overkill.
| Send it to | Which contact | What to expect |
|---|---|---|
| The website itself | Its designated DMCA agent | Fastest when the site is legitimate. Dedicated leak sites often ignore it, and that is expected rather than a failure. |
| The hosting provider | Abuse or DMCA address for the host | The step most creators skip and the one that works. Look up who hosts the domain, then send there. A host that ignores a compliant notice risks its own safe harbor under 17 U.S.C. 512(c). |
| Cloudflare or the CDN | Their abuse form | A CDN will not usually remove content, but it will forward your notice to the real host and often tell you who that is. Useful mainly as a way to find the host. |
| Google Search | Their copyright removal request | Does not delete the file, removes the result from Search. Worth doing in parallel, because for most creators the search result is the actual harm. |
| The platform it was reposted to | In-product copyright report | Reddit, X, Telegram and the tube sites all have their own flow, and their own form is usually faster than emailing a generic address. |
| The domain registrar | Registrar abuse contact | Last resort, and slow. Occasionally the only pressure point on a site that has ignored everything else. |
One route that sits outside copyright entirely is worth knowing about, because for a lot of creators it is faster. Google runs a separate removal path for private, sensitive or sexual content about you, covering imagery showing you nude or in an intimate state and fabricated sexual imagery. It does not ask you to prove you own the copyright, only that the person is you. If the content is intimate imagery of you personally, that path and a copyright notice are two independent shots at the same result.
It does not end the matter. The person who posted the material can file a counter notification, and if they do, 17 U.S.C. 512(g) puts the host on a clock: it must restore the material not less than 10 nor more than 14 business days after receiving the counter notice, unless you have filed a court action seeking to restrain the infringing activity. In practice counter notices are rare for leaked creator content, because filing one means giving your real name and address and consenting to be sued. That is a high price for a repost.
It also does not make the file disappear from the internet. A takedown removes one copy from one service. Re-uploads are the normal case rather than the exception, which is why creators dealing with a persistent leak end up either sending notices on a schedule or paying somebody to do it. Neither of those is a failure of the process, it is just the shape of the problem.
And it carries a real obligation in the other direction. Under 17 U.S.C. 512(f), a person who knowingly materially misrepresents that material is infringing is liable for damages, including costs and attorneys fees, incurred by the alleged infringer or the service provider. The bar is knowing misrepresentation rather than an honest error, so a straightforward notice about your own work is not exposure. Firing notices at content you do not own is.
You own the copyright the moment the work is fixed, and you can send takedown notices forever without registering anything. What registration buys you is the ability to go further, and the rules on that are more specific than most creators realize.
First, you have to register before you can bring an infringement lawsuit over a U.S. work at all. Second, and this is the one that catches people, 17 U.S.C. 412 removes statutory damages and attorneys fees for any infringement that started after first publication but before the registration took effect, unless you registered within three months of first publication. Register after you find the leak and you are limited to proving your actual losses, which for a creator is a genuinely hard number to evidence.
The difference is large. Where statutory damages are available, 17 U.S.C. 504(c) sets a range of not less than $750 or more than $30,000 per work as the court considers just, rising to as much as $150,000 where the infringement was willful. Where they are not, you are arguing about what you can prove you lost. That gap is the entire argument for registering a body of work early, in batches, before anything goes wrong, rather than in a panic afterwards.
One myth to retire while we are here. Mailing a copy of your work to yourself does nothing. The Copyright Office addresses this directly, calling it the poor man's copyright and stating there is no provision in the copyright law regarding any such type of protection, and it is not a substitute for registration. The same logic applies to the copyright wording creators paste into a profile, which is covered in more detail on our page about what an OnlyFans copyright disclaimer actually achieves.
A DMCA takedown notice is a written request that asks an online service to remove material that infringes your copyright. It is defined by 17 U.S.C. 512(c)(3)(A), which lists six elements the notice must contain. When a compliant notice arrives, a host that wants to keep its legal safe harbor has to act expeditiously to remove or disable the material. A notice missing a required element does not carry that weight.
Six, and they come straight from the statute: your physical or electronic signature, identification of the copyrighted work infringed, identification of the infringing material with enough information to locate it, contact information for you, a statement of good faith belief that the use is not authorized, and a statement that the information is accurate and, under penalty of perjury, that you are authorized to act for the copyright owner. Miss one and the host can disregard the notice.
No. The Copyright Office is explicit that your work is under copyright protection the moment it is created and fixed in a tangible form, and registration is voluntary. You can send a takedown notice for unregistered work today. Registration matters later: you must register before you can file an infringement lawsuit for a U.S. work, and under 17 U.S.C. 412 the timing of that registration decides whether statutory damages are available at all.
Nothing. A takedown notice is an email or a web form, not a court filing, and no fee is payable to anyone. Services that charge do so for the labor of finding leaks and sending notices at volume, not for access to the process. If you are dealing with a handful of URLs, sending them yourself costs an afternoon and works exactly as well as a paid notice.
A host that wants to keep its safe harbor removes or disables the material and notifies whoever posted it. That person may file a counter notification. If they do, 17 U.S.C. 512(g) requires the host to restore the material not less than 10 nor more than 14 business days after receiving the counter notice, unless you have filed a court action seeking to restrain the infringement. Most leaks never reach that stage.
Yes. Under 17 U.S.C. 512(f), anyone who knowingly materially misrepresents that material is infringing is liable for damages, including costs and attorneys fees, incurred by the alleged infringer or the service provider. The threshold is knowing misrepresentation, not an honest mistake, so a good-faith notice about your own content is not the risk. Claiming work you do not own is.
It does not change what you own. Copyright already attaches automatically when the work is fixed, so a bio disclaimer adds no legal right you did not have a second earlier. The Copyright Office says the same about mailing work to yourself, the so-called poor man's copyright: there is no provision in the copyright law regarding any such type of protection, and it is not a substitute for registration. A disclaimer deters casual reposting and nothing more.
Where statutory damages are available, 17 U.S.C. 504(c) sets a range of not less than $750 or more than $30,000 per work as the court considers just, rising to as much as $150,000 for willful infringement and falling to as little as $200 where the infringer was innocent. The catch is 17 U.S.C. 412: statutory damages and attorneys fees are off the table unless the work was registered before the infringement began, or within three months of first publication.
Sending notices is the reactive half. The other half is making leaks less likely and finding them sooner, which is covered on OnlyFans content protection. If the account itself is the problem rather than the content, the enforcement categories are broken down on OnlyFans account banned, and creators who want to keep their identity out of all of this should read faceless OnlyFans.
Content gets stolen because people want it. That is a miserable way to learn your work has an audience, but it is also the signal underneath the problem, and the creators who handle it best are the ones who keep growing while they send notices rather than stopping to fight.
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