DMCA takedown notice

A DMCA takedown notice is a statutory notice under section 512 of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act by which a copyright holder, or their authorised agent, may compel a US-jurisdiction online service provider to expeditiously remove allegedly-infringing material from its service. The procedural surface — the form of the notice, the requirement of a good-faith statement, the designated-agent registration with the Copyright Office, the counter-notice procedure, the repeat-infringer policy obligation — is set out in 17 USC § 512(c) and the surrounding subsections.

The instrument is, formally and substantively, a creature of US federal copyright law. It binds a service provider that is operating in the United States and that is taking advantage of the section 512 safe-harbour from secondary copyright liability. The exchange the statute structures is essentially: comply with the notice-and-takedown machinery, and you are not liable for the underlying infringement of your users.

Outside the United States the notice has no procedural standing. A foreign service provider — for instance, an Icelandic or Swiss operator — that receives a DMCA-format notice is not under any statutory obligation to act on it: the safe-harbour the notice procures does not apply to a service provider that is not subject to US copyright law, and the operator’s local copyright statute does not import the DMCA’s procedural surface. Iceland’s Höfundalög and Switzerland’s Federal Copyright Act both rely on substantive civil remedies — court-ordered removal where infringement is established — rather than on a self-service notice-and-takedown machinery.

The OffshorePress operational position is that DMCA-format notices are filed without action. Substantive complaints under the law of the operating jurisdiction proceed through the contact form; the AUP states this explicitly. The publication has set out the operator’s reasoning in the journal articles on jurisdictional drift and in the Iceland and Switzerland jurisdictional dossiers. The choice not to import a foreign procedural standard is deliberate.