One of the least popular topics in the adult industry is registering your content with the US Copyright Office. Very few content creators, studios and producers actually register their content for copyright protection. However, registering your copyrights will give you a distinct advantage over all other content creators.
Most content creators use a DMCA takedown service to send DMCA Notices to various websites that have, without authorization, posted the creator’s content. What few DMCA takedown services will tell you is that your DMCA notice may be legally immaterial unless you have a copyright registration to back-up your DMCA Notice.
When you send a DMCA notice, either personally or through a DMCA service, the platform that receives the notice to will usually forward your notice to or inform the person/account (“infringer”) that posted your content that they have received a DMCA Notice. The infringer will then have between 24-72 hours to dispute your DMCA Notice and file their own counter-notice. By filing the counter-notice, the infringer is basically stating that they do in fact have the legal right to post your content. They are challenging your copyright(s). There is no legally required time frame for the infringer to file their counter-notice, but from my experience, most DMCA compliant sites give infringers 24-72 hours to send a counter-notice. If after that time, no counter-notice is received from the infringer, the platform will remove the content based on the DMCA Notice. And the “DMCA dance” stops there. Your content is removed and you are happy.
Well what happens if the infringer files a counter-notice to your takedown notice?
If the infringer files a counter-notice then your content will be restored and posted back up on the platform. The platform is not the judge or jury in a copyright case. They are merely a third party who needs to follow what the DMCA requires. And once a counter-notification is filed, the platform must restore the content. Your content, the content you claim is being infringed will be made available to the public again. And it will remain publicly available.
What happens next is completely dependent on whether you have registered your content for copyright protection.
After a counter-notification is filed and the content is restored, the legal owner of the copyright(s) to the content has at most 14 days to file a copyright infringement lawsuit against the infringer. If the legal owner of the copyright does not file a lawsuit, the content will remain up on the platform. It is not the platform’s responsibility to do anything other than process your takedown notice and the counter-notification. After that, the responsibility to protect the content falls back upon the owner of the copyright.
In most cases, you will need to file your copyright infringement in a United States federal court. In order to file your case in federal court, most courts required that you already have your content registered or that you have at least filed the application for copyright registration.
The US Copyright Office may take anywhere from 6 weeks to a few months to finalize your application. If you have 14 days to file your copyright infringement lawsuit, this means that there is only one way to possibly secure a registration within the proscribed time limits – expedited copyright registration service. Expedited copyright registration service that will allow you to file a lawsuit will cost more than $1300 and should happen within 5 business days.
Practically speaking, once you receive the counter-notification from the platform, you will have 14 days to retain a lawyer or law firm, file for the expedited copyright registration and receive it back from the US Copyright Office and file the lawsuit. This is almost impossible.
By filing your copyright registration application prior to publishing your content, you can react quickly if your content is not removed.
AdultBizLaw.com 