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Guide to Submitting a DMCA Takedown Notice

This guide describes the information that Netlify needs in order to process a DMCA takedown request. If you have more general questions about what the DMCA is or how Netlify processes DMCA takedown requests, please review our DMCA Takedown Policy.

Netlify needs complaints to be as specific as possible. These guidelines are designed to make the processing of alleged infringement notices as straightforward as possible. Our form of notice set forth below is consistent with the form suggested by the DMCA statute, which can be found at the U.S. Copyright Office’s official website: http://www.copyright.gov.

As with all legal matters, it is always best to consult with a professional about your specific questions or situation. We strongly encourage you to do so before taking any action that might impact your rights. This guide isn’t legal advice and shouldn’t be taken as such.

Before You Begin

  1. Be Truthful. The DMCA requires that you swear to the facts in your copyright complaint under penalty of perjury. It is a federal crime to intentionally lie in a sworn declaration. (See U.S. Code, Title 18, Section 1621.) Submitting false information could also result in civil liability—meaning you could incur a financial penalty.
  2. Investigate. Millions of users and organizations pour their hearts and souls into the projects they create and contribute to on Netlify. Filing a DMCA complaint against such a project is a serious legal allegation that carries real consequences for real people. Because of that, we ask that you conduct a thorough investigation and consult with an attorney before submitting a takedown to make sure that the use isn’t actually permissible.
  3. Contact the site owner directly. A great first step before sending us a takedown notice is to try contacting the user directly. They may have listed contact information on their website, or you can do a WHOIS search with the offending site’s URL. This is not strictly required, but it is appreciated.
  4. Please, No Bots. You should have a trained professional evaluate the facts of every takedown notice you send. If you are outsourcing your efforts to a third party, make sure you know how they operate, including whether they use automated bots to submit complaints in bulk. These complaints are often invalid and processing them results in needlessly taking down sites!
  5. You May Receive a Counter Notice. Any user affected by your takedown notice may decide to submit a counter notice. If they do, we will re-enable their content within 10-14 business days unless you notify us that you have initiated a legal action seeking to restrain the user from engaging in infringing activity relating to the content on Netlify.
  6. Your Complaint May Be Published. As noted in our DMCA Takedown Policy, after redacting personal information, we may publish your takedown notice (in full or partially redacted form) at https://github.com/netlify/dmca and share takedown notices with Lumen.

We Act on Takedown Notices That Substantially Comply With the Following Requirements:

  1. Include the following statement: “I have read and understand Netlify’s Guide to Filing a DMCA Notice.” We won’t refuse to process an otherwise complete complaint if you don’t include this statement. But we’ll know that you haven’t read these guidelines and may ask you to go back and do so.
  2. Identify the copyrighted work you believe has been infringed or, if multiple copyrighted works at a single site are covered, provide a representative list of such works. This information is important because it helps the affected user evaluate your claim and gives them the ability to compare your work to theirs. The specificity of your identification will depend on the nature of the work you believe has been infringed. If you have published your work, you might be able to just link back to a web page where it lives. If it is proprietary and not published, you might describe it and explain that it is proprietary. If you have registered it with the Copyright Office, you should include the registration number. If you are alleging that the hosted content is a direct, literal copy of your work, you can also just explain that fact.
  3. Identify the material that you allege is infringing the copyrighted work you’ve identified (see #2 above) and provide information sufficient to permit us to locate that material. It is important to be as specific as possible in your identification. At a minimum, this means that you should include the URL to the material allegedly infringing your copyright. If you allege that less than a whole site infringes, identify the specific file(s) or content that you allege infringe. If you allege that all of the content at a URL infringes, please be explicit about that as well.
  4. Include a statement that you have a good faith belief that the use of the materials complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law. You can use that exact language, if you’d like.
  5. Include a statement that, under penalty of perjury, the information in the notification is accurate and that you are authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed. You can use that exact language, if you’d like.
  6. Provide your contact information. We need to be able to contact you, so please let us know how you’d like us to do that (e.g., provide your email address).
  7. Sign, physically or electronically, the takedown notice. Takedown notices must be signed by a person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

How to Submit Your Complaint

To be effective, takedown notices must be provided to our designated agent. Our agent can be reached at:

Netlify, Inc
Attn: DMCA Agent
512 2nd Street, Suite 200
San Francisco, California 94107
copyright@netlify.com

Generally the fastest way to get a response is to send an email to the address above. You may include an attachment if you like, but please also include a plain-text version of your letter in the body of your message. If you must send your notice by physical mail, you can do that too, but it may take  longer for us to receive and respond to it.

Last Updated: November 1st, 2023