Unfortunately due to there no longer being a Piracy team, every Creator is responsible for filing their own DMCA takedown notices to potentially infringing websites. This guide is to teach you how to properly submit a DMCA takedown notice. 

You will need to submit DMCA emails to the website themselves, the website host (ISP or Internet Service Provider) and the Registrar of the website if you choose. 

Creating the DMCA

A DMCA is made up of these parts below: 

• Your full legal name
• Your home or mailing address (For example: 123 Main Street is an address)
  • Country
  • City
  • State/Province
  • Postal Code (Zip Code)
• Your telephone number
• If applicable, your email address
• If your original work is located on Wattpad, your Wattpad username
• A URL to your original work.
• A description of the alleged infringement (Where it is located, what is being copied, etc.).
• The URL(s) of allegedly infringing material located on Wattpad.
• Both the following statements:
  • "I hereby state that I have a good faith belief that the disputed use of the copyrighted material or reference or link to such material is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law (e.g., as a fair use)."
  • "I hereby state that the information in this Notice is accurate and, under penalty of perjury, that I am the owner, or authorized to act on behalf of the owner, of the copyright or of an exclusive right under the copyright that is allegedly infringed."
• Your electronic or physical signature.

Each DMCA you submit MUST contain all of the above information in order to be considered a valid DMCA. Once you have created your DMCA you are ready to start submitting them to the infringing website, the website host and the Registrar. 

Contacting the Website (the Registrant) 

On many websites after scrolling to the bottom there is a Privacy Policy tab. For instance on Wattpad it looks like this: 

When clicking "Privacy", the website should have a section about Copyright, Abuse, or simply a contact email. You may send your DMCA to this email. 

In the scenario that the website has its own built in reporting system you may fill out a report with them and also email them through one of their contact emails.

If there is no Privacy Policy there may possibly be a "Contact" tab or an "About Section" tab. Click through these until you can locate a contact email for the website. 

In certain cases there is strategically no contact information for the website. This is usually to discourage complaints or abuse emails. In this case we will move onto attempting to contact the website Host. 

Contacting the Host (ISP)

In order to find the host you will need to use a third party website database tool such as, “Who is Hosting This Website”. https://digital.com/who-is-hosting-this/. 

In many cases the host will mask their identity using Cloudflare or another masking service. In those cases under Hosting Provider it will state Cloudflare or the other service. You can then contact Cloudflare here: https://abuse.cloudflare.com/dmca to reveal the real host. Cloudflare will email you the name and email of the host after you fill out the above form. You may then send your DMCA to that email. 

If the real website Host appears under "Hosting Provider" like it does with Wattpad, In this instance I can see Wattpad is hosted by "Amazon Cloudfront", I would  Google "Amazon Cloudfront DMCA email", to find the email i need to send my DMCA to.

Contacting the Registrar (DNS)

A Domain Registrar sells domain names and registers them. Some of the most popular Domain Registrars or DNS for short, in regards to Wattpad, are:

• Godaddy 
• NameCheap
• Porkbun 
• Name.com 
• NameSilo
• Cosmotown

You can use websites like https://lookup.icann.org/en to look up DNS. For example when you type Wattpad.com into ICANN our DNS is revealed under Registrar: 

From here you can go to the Registrar website and search for a contact email to send your DMCA notice to. Once again contact emails will be located at the bottom of the page  the website should have a section about Copyright, Abuse, or simply a contact email. 

Contacting the Registry

In certain cases when you have not heard back from any of the above you may also choose to contact the website Registry. You can find the Registry using this website https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/listing-2012-02-25-en 

For instance we can see that Wattpad is a .com website. Using this chart and searching for .com we can see .com’s Registry is Verisign. This means that all .com websites are owned by Verisign. 

We can then go to Verisign's website and once again scroll to the bottom to find  a section about Copyright, Abuse, or simply a contact email to submit your DMCA to. 

Contacting an App

In some cases your story will appear on a popular piracy app. The good news is that usually if the app is in the Apple App store or the Google Play store they tend to be more compliant because if they aren't Apple or Google will remove them from their stores.

Apple App

After searching the app in the Apple App store scroll to the bottom of the App Preview page (the same page where you would download the app to your device) until you locate this: 

Most of these websites are required to have a page where their Privacy Policy is visible. If you cannot find their email on their privacy policy then you can search for it on their website linked under Developer Website. 

If you have successfully located their email and sent your DMCA to them and you have not heard back from the app developer within 1 week or 5 business days you can follow the steps below to contact Apple. 

OR

If the developer has hidden their email or any means of contacting them then you can proceed to the next step of contacting Apple directly.

You can report an app to Apple by filling out this form https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/appstorenotices/#/contacts?lang=en. This is a digital DMCA form which will guide you to create a DMCA and report it to Apple. 

Google App 

After searching the app in the Google Play store scroll down and you should see App Support. This is what the App Support drop down looks like for Wattpad: 

The apps contact email should be visible immediately under Support email, however you may also choose to proceed to the app website or view their privacy policy to locate a specific copyright email. Once you find the email you may submit your DMCA to the app. 

If you have successfully located their email and sent your DMCA to them and you have not heard back from the app developer within one week or five business days you can follow the steps below to contact Google. 

OR

If the developer has hidden their email or any means of contacting them then you can proceed to the next step of contacting Google directly.

To report a Google app you can follow this link https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/contact/policy_violation_report?sjid=3425207075661161579-NA to report policy violations directly to Google. Make sure to select "Intellectual Property" as the reason for your report. This is a digital DMCA form which will guide you to create a DMCA and report it to Google.