DMCA

The US Digital Millenium Copyright Act.

Unfortunately I found myself learning about this today as I stumbled across a domain pointing to a complete copy of a site I support.

This came to light during routine monitoring when I noticed traffic against a 2015 event page.
While the 2015 event page still existed all traffic should have been going to the 2016 event page.

After some digging I found that the traffic was originating from a domain neither me nor my colleagues were aware of.
Worse, it was hosting a complete copy of our site from November 2015.

It is a trivial matter to find out where a domain is hosted - in this case it was an ISP in the US,

As part of the DMCA every ISP in the US has to publish the details of a contact designated for handling DMCA requests.
That list is available here.

Some US ISP make DMCA requests straightforward by either making an online submission form available (kudos to Automattic as an example) or allow email submissions.

All this particular ISP did was publish a DMCA policy which stated that the notice has to:
> … be a written communication sent to the address above via registered mail or Federal Express and must require a signature at time of delivery.

Not very helpful when we are half a world away from their office.
That said, an email to the legal department at said ISP (address from their contact details) using a sample DMCA takedown letter did have the desired result, although it did take a couple of weeks.

Sample DMCA takedown letter is available here (amongst many others).

Couple of useful links -
http://bzzzsocial.com/how-to-issue-a-dmca-takedown-notice-to-google/
http://www.sfwa.org/2013/03/the-dmca-takedown-notice-demystified/