The Dead Spammers Society

This article is to serve 2 purposes:

• - Enlighten those who are considering sending a valid DMCA Notification to an ISP (or others for that matter)
• - Encourage those whom have been served with “valid” DMCAs, where the terms are quite broad or misleading, to file a counter-notification.

This article is for discussion, and derived from my opinion/understanding, and should not be considered in any way legal advice.

In order for a DMCA to be considered valid, the following must be present in the document:

1. A physical or electronic signature of the copyright owner or a person authorized to act on the copyright owner’s behalf (The Claimant)
2. Identification of the copyrighted work(s) claimed to have been infringed
3. Identification of the material claimed to infringe the copyright(s), and enough information for the recipient of the notice to locate it
4. The Claimant’s name, address, and telephone number(s)
5. A statement that the Claimant has a good faith belief that use of the disputed material is not authorized by the copyright owner or his agent
6. A statement, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification of copyright infringement is accurate and that the Claimant is authorized to act on behalf of the copyright owner.

I’ve seen the DMCA notifications sent out in quite a few ways that all satisfy these requirements; however, in order for the notification to be processed promptly the following should be taken into consideration:

Identification is IMPORTANT
-Provide DIRECT URLs for all pages of copyrighted materials whenever possible
-If a DIRECT URL is not possible, provide detailed directions on arriving at each page in question
-Specify the location on each page where the work(s) can be found.

Make the document easy to parse
-When the recipient includes instructions in their Acceptable Use Policy or Legal pages on DMCA submissions, submit all information in the order that the criteria is listed
-Use editable document formats (the recipient may need to copy/paste some of the information in processing/investigation)
-Date the notification because inevitably you may need to revisit this notification and this can often act as a unique identifier in conjunction with the domain name.

Receiving a Broad/Misleading DMCA?

I’ve witnessed, and have heard of others that feel they have been attacked through exploitation of this law. Luckily, counter-notifications are one opportunity to minimize the abuse. It is in conjunction with possible relief for any damages that may have been caused if the Claimant has submitted this notification with false pretenses.

The criteria of a counter-notification are:

1. A physical or electronic signature of the subscriber
2. Identification of the material that has been removed or disabled, and its prior location;
3. A statement, under penalty of perjury, that the subscriber has a good-faith belief that the material was removed or disabled as a result of a mistake or misidentification;
4. The subscriber’s name, address, and telephone number(s)
5. A statement that the subscriber consents to the jurisdiction of federal district court for the judicial district in which the address is located.

At this point the claimant can submit a notice not less than ten, but no more than fourteen business days to notify that a court order to restrain the infringing activity has been filed.

The material must still remain removed or disabled until the fourteen day period is expired; however, it can sometimes result in the material being re-enabled much sooner if the the Claimant indicates that it was in err.

Additionally, the counter-notification will provide further documented evidence should the Claimant decide to claim further damages in court.

It is important that the statement be specific on why the material was disabled as a result of a mistake or misidentification. Include comparison of works, laws that relate, and indicators of what may have caused the misidentification.

Admin Note:
Please note that we are not attorneys, do not take this as legal advice, this is just what we have seen in our experience.  Please seek sound legal advice. 

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Any one that blogs knows there is a problem. It has also recently increased. On average my other blogs receive 10-20 comment spams per day. I for one and sick and tired of it, as I am sure other bloggers are too. What can be done to stop them? Well report it to the ISP’s. Yes ISP’s will do something about the problem. What do ISP’s want to be able to process your complaint?
1. Copy of the comment.
2. The IP address that the spam originated from.
3. If possible the copy of the apache logs where the spam was posted on your blog.

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As an abuse desk analyst one of the biggest things that annoys me is the most is, the amount of information provided. Quite often someone sends an email to abuse@, we see that the complaining party will send more information than needed, or there won’t be enough information.
What We Need
* For Spam
- Header
- Body
* For Security Issues
- Evidence (preferably more than one line)
What We Do Not Need
- Copy of the WHOIS output of our IP address
- Useless commentary
- Complaints that do not provide us with any information at all.
Quite often we will receive emails that will be similar to “You and Your ‘explicative’ customer are spammers”, and that is it. So remember when you want to get spam to stop coming to you and you are complaining to the ISP make sure that you provide enough information, and make sure you do not provide more than what is needed.

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A little about me, I work for a webhosting provider. I work in the network abuse department, and I am starting this blog to help those that do not know what it is like to be on the receiving end of all those complaints that are sent in. Over time I hope this blog will help others that may not be sure how to report spam, or how to work with their service provider. I also hope to get some guest bloggers in here from different sides of the email industry.

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