In the first two parts of the blogs series Protecting Your Website Content, we talked about what copyrights are, how to protect your original copy, and implementing software to help find websites that are using your copy. In part 3 we are going to cover the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA for short. This is a valuable law to further help you protect your original works.

In 1998, President Clinton signed into law an act that was passed by the U.S Senate with a unanimous vote. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act helps protects against copyright infringement. In today's world of technology, the Internet is used everywhere which allows your message to be broadcast all over the world. If it turns out someone else is also broadcasting your message or your copyrighted material without your permission, the DMCA can help you.

The DMCA allows people to contact search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing to report copyright infringement and violations. For example, if a DMCA complaint is filed with a search engine like Google, they will notify the alleged violator of the copyright infringement. If the alleged violator does not respond to Google or take down the copyrighted material, the search engines can and have removed entire websites from their index. For a business that uses the Internet as part of their marketing, sales, or business strategy, what could be worse than getting eliminated from a major search engine index?

Before you file a DMCA complaint with a search engine, ensure that you have all the facts and details. In order to deter false DMCA complaints targeted to hurt ones competition, Google and other search engines have penalized those for making false DMCA complaints. In a recent case, a false DMCA claim led to $100,000 fine.

In addition to submitting a DMCA complaint to the search engine companies, you can also send it to company hosting the alleged violator's website as well as to the domain registrar. To find out this information, go to a search engine and type in "Who Is". Use one of the results to search for the owner of the site as well as who hosts their domain. With this information you can submit your DMCA complaint and in most cases the registrars and hosting companies will take the complaint seriously and immediately contact their client to answer to the allegations of the DMCA complaint you filed.

Just as the DMCA protects your original copy, it also protects others. So before you think about using someone else’s copy or content without permission, think about the potential implications.