DMCA notices and how we handle them

Almost everything you read here we wrote ourselves: 51 service pages across 12 platforms, the hubs behind them, 19 guides in the blog and the policies in the footer.

A page like Instagram followers is our text on our machines, so a notice about it reaches the people who wrote the words.

There is no account here and no upload form. An order is a package step and a public link or username pasted into a field, no login and no password, so no one else's files are sitting on this site.

Eight tools run on the site. The Instagram story viewer looks the media up at the moment you ask for it and streams it through to your browser. The TikTok downloader works the same way, as does the one for Twitter.

We do not copy that media onto our servers, we do not keep it after the request and we do not index it. If you want a file gone from the internet, only the platform hosting it can do that, and a notice asking us to remove something we never stored gets that answer back.

Put it in writing and give us the six elements that 17 U.S.C. § 512(c)(3) asks for. We work to the American notice and takedown procedure because it is the one rights holders already use. Governing law and place of jurisdiction for MrFollows is the United Arab Emirates.

1. A signature, physical or electronic, of the copyright owner or of someone authorised to act for them.

2. The copyrighted work you say has been infringed, named closely enough that we can find it.

3. The material you want removed, with the full address of the page it sits on.

4. Your contact details: name, postal address, telephone number and email address.

5. A statement that you believe in good faith that the use is not authorised by the owner, by an agent or by law.

6. A sworn statement that what you have written is accurate and that you are the owner or act for the owner. Swearing to something you know to be untrue is perjury.

A notice missing one of the six is not effective. If an element gives you trouble, send what you have and say so.

Email info@mrfollows.com with DMCA in the subject line. That is the address for copyright notices, it is read by a person rather than a filter, and an answer comes back within 24 hours.

Write from an address you read, because the answer comes back to it: what we found, what came off the site, or why the notice does not reach us. If a deadline of yours is running, say so in the notice.

We read it, look at the material and, where the notice holds up, remove the material or switch off access to it. That is the full extent of what we can do: take our own copy down.

You get an answer naming what came off and where it stood. The text on this site is ours, so a notice here concerns our own work and we answer it ourselves. Were material ever to come from someone else, we would pass your notice on with your contact details in it, because a counter-notification needs both sides reachable.

Whoever the removed material belonged to can answer with a counter-notification under 17 U.S.C. § 512(g), sent to the same email address.

It needs a signature, the material and where it stood before we removed it, and a sworn statement that you believe in good faith it came down through a mistake or a misidentification. Add your name, postal address and telephone number, your agreement to accept service of process from whoever filed the notice, and your agreement to answer the dispute in court.

A complete counter-notification goes to the person who filed the notice. If they do not tell us within 10 business days that they have taken the matter to court, we may put the material back, usually between 10 and 14 business days after we passed it on.

Anyone who keeps drawing sound copyright notices stops being someone we do business with, and we turn down further orders from them. That is an ordinary condition of the safe harbour.

17 U.S.C. § 512(f) makes anyone who knowingly and materially misstates that material infringes, or that it came down by mistake, liable for the other side's damages, legal fees included. It cuts both ways, against a notice and against a counter-notification.

So we read a notice before we act on it. A takedown is not a cheap way to remove a comparison someone dislikes or a page that outranks theirs.

Engagement is not a copyright matter. Ordering YouTube views puts a count on a public link and copies nothing of yours, and the same is true of Twitter likes. A video that uses your work sits with the platform, and so does the notice about it.

Impersonation is a different question. If someone is trading on the MrFollows name, write to the same address and say so: it is a trademark and fraud matter rather than a copyright one, and we want to know.

An order that went wrong is not a copyright question either. The money-back policy sets out what we refund and when. What the link check does on each platform is covered on safety.

For anything else, contact is the shorter road.