DMCA
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act was passed by the U.S. Congress in 1998 in part to deal with online copyright infringement.

UsenetExpress and the DMCA

UsenetExpress takes the DMCA and related notices very seriously. We maintain registration with the U.S. Copyright Office as required. Our registered agent and associated documents can be viewed at the Directory of Service Provider Agents.

The rest of this document will provide details about submitting a DMCA notice in a way that will assure prompt handling. It doesn’t matter if you are a big corporation or a single person, your copyright is important to us, and will want to do what is required to protect your copyrights under the DMCA.

DMCA notice submission overview

The DMCA allows for only the copyright holder or a legally authorized agent of the holder to submit a DMCA notice. As someone who is not the copyright holder or their agent with information about a copyrighted work on our service, please direct this information to the copyright holder. A DMCA notice may only legally be submitted by the copyright holder as they are required to identify their property under threat of perjury.

DMCA notice information and contents

The DMCA itself sets forth the guidelines for a properly formatted DMCA notice. It is necessary that it:

  1. clearly identifies the person or entity submitting the notice.
  2. clearly states relation to the copyright holder as either the copyright holder, or an authorized agent of the holder.
  3. contains a “physical or electronic signature” of an authorized person who may act on behalf of the owner. The name and contact information of the authorized individual meet this requirement and give us a person to contact if needed.
  4. contains a clear statement that under penalty of perjury, the information in the notice is accurate and that you are the copy right holder, or able to act on the behalf of the copyright holder as an authorized agent.
  5. the Usenet Message-IDs of all the articles that the DMCA notice is requesting that we take down. Please be aware that some files are large enough that they might be posted across several articles as multi-part posts. To remove them completely you need to identify all of the Message-IDs to be removed.
  6. be submitted to [email protected]. This is the email address we have registered with the Copyright office. Please include the words “copyright violation” in the subject of any related e-mail correspondence. This is not legally required, but helps to insure that we receive the email promptly. Our system automatically flag these messages as important.

DMCA notice handling procedure

Once we have received a properly formatted DMCA notice we will promptly begin to remove all of the specified articles. We will also check to see if these articles were posted by a UsenetExpress customer. If a UsenetExpress customer was found to have posted any of the specified articles then we will apply our abuse policy to that customer. Once the removal of all specified articles has been completed we will notify you via response to your DMCA notice e-mail.

Upon the first incident we will revoke Usenet posting access from the subscriber account. We will then attempt to contact the subscriber via e-mail to make them aware of our policy and the action taken. Posting privileges may be restored if the subscriber affirms that no further infringement incidents will occur.

The DMCA requires that we have “a policy that provides for the termination in appropriate circumstances of subscribers and account holders of [our] system or network who are repeat infringers”. If a DMCA notice is received that involves a subscriber for a second time after the subscriber has affirmed that no further infringement would occur, then we will at the sole discretion of UsenetExpress, terminate the account or permanently ban the account from posting.