Copyright violations

https://builtbybit.com/threads/standing-firm-against-leak-sites.455982/

Know that you are not powerless to fight against the redistribution of your content. If your products have ended up on a leak site, there are steps you can take to get it removed. This wiki is intended to provide our content creators with the resources necessary to report these sites for their theft, and to the fullest extent of the law and policies of services these leak sites may be using, ensure that the content is removed.

And a reminder: Never to allow yourself to be blackmailed/extorted into paying these leak sites for ‘protection’ from their own theft. Not only is the word of the scammers behind these schemes unreliable at best, the revenue they earn from you will only serve to further fund their theft and abuse of other content creators.

Directly funding leak sites through any means is a violation of BuiltByBit's policies and can result in the restriction and permanent ban of your account.

Stay on the side of the creators. Report their abuse. Don’t fund it. Together, we can end it.

DMCA Takedowns​

DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedowns are among the most successful in protecting the rights of copyright holders. Any copyright owner is capable of issuing a DMCA notice of their own accord, and BuiltByBit encourages everyone whose content is being unrightfully redistributed, protect your rights through lawful means. That said, the legal weight of a DMCA notice does not apply only to the receiver. It’s important that the issuer understand the responsibilities and implications that issuing a DMCA notice has.

Firstly, it should be known that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is U.S law, and therefore applies only to the United States. However, Copyright law is international. The WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) Copyright Treaty provided the foundation for the US DMCA. As such, any OSP based in a WIPO member state has strong reason to comply with a formal copyrighted material takedown request, such as in a DMCA compliant format.
https://www.copyright.gov/title17/
https://www.wipo.int/members/en/

Countries outside of the WIPO may still have similar laws in place to protect copyright holders from the theft of their property. If you do not have the time or money to speak with an attorney on how to protect your rights in the country where the offense is occurring, you may consider hiring professionals who are familiar with the practice, to act on your behalf. https://www.dmca.com is a very successful resource for this purpose, and they provide a 100% money back guarantee if they are unable to get your content taken down, with their full service package.

If you’re confident in your ability to write and deliver the DMCA notice on your own, know that your DMCA notice is only effective if it has all of the following:


Searching online, you can find many DMCA notice generators and formats at your disposal. Do look at examples if you’re having trouble wording your notice.

Once you have your notice written, you need to know who to send it to.

Most websites will have a “support” email, which you can email them at, however, there’s no reason to rely solely on their willful cooperation. Use abuse email lookup tools to find the best emails to contact to report their abuse, and always check WHOIS. You’ll want to send the DMCA notice to both their server host, as well as their domain registrar.
If they refuse to cooperate with the demands of their own host and registrar, their service will be suspended, which means the leaks of your peers’ work are also taken down.

You may also consider sending the DMCA notice to various search engines to get the content deindexed. Though, if the content is already removed from the website itself, this will likely happen automatically next time the search engine crawls the site.

Search Engines​

Search engines will display results related to received search queries for any website they’ve crawled. This includes leak sites, which feed off of the popularity of your product by utilizing the same key terms used to locate your resource on a legitimate site. When someone searches for your resource, unless you report the infringing link to the search engine and get it taken down, your leaked product will likely show below or even above your legitimate resource link(s) in the search results.

You absolutely must report to remove any infringing links from web browser search results from your potential buyers.

Here you can find the copyright infringement report function for Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Cloudflare​

Many sites utilize Cloudflare to hide their server IP, optimize their service as well as protect themselves against DDoS attacks. Cloudflare, offers an abuse form for filing a copyright infringement complaint/DMCA violation, which they will forward to both the site’s webmaster as well as the server host for processing. They will also provide you with contact information for direct communication with the webmaster.

In accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Cloudflare will, in appropriate circumstances, disable access to Cloudflare services or terminate the accounts of users determined to be repeat infringers.


Ending the Cloudflare protection of leak sites is something that only the victims of these leak sites are able to do, and only through their combined unyielding insistence for the rights over their property which they are entailed.

Google AdSense​

The Content Policies of the Google AdSense program forbid the inclusion of ads on pages which contain "Hacking/cracking content” or "any other content that is illegal, promotes illegal activity or infringes on the legal rights of others”.

You are able to report the violation of these policies even if you do not own the cracked/stolen content. So please, if you are able to file a conclusive report for these violations, do so, and protect the rights of the stolen content’s owner.

Furthermore:

Copyrighted material
AdSense publishers may not display Google ads on pages with content protected by copyright law unless they have the necessary legal rights to display that content. This includes pages that display copyrighted material, pages hosting copyrighted files, or pages that provide links driving traffic to pages that contain copyrighted material.

It is our policy to respond to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). For AdSense publishers, if we receive a notice or otherwise have reason to believe that your page is infringing, we may terminate your participation in the program. You can file a counter-notification via this form. More information about our DMCA process is available in this blog post.

If you believe that a page which is participating in the AdSense program is displaying your copyrighted material without the rights to do so, please report it using this form or by clicking on the AdChoices icon

.


AdSense is a source of income and sustainability for these leak sites which continue to victimize hard working content creators every day. Ending their ability to earn AdSense revenue from page visits is one big step towards ending the funding of these sites entirely, and ensuring they cannot cause further damage to any more creators in the future.

PayPal​

PayPal’s Acceptable Use Policy forbids the use of PayPal for activities which violate any law, statute, ordinance or regulation, or relate to transactions involving:

(d) items that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity, (e) stolen goods including digital and virtual goods (h) items that infringe or violate any copyright, trademark, right of publicity or privacy or any other proprietary right under the laws of any jurisdiction


Leak sites are in violation of all of these above terms, and if you are aware of the PayPal account being used to facilitate transactions for these leak sites, report it, so that their PayPal account will be locked and they will be unable to receive payments for leaks or ranks they may be selling on their sites, nor use the balance accumulated in their PayPal accounts to pay for hosting, domain renewals, development, and worst of all, the products belonging to other buyers/sellers, and updates to products currently being leaked on their website.

Certainly, the webmasters of these leak sites may start using a different PayPal to accept payments, however, if the new accounts are reported as soon as they are introduced, we can ensure that these leak sites never accept any significant amount of money for their theft.

You can make the report to [email protected], and they will reply within your PayPal message center. Unfortunately, you will not be informed of the results of their investigation, however, we must trust that the PayPal AUP enforcers will take action against violations presented directly in front of them.
The response you receive to your report will likely consist of the following:

Thank you for contacting PayPal and reporting a possible violation of our Acceptable Use Policy.

We will thoroughly review the mentioned website/s and/or auction/s and possible linked PayPal accounts and take further action as appropriate in this case.

Due to data protection we cannot provide details regarding the result of this review or its possible consequences and hope for your understanding in this regard. As a matter of course your information will be kept in confidence.

We thank you for your active support of PayPal and appreciate the information that you provided.

The complete Acceptable Use Policy can be found at the following URL:
https://www.paypal.com/uk/webapps/mpp/ua/acceptableuse-full

To learn more about the Acceptable Use Policy, please refer to our Help Centre page here:
https://www.paypal.com/gb/selfhelp/home

Again, we thank you for your cooperation. If you have any further questions, please contact the PayPal Brand Risk Management Department at [email protected].