Summary: As an Author, you may come across your Envato items being distributed outside of Envato without your permission. You can take action when you see this as you maintain the copyright to your items. This article will give you some resources to help you with this, and to protect your items from intellectual property theft.
How to take action as a rights owner
Tools to manage and report copyright
Apps & Extensions for your Web Browser
Reporting sites to us
What does Envato do about piracy?
How to take action as a rights owner
If you see someone using or selling your content without your permission – like your Envato Market items – you can take action by sending a DMCA notice to the website's owner or website’s host. A DMCA notice asks the owner or host to take the item down. Content owners have the right to do this and depending on your personal philosophy you can use this approach to act on abuse of your rights as an owner.
If you feel strongly about piracy of your items, we encourage you to actively protect your copyright in this way. Doing it yourself will be the quickest, most efficient way to get your content taken down.
We’ve developed some resources to help you protect your copyright.
Find useful information here about a range of tools we’ve found helpful. A big thanks go out to our community members (and others) who’ve created some of these tools.
How to send a DMCA notice - we’ve prepared a short guide on how to do this plus there’s a template form you can use.
You will need to send your DMCA notice to the host of the site; see below for a guide on using ‘whois lookup’.
We’ve been devoting a load of resources to fighting piracy and we’re seeing some great results, but it’s a continual effort that we can all work on together!
Tools to manage and report copyright
Hack Hunt
Link: https://www.hack-hunt.com/
This is an anti-piracy service that can find unauthorized shared links to your paid product, send a DMCA takedown notice and remove shared links from Google.
This includes the offering of four main tools:
- Find Illegal Shared links: Find unauthorized downloads of your products, software, and apps.
- DMCA Sender: Auto send DMCA takedown notice and manage your products lists.
- Abuse Email Look-up: Find all available abuse emails from a given URL/domain.
- Goodies: Report alleged copyright infringement, Abuse Email Template & useful links.
Google Search Central (formerly Webmaster Tools)
Link: https://www.google.com/webmasters/
This is a free service by Google for webmasters which you can use to check indexing status of your website and optimize its visibility.
It also has a section (Copyright Removal) which includes an online abuse contact form in order to report abuse or infringements of your copyrighted work. You can request to have your copyrighted work removed from web search results and from other Google services as well.
There’s a dashboard where you can see total of reported URLs, approved, rejected and pending URLs too.
Harvel.io
Harvel is a copyright protection platform for next-gen creators, crawling the web on a daily basis in order to find piracy links and copyright infringement of your content. It automates the process of finding and taking down piracy links through DMCA Takedowns with Google and the hosting site.
WHOIS Lookup Tools
Whois is a widely used internet record listing that identifies who owns a domain name and how to contact its registrar, registrant or web hosting company.
There is a broad range of Whois tools you can use, most of them in the form of web application but you can find web browsers extensions too. Most of these applications are free and provide similar features such as domain search, whois history, brand monitor, etc.
See a short list of these applications below:
http://who.godaddy.com/
http://www.whois.net/
http://www.whois.sc/
http://dnsquery.org/
http://www.whoismydomain.eu/
https://whois.domaintools.com/
There is a complete guide on how to use one of these applications (Whois DomainTools), it can be found via the following link: HOW TO USE THE WHOIS LOOKUP TOOL
DMCA.pro
DMCA.pro is a website that offers DMCA takedown services. They search and monitor illegal links to your products and it also offers a client control panel with real-time information, reports, etc.
It's a paid service, you can choose to pay for a monthly subscription or opt for pay as you go. All their plans available via their website.
Apps & Extensions for your Web Browser
As well as the web applications we have mentioned above, you can also try finding a good WHOIS application or extension for your preferred web browser. With these, you will be able to check the details of a website with only a few clicks. See some helpful links below:
Chrome Web Store
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/whois?hl=en-US
Mozilla Firefox Add-ons
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=whois&appver=&platform=
Reporting sites to us
Once you’ve submitted your DMCA notice you can tell us about it via the Author Support Team and include a copy of the DMCA notice you’ve sent. Sometimes we can investigate further and potentially we can take further action such as approaching the host to get the whole site taken down if we see that there’s a lot of authors being impacted by the site.
If you come across a site that you think will affect our community badly – one you think we should focus on – please let us know via support so that our crack team can investigate.
What does Envato do about piracy?
At Envato, we are continually fighting piracy, as well as misuses of our brands which might confuse users (which ultimately is bad for our whole community). But what do we do? And what is our strategy?
We’ve got a ‘hit the big guys’ strategy. So, while you send DMCA notices about your own items, we are concentrating on trying to get the big sites taken down altogether. This is especially so for sites that target or mimic Envato sites like Envato Market.
This is not always a quick process so while we’re combatting the sites, we still encourage you to follow up on the infringement of your content with the site hosting provider.
We’ve also established content take-down procedures with some of the major cyberlocker and file sharing sites which allow us to support Envato Market authors to take down items in bulk.
We have this strategy because this is the way we can help as many of our community members as possible. It is more efficient for us to hit the sites with the most impact on our community rather than try to cover all the one-off instances of piracy.
We’re realistic about not being able to deal with all piracy we come across. We have to be quite pragmatic about what the top priorities are across our networks of sites. Unfortunately, it’s something that content creators with their work online have to deal with all over the world.
We take piracy really seriously and we are working hard behind the scenes to get content and sites taken down. To help combat piracy, it takes a community approach to take action to help make items sold on our sites harder to target.