We all know that piracy can feel like a major problem for those who create digital content. Content owners, like our Envato Market authors, have different philosophical approaches to the piracy issue.
Some seek to fight all piracy they come across, some want to find ways to motivate users of content to pay for it, and some choose to focus on what they do sell and not change the ways of users who want all their content for free. Ultimately, this is your personal choice (and more below on the path Envato takes on the piracy issue).
Taking 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.
How to take action!
We’ve developed some resources to help you protect your copyright.
What tools to use - 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.
Who to send your DMCA notice to - here’s a guide to using ‘whois lookup’.
What to do when you’ve sent your DMCA?
Once you’ve submitted your DMCA notice it would be great if you could tell us about it via the Help 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 else 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?
First of all – we’ve got some great people! You may recall we’ve had our ‘copyright ninja’ Ibrahim taking action against pirate sites for the last few years. But you probably don’t know that we’ve also trained up a crack squad of piracy fighters, in our Envato Market Support team and from other teams, who are working with Ibrahim!
Secondly – we’ve got a ‘hit the big guys’ strategy. As you’d know, it doesn’t take that much longer to send a DMCA notice about a site that sells hundreds of items (or suggests how to rip off items) than it does to send one about a single item.
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.
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.
Thirdly – 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.
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.
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!