It is our policy to respond to clear notices of alleged copyright infringement. This page describes the information that should be present in these notices. It is designed to make submitting notices of alleged infringement to Google as straightforward as possible while reducing the number of notices that we receive that are fraudulent or difficult to understand or verify. The form of notice specified below is consistent with the form suggested by the United States Digital Millennium Copyright Act (the text of which can be found at the U.S. Copyright Office Web Site, http://www.copyright.gov) but we will respond to notices of this form from other jurisdictions as well.
Regardless of whether we may be liable for such infringement under local country law or United States law, our response may include removing or disabling access to material claimed to be the subject of infringing activity and/or terminating subscribers. If we remove or disable access in response to such a notice, we may notify the owner or administrator of the affected site or content so that he or she can make a counter notification. It is also our policy to document all notices of alleged infringement we receive, including by sending a copy of the notice to one or more third parties or making it available to the public. You can see an example of such a publication at http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca512/notice.cgi?NoticeID=861.
IMPORTANT: Misrepresentations made in your notice regarding whether material or activity is infringing may expose you to liability for damages (including costs and attorneys' fees). Courts have found that you must consider copyright defenses, limitations or exceptions before sending a notice. In one case involving online content, a company paid more than $100,000 in costs and attorneys fees after targeting content protected by the U.S. fair use doctrine. Accordingly, if you are not sure whether material available online infringes your copyright, we suggest that you first contact an attorney.
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(For example, “The photographs of the black widow spider with red spots and that of the black labrador retriever which can be viewed at the URL below” or “My published book, “Touch Not This Cat”, is infringed by the text excerpted on the site, beginning with the text ‘I came home to find my cat sitting on the kitchen counter.’”)
Please provide the URL of the allegedly infringing Google+ content. For posts and shared content, please provide a post URL, which you can find by clicking on the time-stamp of the post or choosing the "link to this post" option from the drop-down menu on the right of the post.
Please note that a copy of each legal notice we receive is sent to a third-party which may publish and annotate it (with your personal information removed). As such, the content submitted in this form will be forwarded to Chilling Effects (http://www.chillingeffects.org) for publication. You can see an example of such a publication at http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca512/notice.cgi?NoticeID=861. For products like Google Web Search, a link to your published notice will be displayed in Google's search results in place of the removed content.
Please note that we will not process your complaint if it isn't properly filled out or if the complaint is incomplete. If multiple Google products are affected, please note that you must submit a notice for each affected product. Instructions for filing a DMCA notice for each product can be found at http://www.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=1120734 (refer to the sidebar on the left-hand side of the page). Account Disabling Many Google Services do not have account holders or subscribers. For Services that do, Google will, in appropriate circumstances, disable the accounts of repeat infringers. If you believe that an account holder or subscriber is a repeat infringer, please follow the instructions above to contact Google's DMCA agent and provide information sufficient for us to verify that the account holder or subscriber is a repeat infringer.
Click here for the mail and fax submission process. Submitting via mail or fax will result in longer processing times. The above web form is the best way to contact us.
