If you or your company has ever registered a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) Agent with the US Copyright Office, you must re-register your DMCA Agent at the US Copyright Office website by the end of this calendar year or risk losing DMCA Safe Harbor protection. 

Many websites or webservices allow their users or clients to upload so-called “user generated content” (“UGC”), such as comments, reviews, photographs, video and other media files. While allowing UGC is critical to the operations of many websites and webservices, there is a distinct danger in handling UGC: specifically, if a user uploads material that they do not own or have the rights to, the webservice or website may face allegations of copyright infringement, which can carry a very hefty fee – up to $150,000 per infringed work, in addition to the costs of litigation and defense.

In order to allow websites to display UGC without assuming the risk of copyright infringement liability and defense, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (passed in 1996 and effective in 1998) provides a “Safe Harbor” that exempts websites from copyright infringement liability based on UGC provided that the website operators comply with applicable DMCA requirements. These requirements include registering a “DMCA Agent” with the US Copyright Office, posting the DMCA Agent’s contact information on the website seeking Safe Harbor protection and a number of other notice requirements. The Safe Harbor provisions also includes procedures for complying with DMCA “take-down requests,” which are notices sent by owners of copyrighted material to websites or webservices demanding that infringing material be removed from that website or webservice.

Up until the end of 2016, the US Copyright Office required that DMCA Agents be registered with a paper-and-mail system. Finally, as of December 1, 2016, the US Copyright Office moved to an online registration system. Additionally, the registration fees have been reduced from over $100 to $6. However, rather than ‘migrate’ the content of their current paper-based database of DMCA Agents to this new online database, the US Copyright Office has offloaded this task to the website operators that seek the protections of the Safe Harbor. Accordingly, the US Copyright Office has required that each website that seeks to take advantage of the Safe Harbor must re-register its DMCA Agent with the US Copyright Office by December 31st of this year. Failure to do so will result in the Safe Harbor not applying past this date. Given that copyright infringement carries a statutory maximum of $150,000 per infringed work, this can be catastrophic for those who do not comply.

If you have any questions or concerns about re-registering your DMCA Agent with the US Copyright office or complying with the DMCA Safe Harbor requirements, please do not hesitate to contact Liberty McAteer or Maurice N. Ross.