I need your help about DMCAs and risks, if you have competence in this

sorry for the bad grammar

I wonder if this is why rapidsearch is down lately. Also if the movies are subed and not dubed it should be fine right?

You’ve asked a good question, and I’ll share with you what I know. The DMCA is a U.S. Copyright Infringement protection, and you would in essence need to be a U.S. citizen, or reside within the U.S. to be held responsible. However, the EU also possesses similar copyright protection under the EU Copyright Directive, if I’m correct. Unfortunately, there are cases of people being prosecuted for copyright infringement before either the DMCA or Directive were put into effect. The purpose of the two is to eliminate any loopholes or claims of ignorance when dealing with digital data, including media.

The good thing is that in order for someone to be formerly prosecuted under either, certain steps must be taken by the copyright holder before they can attempt any litigation. Just this past winter a fansubbing group received a Cease & Desist e-mail from a company that had recently licensed the Japanese Anime. I think it was for overseas distribution, but it doesn’t have to be strictly licensed for overseas distribution. The C&D is usually the first step taken concerning copyright infringement, and then it goes to domain hosting service or ISP, and then court. In the case of the fansubbing group, they complied with the C&D by removing all torrent links on their site and tracker, and dropped subbing the anime.

Don’t mistake what the RIAA has been doing with what is proper procedure for copyright infringement. The RIAA has been strong-arming individuals, and performed a roundabout C&D released to the general public via the news media. They then went after individuals who shared a large to extremely large amount of copyrighted media to try and intimidate everyone that had been sharing files. Some of the RIAA’s tactics are questionable, but many individuals cannot afford to fight a lengthy court battle. There was the case of the torrent search engine web site, I think it was TorrentSpy, that continued operations after being fined in court. Between the court and legal costs, fines, and continuing to operate, they not only had to shut down the site, they also had to file bankruptcy after the fact.

The thing is that you can reduce the risk of legal problems by following what many of the fansubber groups do, especially since in a sense you are doing the same thing. Make a link or e-mail address available on your site for someone to contact you concerning any issues of the illegal distribution of copyrighted material. Just say something like, “If you are the copyright holder, and you have issue with your material being on this site, please send a message specifying your company, contact information, material, and some form of verifiable proof of ownership or license, and we will attempt to comply with your request,” or something to that effect.

If you provide companies or authors/artists with a means by which to contact you, and you’re only asking for reasonable proof from them that they are really who they say they are, then the chance is better that they will simply send you a C&D. If you get one, then remove the file from the servers you uploaded it onto, and remove any links, galleries, and images found on your web site that belongs to them. If you do this, and you do it by the deadline they’ve specified, then when they look at your web site again they should find the material gone. If you’ve complied, and they see that you have in a timely manner, they usually won’t take it any further.

If you want, you can run searches concerning fansubbing groups receiving C&D orders, and just follow the same steps they use to keep from being taken to court. I don’t think you need to worry about closing the site, as long as you show that you’re willing to co-operate, and still have material you can post on the site. Most fansubbing groups just move onto a different anime, and most companies treat the C&D’s to the fansubbing groups on a case by case, or anime by anime basis. Sometimes they send out a list of titles, but as long as you comply with the list, you should be fine.

Well, I think that since you have work from so many authors and publishers, I doubt they will tell you to remove all the info. I have a pal who works in a company the publishes comics/manga’s and asked him about this. He told me that unless you have manga/hentai from a sole publisher they will not tell you shutdown or remove.

Thanks for the input, guys
FYI, hentairules.net is hosted by an american company, and the domain was bought off a french domain handler.

The most important part of my comment :
Please, correct me if I am wrong, the conclusion would be that
-> I can keep on sharing stuff,
-> The editors are not likely to contact my host and successfully have hentairules.net closed
-> There is just the possibility that I get a cease and desist (aka “remove at once please”) email, and if I comply to it, i’m clear ?

But then, how could you explain that some websites like browsehentai or rapidshare have had to close in a same week ?

Browsehentai was a proffitable website, its admin once contacted me to suggest I would publicize one of his “join now” offers, so I guess his service was rolling. I see no reason it would have decided to stop service.
Rapidsearch is more of an UFO, but I don’t see why it should have chosen to close without being forced to…

Maybe because, as link aggregators, they couldn’t possibly filter out every link they showed, and that didn’t please copyright holders ?

I’m pretty sure browsehentai didn’t take down any of their content despite the DMCA and C&D stuff which resulted in the suspended domain.
If worse comes to worse just do as they say and you should be in no trouble at all.

A couple of thoughts.

First, on browsehentai, x-shinigami.com which was on their service posted a message a couple of weeks ago saying they and browsehentai had gotten several DMCAs, not just one, over an unspecified period of time (my guess, a few months) and their host notified them they were being kicked for multiple DMCA issues. (they may be back if they can raise the funds and find a new host)

Second, the most common way for copyright holders to check the web for ‘violators’ is auto searches, so, many sites, DS*ist for example put nonsense characters into names that may pop up on such searchs (Na*ru*o or B*each for example) ,which throw bots like that off.

As for proactive responses, like removal, don’t seem to work for long, since I assume browsehentai would have removed such material (the double prob being a number of people could setup downloads there so it was hard for them to control what was on their site)

I’d just make it harder to find your site, and harder for auto or google like searchs to browse your content, and have an emergency fund for eventualities

I’m heavily involved with fansubbing and dvd-ripping anime community.

The bottom line is that lawyers are really fucking expensive. Companies would rather resolve the issue quickly, painlessly, and without a court order. Hentai/anime companies don’t have huge amounts of money to throw around suing people who pirate their stuff.

There’s has not been an anime group in my memory who has been explicitly shut down. They are always threatened first. Anime-supreme got an e-mail from Funi or something a while ago saying “Please remove such a such content.” They’re a dual-audio anime releasing group. They just removed the materials and stopped doing bit-torrents in general. And they still release things sometimes.

Don’t worry about it. It’s EXTREMELY unlikely that you are going to be at in risk. If you are, they will give you a cease and desist before the outright shit you down.