By Pierre Zarokian
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act was meant to help individuals establish copyrights for their materials online. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work to get defamatory content removed, unless the content was something you owned, such as a section of your website copied or a copied picture that you own the copyright to. However, be adviced that some sites such as ripoffreport and thedirty.com may not comply with a DMCA take down notice, where the owners use federal protections to justify their behavior. Sending a notice to Google may not even work, as Google most often asks to deal with the sites directly. We have sent plenty of DMCA notices on behalf of our clients and know what works and what doesn’t. Unfortunately, most often DMCA would not work to take down defamatory content.
When the DMCA takedown notice fails, there are a few more options left to you.
Establish Your Reputation
You can leverage the power of social media and SEO to help rebuild your reputation after a crisis, and you don’t even need a large budget. It helps to have tools that manage social media for you, identifying what people are saying and who your likely product evangelists are. This lets you build multiple profiles, update content and monitor how everything is performing for you.
Within no time, the negative content will be buried in favor of positive content with a higher user engagement. You also get the bonus of increasing market reach and identifying key influencers you can use to spread your messaging.
This is a service our firm is best at, so if you need a professional to help you, contact us.
Take Legal Action
You cannot sue the site hosting the defamatory content the Communications Decency Act protects them. What you need to do is sue the poster or if it I anonymous you need to sue a “John Doe” and try to subpoena the records of the site hosting the content to find out who posted it. Some sites like Ripoff Report may remove content if you have a court ordered removal and if they don’t Google would most likely comply.
Legal action is costly, and not always guaranteed. Although our firm does not provide legal removals, we can refer you to one of the best attorneys that does this service.
