DMCA or Trademark? Picking the Right Takedown Notice

The solicitor's invoice said 1,150 pounds and the covering note said, in effect, you sent the wrong form.

Priya had found 9 listings copying her ceramic planters. She'd sent 9 copyright notices. 7 of them were rejected, and the rejections all said something close to the same thing: the images on those listings weren't hers. The sellers had reshot the product. Badly, on a kitchen counter, but reshot.

What they had copied was the name. Every one of the 7 listings said Kilnwork in the title.

"So I had a trademark case and I filed a copyright case," she said. "Nine times."

Two different rights. Two different forms. Two different pieces of evidence. The choice takes 30 seconds once you know how to make it, and getting it wrong costs weeks and sometimes a solicitor.

The question that decides it

Not "are they ripping me off". Everyone is sure about that already. The question is: which of my things did they actually copy?

Four answers, four routes.

They used my photographs. That's copyright. In the United States this is the DMCA route under 17 U.S.C. 512, and it's the strongest hand a small brand holds, because you don't need to have registered anything to send the notice. You took the picture, you own the copyright from the moment you took it. (Registration matters if you ever want to sue in a US court, under 17 U.S.C. 411. For a takedown, it isn't required.)

They used my brand name or my logo. That's trademark, and there's no DMCA for trademarks. You go through the platform's own intellectual property programme, and almost all of them want a registration number. Amazon's Brand Registry expects a registered mark, or in some cases a pending application. eBay's Verified Rights Owner programme, Etsy's reporting portal and Alibaba's IP Protection platform all run on the same logic: show us the right, then we'll act on it.

They copied the shape of the product itself. That's design right, and it's the hardest of the three. A registered design in the UK or EU, or a design patent in the US, gives you something to point at. Unregistered design right exists in the UK and is narrower and shorter-lived than people hope. Without a registration, platforms will usually decline.

They're selling my genuine product without permission. Painful, and mostly not an intellectual property matter at all. It's a contract problem with whoever sold it to them. Platforms are explicit about this: Walmart's IP claim form states it doesn't accept unauthorised-reseller claims, and the others take a similar line in practice. Sending an IP notice here is how brands get their reporting access restricted.

Priya's case was a trademark case. 2 of the 9 were copyright cases. She'd treated all 9 as copyright.

Read the listing, then pick

A 2-minute habit that saves the 1,150 pounds.

Open the listing side by side with your own. Then write down three yes-or-no answers.

Is any image on that page a file I can prove I own? Not "similar to mine". The same photograph, or a crop or recolour of it. If yes, copyright is live.

Does the title, the body text, the shop name or the product image carry my brand name, my logo, or something close enough to confuse a buyer? If yes, trademark is live, and only useful if you hold a registration.

Is the product itself a copy of a design I've registered? If yes, design right is live.

You can have more than one. When you do, file on the strongest. For most small brands the strongest is copyright, because you own it automatically and the evidence is a photograph you can date. For brands with a registered mark and a copycat using the brand name in a shop name, trademark is stronger, because it attacks the shop rather than the listing.

That last distinction is the one worth paying attention to. A copyright notice removes a listing. A trademark complaint about a shop name can remove a shop. Same afternoon's work, different blast radius.

What the notice has to contain

The DMCA notice has a statutory shape, set out in 17 U.S.C. 512(c)(3)(A). Six elements, and platforms reject notices that miss any of them:

• your signature, electronic is fine
• identification of the work being infringed, so the photograph, with a link to where you published it
• identification of the infringing material, with enough detail to find it, so the listing URL
• your contact details
• a statement that you believe in good faith the use isn't authorised
• a statement that the information is accurate, and, under penalty of perjury, that you're the owner or authorised to act for the owner

Read that last bullet again. Under penalty of perjury. That phrase is in the statute, it's in the form, and it's the reason this isn't a task you hand to software.

Section 512(f) backs it up. Anyone who knowingly materially misrepresents that material is infringing is liable for damages, including the other side's legal costs. Brands have paid out under it. Not many, but enough that the risk is real rather than theoretical.

In the EU the mechanics differ and the direction is the same. The Digital Services Act, Regulation (EU) 2022/2065, requires platforms to provide a notice and action mechanism under Article 16 and to give the affected seller a statement of reasons under Article 17, with routes to contest the decision. A sloppy notice in the EU produces a documented dispute rather than a quiet removal. Article 30 of the same regulation requires online marketplaces to collect and verify trader information, which is occasionally the most useful fact in this entire article: the platform knows who the seller is, even when you don't.

Why no tool should file it for you

Here's my actual position, and it's the reason the product we run is built the way it is.

Software can do everything up to the signature. It can find the listing. It can score the photo similarity, note that the title repeats your brand name, and flag that the price sits 70% below yours. It can grab the screenshot and timestamp it so the evidence survives the listing. It can look up the right route for that platform, fill the fields and draft the wording.

It cannot swear the statement. The notice says you have a good faith belief that the use isn't authorised. A model doesn't know who you authorised. It doesn't know about the handshake deal with the stockist in Lisbon, or that the shop with the odd name is your own second account, or that the similarity is because you both buy from the same factory.

Any product that files on your behalf is signing a sworn statement using your identity, on facts it can't check. The automation saves you 4 minutes and exposes you to 512(f). That's a bad trade and it should be a dealbreaker in your tool selection, not a footnote.

Brand Protection Tools, which Verity AI runs, draws the line in the code rather than the terms of service. It drafts the DMCA notice for copied photographs, or the trademark complaint where a registration exists, and then it stops. Confirming a match and submitting a notice happen on the brand owner's click and nowhere else. It also provides software, not legal advice, which is a sentence worth checking for on anything you buy in this category. Human in the loop, done properly is the longer argument for why that boundary belongs in the architecture.

Where the forms actually are

The other thing that eats a morning is finding the route. Platforms move these pages, bury them behind a sign-in, or keep three of them with different scopes.

We maintain a free index of them, opened by hand and dated: brandprotectiontools.com/data/takedown-routes. Version 2026-11-06 covers 12 platforms and channels, with 10 routes confirmed by opening them, 4 that require a sign-in before you can file, and 1 still unverified and marked as such. It downloads as CSV and JSON, it's free to use with credit, and every row links back to its source.

One rule from it that saves people real trouble. For a copy sold from a standalone website rather than a marketplace, the notice goes to the company hosting the site, verified, never to the domain registrar. A registrar can only switch off the whole domain, which is both disproportionate and the fastest way to have your complaint dismissed.

After you file

Priya refiled the 7 as trademark complaints. 5 came down inside a fortnight. 1 was rejected because the seller had used a near-miss spelling that the platform decided wasn't close enough. 1 produced a counter-notice.

The counter-notice is the part nobody warns you about, and under 512(g) the clock is unforgiving: once a valid counter-notice lands, the platform puts the material back in not less than 10 and not more than 14 business days, unless you tell it you've filed a court action. So the week after a takedown is a decision week, not a victory week.

And then there's the relisting, which isn't a legal problem at all and is the one that actually determines whether any of this worked. The relisting problem is next.

For the wider argument about why this matters more now that buyers ask assistants where to shop, start at When the AI shopping assistant recommends the fake.