Okay, so we now know how to hunt down a leak, figure out who controls it, write the notice, file it, follow up, and do the whole damn process ourselves. This is the third installment of our DMCA Takedowns and protection series partnered with Bruqi. This resource is going to cover everything we need to know about DMCA takedown services first, and then we are going to have the team from Bruqi answer all your burning questions on the topic of DMCA and DMCA takedowns.
Legal disclaimer: I am not an expert in the field, nor am I a copyright lawyer. Please consult a licensed professional with any concerns or questions. This resource is written in paid sponsorship with Bruqi.
DMCA Takedown Services: The What, Who, and Why
What is a DMCA service and which creators should use one?
A DMCA takedown service is basically a company you authorize to do some or all of the work around DMCA protection for you. You do not need a DMCA takedown service to file a takedown. But you do have the option available.
Different DMCA takedown services will offer different services available. These often include helping you prepare notices, performing background scans for leaks, identifying infringements, submitting takedowns, requesting search-engine delisting, monitoring for reuploads, and keeping track of everything for you. A great example to look at is Bruqi. Their service includes scanning and monitoring public websites and databases for potentially unauthorized uses and then submitting removal and search-delisting requests on behalf of users.
When it comes to which creators should use one, let’s bust a quick myth. There is no magic income level, follower count, subscriber count, or ‘level of attractiveness’ that makes a creator automatically need or qualify for a DMCA service.
Think about the amount of infringement you’re dealing with and the amount of time you’re spending dealing with it. If you find one stolen photo every six months and don’t mind filing the occasional notice yourself, you may be perfectly fine doing this manually. If you’re constantly finding hundreds of links, multiple scrapes, impersonators, old content from years ago, or the same shit reappearing every time you remove it, paying someone else to continually look for and remove it might make a whole lot more sense.
For creators with a massive back catalog, multiple usernames, years of content floating around online, or those who want to be on top of removals from day one, having something continually looking can be WAY more realistic than spending every Sunday night Googling ourselves until we want to throw the laptop out a window.
Why would creators want to use a DMCA service?
There are a number of reasons creators would want to use a DMCA service!
- The benefit of anonymity: Many services like Bruqi will submit takedown requests for you in their name as an agent on your behalf. This helps keep your information private from the sites and offending parties.
- The gift of recouped time: Gathering all the evidence of the infringement, drafting, and then submitting notices for every leak you find when checking takes a lot of time that creators just don’t have. Having a service do it for you gives you that time back.
- The protection of active monitoring: Sure, creators can schedule a time every week or month to search for their leaks to try and stay on top of it. But if your stolen content is posted the day after you do your search, then it is up there until you do your next. And what if you just miss something? Or, what if the content you just spent a week getting taken down from one site pops up on three more during your next scan? Finding our own leaks is hard to do, but it’s much harder to keep up with every day, all day. Many services, like Bruqi, offer background scanning for you to catch what you miss.
- The ease of automated takedowns: Y’all, manual takedowns are absolutely doable. But they are an absolute time suck and will drain your energy. Many services provide automated takedowns that all happen in the background while you dedicate your time where it really matters.
There are a ton of reasons creators will lean on a service, but they all boil down to automation. Automation is the key in this industry, unlocking the time creators need to do all the… well, everything else we need to do every day.
The different kinds of DMCA services and how they work
Just like every creator is different, every DMCA service is different. This is why it is so important to actually read the details of what we are buying first. Here are a few of the different types of services available:
DIY services: These provide some tools but still leave us responsible for the actual enforcement. That may include providing templates, host lookups, tracking tools, scans, and instructions for submitting notices ourselves. DMCA.comcurrently offers DIY takedown tools where the copyright owner prepares and sends their own notices, and Bruqi currently has a free DIY tier that includes periodic scans and removal resources without automatic removals.
Monitoring services focus on FINDING potential infringement. They may search images, keywords, usernames, webpages, or other information and then notify you when they find something. Monitoring and removal are not automatically the same service, though. Make sure you know whether removals come with monitoring or are offered separately.
Automated or subscription takedown services continuously search and then submit removal requests on our behalf. This is the hands-off model where we’re basically handing the labor to the service and getting as much help as we can. Bruqi is a prime example of this service, as some of its tiers currently offer automated requests for both search-engine delisting and source-content removals, along with removals involving impersonation and deepfakes.
Managed or pay-per-case services are when an actual person or team handles a specific infringement case, rather than paying for continuous automated protection. This type can make sense when you don’t need ongoing monitoring, but you’ve found one particularly annoying leak and just will not deal with it yourself.
Let’s get honest, though. Most companies are really a combination of these, thrown into a blender, and a hybrid of all of these options.
Important information you should know about your DMCA service
Before you hand over your content and your credit card, know what the hell you’re actually buying.
What do they remove and where? Does your plan cover source websites? Google? Bing? Reddit? X? Telegram? Impersonators? Deepfakes? Are those included, or are they upgrades? Even within one company, the answer can completely change by plan. You want to know exactly what “unlimited removals” or “full protection” means BEFORE the bill hits.
Do they find the leaks only, delist only, or do full removals? A service finding a link does not mean it has been removed. A search engine removing a result does not erase the original page. Ask what the service considers a successful removal and what happens when the original site refuses to cooperate.
Do you use my legal name? You need to know this BEFORE signing up. One major advantage of using a service is enhanced privacy, so you need to know for sure whether you are getting it. Do NOT assume every company does this. Ask exactly what name, email, address, or other information is being sent in your notices and who can see it.
Do you permit adult content? Not every service will want to work with adult creators. It is important to know this before signing up with your usernames. Some sites are absolutely on adult creators’ side and happy to help, like Bruqi.
When do you need an attorney, rather than a DMCA service?
Most normal leaks do not require us to immediately lawyer up. The Copyright Office specifically says you do not need an attorney, or any other company for that matter, just to send a DMCA takedown notice.
You need to look at an attorney when someone disagrees with your right to remove something. That could be because somebody filed a counter-notice, ownership is being disputed, a photographer or collaborator claims rights in the content, a license is involved, or somebody is making an actual fair-use argument. Most importantly, if someone files a valid counter-notice and you want to prevent the content from being restored, Section 512 generally requires the service provider to restore it after 10 to 14 business days unless the original complaining party notifies the provider that a court action has been filed. That is a hard law. If someone sends a counter-notice, your next option is to go to court or allow the content to stay up.
Think about the divide like this:
DMCA service: “Find this shit and help me get it off the internet.”
Copyright attorney: “We now have an actual legal fight.”
Those two worlds absolutely overlap, and some takedown companies offer escalation or connections to legal professionals. But once we’re talking court filings, disputed rights, potential damages, or someone formally challenging our claim, we want someone who can actually give us legal advice about OUR specific situation rather than expecting a takedown service to magically turn into our lawyer.
DMCA Experts Answer Your Questions
You asked, They Answered
Y’all know how I always say the wisdom of the crowd is greater than the individual, right? We asked y’all what big questions you had about DMCA takedowns and services, and the team at Bruqi stepped up to the challenge! We asked you in r/creators_spicy_tea, in Creators Resource Chats, and on the Creators Spicy Tea Patreon what myths you’ve heard or questions you had about the topic. We then handed those over to the team at Bruqi to see what the folks actually proficient in the topic had to say. Below are those questions anonymized (other than ones found in the wild) and all the responses:
1. It’s as the title says. A customer that spent over 15k usd and bought every set of mine since 2024 posted and leaked the entire thing online on a website that doesn’t comply with DMCA takedowns. Now what? 2 years of work public for everyone to find- nothing i can do about it. Feeling extremely demotivated and hopeless.(Post found here)
Firstly, I’m so sorry this happened to you. Getting leaked is horrible on its own, but getting leaked by someone who’s been buying from you for two years is a different kind of awful, and feeling demotivated and hopeless after that is natural.
The “nothing I can do about it” part isn’t quite true though. Most creators who get leaked have no idea who did it. You do, and that changes what’s possible.
Before you block or confront them, save everything. Screenshots, screen recordings, anything that ties their username to the leak, because once you block them it gets a lot harder to collect. Then block them, and yes, I know blocking someone who’s spent 15k stings, but if you’re sure it was them, there’s no version of this where they get to stay.
Then take all that proof to the platform. They have this person’s payment details on file, and creators who’ve come with solid proof have gotten their leakers banned, sometimes even IP blocked. It won’t undo the leak, but it stops them from sitting in your subscriber list doing it again.
Now the removals. I know the site ignoring DMCA feels like the whole thing is lost, but here’s what most people don’t realize: when a leak gets delisted from Google and Bing, its discoverability drops by up to 99.9%, and search is how basically everyone finds leaked content in the first place. So the page can sit there all it wants, if nobody can find it, it’s not doing much. On top of that, even sites that ignore DMCA still depend on hosting companies, CDNs and registrars to stay online, and those companies often do respond even when the site won’t.
The one thing I’ll be upfront about is that content like this tends to spread to other leak sites over time, so this isn’t a one weekend cleanup, it needs ongoing attention. That’s honestly the main reason Bruqi exists, we keep scanning and removing as new copies show up, so hunting them down isn’t your job on top of everything else.
I know none of this makes the betrayal part better. But your work isn’t gone, and this is way more fixable than it feels right now.
2. I feel silly even asking because I feel like I know the answer. I’m a plus size creator, do I really need to worry that people are sharing my things places? Basically because I’m not the ‘social standard’ and in many ways a fetish for a few. Does it matter for me or ‘less’ likely to happen? (Sent anonymously)
Please don’t feel silly for asking, and I really wish I could tell you not to worry. But it’s tough to be the bearer of bad news here: content leaks no matter what kind of creator you are. Leak sites have sections for every niche you can think of, plus size very much included, and the logic behind it is painfully simple. If people are willing to pay for your content, there are people who want it for free, and that’s all a leaker needs.
What does vary is how often it happens. Creators with fewer fans generally get leaked less, which sounds comforting until you flip it around, because it also means the more popular you get, the more you’ll be leaked, and leakers don’t do it once and move on. They keep coming back for everything new.
That’s honestly the whole reason Bruqi’s plans scale the way they do, from weekly scans on the $29 Side Hustle plan up to hourly on the top one. Someone who gets leaked occasionally just doesn’t need the same protection as someone getting leaked daily, and we didn’t want smaller creators paying $100+ a month for coverage they don’t need yet. Whichever service anyone ends up looking at, ours included, the two questions I’d always ask are how well the leaks get found and how often removals actually run, because those two things decide everything.
But for you specifically, the fastest way to settle this is to stop wondering. Run a free scan and see for yourself. If it comes back clean, wonderful. If it doesn’t, at least you know exactly what you’re dealing with and can start fixing it.
3. One of the most common questions i hear is “why wont this come down too?” when in reference to sites in other countries (Creators Resource Chats)
There are really two answers here, because search engines and the sites themselves are completely different battles.
Search engines are the winnable one. Delisting a leak from Google and Bing should work basically every single time (once in a while Google rejects a link claiming they couldn’t find the infringement, but that’s rare and in these cases it’s possible to appeal), and it matters more than people realize, because delisting kills up to 99.9% of a leak’s discoverability. If nobody can find it by searching your name, the leak is more or less dead, even though the page is technically still sitting out there.
The sites themselves are where it gets frustrating, and the honest reason is that DMCA is a US law. A site hosted in a country that doesn’t enforce copyright faces zero consequences for ignoring you, and some leak sites choose their hosting for exactly that reason.
What you can still do is go after everything around them. Every site needs a hosting company, usually a CDN (a lot of these sites sit behind Cloudflare), and a registrar, and sometimes the site ignores you while their host doesn’t. We’re pretty stubborn about this at Bruqi, we contact every layer we can reach on every single link, and it’s often what decides whether something comes down at the source.
We can’t remove everything though, and any company that tells you they can is lying to you. Many countries just don’t care that much about copyright, or about the massive consent violation happening on these sites.
So the best anyone can do is put as much pressure as possible on these sites and make the leaks as invisible as possible, and that’s exactly what we do.
4. Why it’s so difficult to get things completely removed! (…) 9 times out of 10, the content is just delisted. I don’t feel like they escalate it enough, despite a lot of the sites in question having DMCA sections on the website saying they’ll remove the content if you fill in the form. I still have to do weekly checks myself and always find stragglers that they haven’t removed 🙄 It’s such a draining experience. And like I was saying the other day, is a huge huge driver for me trying to switch my promo to SFW only. Once the switch is made and I can get a steady stream of subs from SFW channels, I’ll also be changing my stage name (just the last name) to add another layer of separation (Creators Resource Chats)
Doing weekly checks yourself on top of paying for a service, I completely get why you called that draining. It shouldn’t be like that, and I hope some of this helps it make more sense.
First, the “just delisted” part, because I think it stings more than it should. Delisting is the single most important step in this whole process. Search is how nearly everyone finds leaks, and delisting cuts that off by up to 99.9%, so a delisted leak is doing a small fraction of the damage even if it’s technically still up. I know that’s cold comfort when what you want is for it to be gone completely, but those delistings are carrying most of the protection.
Here’s the thing with removal at the source: it only happens if someone actually sends the emails and fills out the DMCA forms, and a lot of services never send them at all, they stop once a link is delisted. We send them on every single link, plus the site’s host and providers when the site ignores us, and that gets content down at the source about half the time. The other half are sites that won’t budge for anyone, and plenty of the DMCA pages are pure decoration. Those we keep unfindable.
Around 55% of the time we find and remove leaks before Google has even indexed them, meaning they never show up in search at all, and you can verify that yourself on our public Google transparency report. Those pre-index removals appear there in red as “Not in Index,” and you’ll sometimes see that framed as errors by our competitors. It’s the opposite, “Not in index” means we reported the leak before Google knew it existed.
The second thing is that a lot of stragglers aren’t misses at all, they’re new. Leakers repost constantly, so you can have a completely clean sweep on Monday and fresh links by Tuesday, and that’s why how often a service scans and removes matters so much. And if you ever spot one before it was removed, with Bruqi you just self-report the link and we take it from there. Unlike some other services we allow the submission of an unlimited number of self reported links for this purpose. (If it wasn’t removed yet, it needs to be removed.)
On the name change, changing to a new username will definitely help. Just two things to know going in. The leaks that already exist will, of course, not disappear when you switch to SFW, so the removal work still matters. And leak sites are unfortunately good at connecting old names, new names and usernames from different platforms in the same threads, which is part of why we protect unlimited usernames at no extra cost. We’re protecting you as the copyright holder, not one of your usernames. Charging per username always felt to us like charging per clue you give a private investigator.
5. I think the most important thing is why is it important to use a company to do it for you if you don’t want your name listed anywhere (Creators Resource Chats)
The honest answer is that you can absolutely do this yourself, and if you’re just starting out I’d encourage you to try. We even make free DIY guides and have a free plan with monthly scans so anyone can at least see where their leaks are without paying a cent: bruqi.com/removals
That said, there are a few reasons creators end up handing it off, and the first one is exactly the thing you’re asking about.
The privacy one is real. A DMCA notice is a legal document and it requires your real name and contact info, and when you submit to Google yourself, that notice can end up publicly searchable on the Lumen database. It also goes to the site you’re reporting, which means some sketchy leak site now has your real name and email, and some of these sites have been known to publish the notices they receive. When Bruqi files for you, every notice carries our company name, our email and our address, and the only thing of yours anywhere on it is the username that’s already public.
Then there’s the time. Doing it yourself means finding every leak, gathering the URLs, reporting each one to Google and Bing, then tracking down the right contact for every single source website, and then doing the whole thing again a few days later because leaks keep coming. Past a certain point there just aren’t enough hours in the day.
There’s also the results side. Bruqi is part of Google’s Trusted Copyright Removal Program, which means our notices get processed faster than an individual’s and rejected less often, and our scans find leaks that manually Googling yourself just won’t surface.
And one more that nobody really talks about. Doing this yourself means regularly searching for and looking at your own stolen content, and a lot of creators tell us that’s the hardest part of the whole thing, harder than the lost income. Letting someone else do the looking is completely fine.
So start DIY if you want, genuinely. And if it starts eating your time or getting to you, that’s the moment to hand it over.
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