DMCA To Find The Owner Of A Site

Serving a DMCA notice doesn't necessarily help to identify the owner.

You can try to find that with a "who is" search. They may have "privacy protection" but even so, there should be an email address as an "adminstrative contact", and so on.

Other things you can do include ...

(i) Looking on sites like who-hosts.com to identify the host (and you can and should send the host the DMCA notice anyway)

(ii) Trying to contact the owner by making up email addresses like "admin", "info", "support" and so on, at theirdomain.com (some people have those set up, or a catch-all, and can be reached that way).

But ultimately, you don't need to know who the owner is, to serve a DMCA notice.

Good luck!

A DCMA notice or complaint is just that, it gives notice to the owner that there is a DCMA problem. It has nothing to do with identifying the site owner's identity.

DMCA will not help. You would have to sue them to find out who owns.

Just send the DMCA to the host. That's more effective than trying to deal with the site owner. The host gives them a 48 hr ultimatum. Ditch the copyrighted content or your hosting account gets shut down.

Why do you want the owner details ?

First check the website and contact the owner by email..if you cannot find the email address for the website that has published your copyrighted content, you can utilize WHOIS to find the person associated with the site's domain..then send your DMCA Complaint to the email address associated with that domain (even if it's protected).

You can find a site's hosting service and file a DMCA with the hosting service directly.

whoishostingthis.com

Finally ,if you don't get a response from the owner or hosting with which you have filed your DMCA complaint, you may then file a DMCA complaint with Google and try to get the page de-indexed.

Just do a WHOIS lookup on the domain name.

New WF buzzword "DMCA"
So now every man/woman and their dog
are filing notices, probably for the wrong reason...

Just look inside their underpants. Most people have their name written there.

Don't ever file a false DMCA, you could find yourself in some hot water.

Consequences of filing a false DMCA Takedown Request : Lawyer Directory

There is nothing you could do other than mutually convincing the owner to take it down.

I have been rather quiet, giving things time to sort out. I am being ignored though by the site owner.

It is not a copyright issue. An individual has made some false incorrect statements that are a determent to my interest. He / She does have a contact us page, and my contact attempts have been ignored. I have emailed their contact information on whois, which is a domain registrar proxy who is protecting their identity. Their domain privacy policy (rules of being anonymous) indicated that my emails would be passed on to the owner of the domain and these have been ignored. Same for snail mail.

I would like to avoid the cost of legal action of course.

I am at the point of engaging legal representation in that country where it is hosted (and domain registered) and proceeding to indicate that I am willing to sue the host for publishing these claims as they have hampered my attempts to have them rectified.

It is not a path I wanted to go down. But the host is part of the problem spewing this garbage out to the world 24/7 and the registrar is protecting the person. I have a gut feeling who owns the domain, but I can not prove it as the host / registrar is protecting them.

At what point does the host or registrar have to give up this secret?
How can you go to court with a ghost protected by the domain registrar?

Don't ever file a false DMCA, you could find yourself in some hot water.

Consequences of filing a false DMCA Takedown Request : Lawyer Directory

I agree about the comments about the warning about a false DMCA and is abused.

I don't want to repeat what others already said but I just want to tell you what has worked for me - WHOIS. In some cases, registrants have privacy protection so you won't be able to see their direct email address and other PII (Personally Identifiable Information).

If it isn't a copyright issue then don't use DMCA (digital Millenium COPYRIGHT Act). Sounds like they might be exercising freedom of speech. Not sure that trying to quash that, even if he/she is saying something you don't like (like a review for instance) is a good idea. If people cannot have their own opinions on a website they own, what's the point?

What if they are impersonating you, using your name, your business name, basically 100% pretending to be you then go on the make false claims that are extreamly insulting to people. In the name of free speech can you go n the net, and pretend to be some one and accuse a 3rd party of being a pedophile amunst other things and hide behind a privacy setting on WHO IS?
WHOIS is useless in this case.

Is this freedom of speech?