When Someone Posts Your Content, Do This First! IT'S CALLED A DMCA TAKEDOWN NOTICE & YOU DON'T NEED A LAWYER TO SEND ONE; YOU JUST NEED THE RIGHT INFORMATION & INSTRUCTIONS. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) gives every creator a free, legally enforceable tool to remove stolen content from Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Google, Pinterest, Etsy, and almost any other website on the internet—without a lawyer, a lawsuit, or filing fee payments required. Most creators do not use it, not because it doesn’t apply to their work, but because they don’t know the process.A DMCA takedown notice has six required elements under 17 U.S.C. § 512(c)(3). Miss any one of them and platforms are not legally required to act. The difference between a notice that gets content removed and one that gets ignored comes down to whether all six are present, accurate, and correctly addressed to the platform’s designated DMCA agent.You do not need a registered copyright © to file a DMCA takedown notice. Registration is what unlocks your right to file a federal infringement lawsuit and it’s what makes statutory damages available if you need them. But the takedown itself is available to any creator who owns the original work regardless of copyright registration.

The Firm T-Shirt Said "B the Change." I Quit Instead. WHY I LEFT A 20-YEAR LAW PRACTICE AND HOW THE LAW FIRM FOR CREATORS WAS MADE.

BEFORE CREATORS SETTLE FOR 5K, 50K, OR MORE, THEY NEED TO UNDERSTAND WHY THIS IS HAPPENING & WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT. Independent artists and creative entrepreneurs are being unfairly targeted for ADA lawsuits because 94% of websites fail basic ADA accessibility checks, and few creators have the resources to fight the lawsuits. In 2025, over 5,000 digital accessibility lawsuits targeted websites in 2025—a 37% increase from the prior year—and it’s only getting worse for creators in 2026. The average settlement range of 5K to 20K is a minor nuisance for corporations, but it’s devastating for our clients—especially for those who did not realize their exposure was a very real and urgent problem with a very real and immediate solution—until it was too late.

LEGAL SERVICES BUILT FOR TRADITIONAL BUSINESSES ARE DECADES BEHIND AND DO NOT WORK FOR CREATORS

• Independent Artists, Creators & Entrepreneurs are not building typical businesses. They’re building a body of work, and that distinction changes everything about the kind of legal protection they need.

• For creators, their body of work operates as a collective whole and should be protected as a whole and based on the way it actually operates in the creator economy.

• For trademark, copyright, and content protection to work, it needs to be integrated and synthesized over all platforms, programs, and applications.

One of the most frequent questions I get as an attorney is also one of the most frequent mistakes I see made in the creator economy—whether, when, and how to use the ™ and ® symbols.