If other people can post on your site
Registering a DMCA agent
If anyone other than you can put content on your site, you are a service provider in the statute's sense. Comments, reviews, forum posts, uploaded images and seller listings all count. The safe harbour is available to you, and it costs about ten minutes and six dollars to claim. Skipping it means a rights holder can sue you directly for what a user posted.
Whether this applies to you
The threshold is lower than most site owners assume. A WordPress blog with open comments qualifies. So does a marketplace, a community, a review section, a customer photo gallery, a Discord-linked wiki. If material can arrive on your servers at someone else's direction, § 512(c) is available to you.
A purely static site with no user contributions doesn't need it. Neither does a site where the only author is you. There is no third party whose infringement you'd be shielded from.
How registration works
- Registration is made through the Copyright Office's online DMCA Designated Agent Directory. Paper filings were retired years ago, and an old paper registration no longer counts.
- The fee is $6 per service provider, whatever the number of sites listed under it.
- A registration expires after three years unless you renew it. There is no grace period, and an expired registration means no safe harbour for anything that happens after it lapses.
- Any change of agent, address or email requires an amended filing.
Put the renewal in a calendar now
Three years is long enough that the person who filed has often left the company. A lapsed registration is a silent failure. Nothing breaks, no one is notified, and you only discover it when a claim arrives and the protection you were counting on isn't there.
What has to be on your own site
Registering with the Copyright Office is only half of it. § 512(c)(2) also requires the agent's contact details to be available to the public on your site, and in practice that means a page anyone can find without an account:
- The agent's name or job title, postal address, telephone number and email address.
- A plain statement of where to send infringement notices.
- Your repeat infringer policy, or a clear summary of it.
Link it from the footer. A copyright page nobody can reach is treated much the same as no page at all.
The repeat infringer policy
§ 512(i) makes the safe harbour conditional on adopting and reasonably implementing a policy for terminating repeat infringers, and telling your users about it. Courts have taken the "reasonably implementing" part seriously: providers have lost the harbour for having a written policy they never actually applied.
A workable policy for a small site does not need to be elaborate. Record the notices you receive, count them per account, define what triggers a termination, and follow your own rule when it triggers. The written policy and the log matter about equally. The question a court asks is whether you did what you said you would.