Shopify DMCA takedown: wording that works

A takedown notice is not an argument. It is a checklist, and the party receiving it is checking whether every required element is present before anything else happens. Notices fail far more often on completeness than on merit.

What a complete notice contains

In substance, six things:

1. Your contact details. Name, address, telephone, email. These will normally be passed to the other party.
2. The work you own. Identify it specifically. "Our product photography" is weak. "The seventeen product photographs at these URLs on our store, first published on these dates" is not.
3. The material you say infringes it. Specific URLs, enough for someone to locate it without guessing. This is where most notices are weakest.
4. A good faith statement that the use is not authorised by you, the owner, or the law.
5. An accuracy statement, made under penalty of perjury, and that you are the owner or authorised to act for them.
6. Your signature, physical or electronic.

The three reasons notices get rejected

1. An element is missing

Usually the sworn statements, because people write a description of the problem and forget that the form is a legal instrument. A notice without them can be treated as not received.

2. The material is identified too vaguely

"The entire site is a copy of ours" gives the recipient nothing to act on and shifts the work of identifying the material onto them. List the URLs. Pair each one with the original it was taken from. A table of six rows beats three paragraphs of description.

3. It is not actually a copyright matter

Copyright covers the things you created: photographs, descriptions, site copy, video. It does not cover your brand name, your logo as a mark, the general look of a store, prices, or the fact that a competitor sells something similar. Those are trademark or commercial questions and they go through different routes. Sending a copyright notice about a trademark problem is a common and entirely avoidable failure.

A template you can adapt

Keep it plain. Nothing here needs to sound like a lawyer wrote it, and ornament makes it harder to check.

I am the owner of the copyright in the works described below, or am authorised to act on the owner's behalf.

The copyrighted works are the product photographs and product descriptions published at the following URLs on my store: [list your original URLs].

The material I believe to be infringing appears at the following URLs: [list the infringing URLs, paired with the original each was taken from].

My contact details are: [name, company, postal address, telephone, email].

I have a good faith belief that the use of the material described above is not authorised by me, my agent, or the law.

The information in this notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury I state that I am the owner, or authorised to act on behalf of the owner, of the rights described.

[Signature, printed name, date]

Attach the evidence rather than describing it: dated captures of each page, and the page source where images are served from your own content delivery network.

Where to send it

For a store on Shopify, use the route Shopify currently publishes at shopify.com/legal/dmca. Do not copy an agent address out of an older article. Designated agent details are a matter of public record and they are updated; a notice sent to a stale address is a notice nobody reads.

Before you sign it

The sworn statement is the whole weight of the document, and a false one carries real consequences. Check your own authorised list first. A notice filed against a legitimate distributor is the single most expensive mistake available in this process, and it is the reason a monitoring service can prepare every other field but cannot sign this one for you.