What to Do When Your Videos Get Stolen: A Creator’s DMCA Guide

“If you can get something for free, why care if it’s right or wrong? It’s just porn.” I’ve heard that logic so many times. Here’s why it matters more than people think — and what I actually did about it.

File a DMCA Report Directly with the Site

This is the first and most obvious move — and it works more often than you’d expect. Even the sketchier torrent sites and those well-known gay forums typically have a DMCA contact email or a support form. Send a takedown request with direct URLs to your stolen content and ask them to remove it. Most of the time, this gets handled within 24 hours. It’s not glamorous, but it gets the job done.

When They Ignore You — Remove Them From Google

Some of these sites are built specifically to frustrate you into giving up. One I dealt with uploaded all my stolen content to TezFiles — but hid every download link behind a paid membership. Want to report the TezFiles URL? You first had to pay the thieves $75 or more just to see the link you needed to report. Then when your membership expired, they’d re-upload everything and you’d have to pay again to report again.

That’s a deliberate loop. Don’t play into it. Instead, cut off their traffic at the source.

Track Down the Real Host and File Against Them

This takes a bit more effort — but it’s one of the most effective moves once you know how. Most pirate sites hide behind CDN services like Cloudflare to mask their actual hosting information. Here’s how to dig past that layer.

First: Go to whois.com and search the domain name. Look at which nameservers they’re running on.

If it shows Cloudflare: Head to cloudflare.com/abuse/form and select “Copyright Infringement & DMCA Violations.” Fill in the details — and critically, check the option to have Cloudflare forward your complaint to the actual hosting provider and site owner. That part matters.

After they investigate, you’ll get a response that looks something like this:

That email will name the actual hosting provider — and now you have a real, accountable party to contact directly.

When the Hosting Provider Doesn’t Care Either

Here’s where most people stop — and honestly, I get it. A lot of these pirate operations run on offshore hosting that treats international copyright law like a suggestion. You file a complaint. You get silence. That wall is completely intentional, and they count on it.

Most people stop here. I completely understand why. I didn’t stop here.

A Personal Note

8 Months. One Lawsuit. And a Reason That Has Nothing to Do With Money.

Eight months. That’s how long it took me to gather evidence, file a lawsuit against an offshore hosting provider, and force out the name of the actual site owner. They won’t know when the court order shows up. But it will.

Was it worth it financially? Absolutely not. The legal cost far exceeded whatever revenue was stolen from me. That’s not why I did it.

A while back, I had dinner with a friend . She broke down at the table, crying about her 3 years project being stolen and claimed as someone else’s work. Everyone felt bad. A few people cracked jokes to lighten the mood. I did the same thing — I brushed it off the same way you do when you’ve heard this story enough times. “It happens everywhere. What can you do.”

A few weeks later, she tried to take her own life. Her family saved her in time. I don’t fully know the scope of what she was carrying — the money pressure, the chain of things that had fallen apart — but I was at that dinner. I heard her. And I didn’t do anything meaningful about it.

I still carry that guilt. To this day.

I know my situation is nowhere near what she was dealing with, it’s just a bullshit porn. But the part that stuck — the part that still bothers me — is that people who steal from others and profit off their work get to sit comfortably in society because it’s just “too much effort” for anyone to go after them. So I went after them. And I hope it counts for something.