DMCA takedown notices

4 Requests granted 22 Total requests

The Wikimedia community is made up of creators, collectors, and consumers of free knowledge. While most material appearing on Wikimedia projects is in the public domain or freely licensed, on occasion, copyrighted material makes its way onto the projects.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) safe harbor provision requires us to remove infringing material if we receive a proper takedown request. We thoroughly evaluate each DMCA takedown request to ensure that it is valid. We only remove allegedly infringing content when we believe that a request is valid, and we are transparent about that removal. If we do not believe a request to be valid, we will push back as appropriate. To learn more about DMCA procedures, see our DMCA policy.

Below, we provide information about the DMCA takedown notices we have received in the past and how we responded to them.

This report covers requests we received between January and June, 2020. For historical data, please see our past reports.

Requests by Wikimedia project

Commons	3	11
English Wikipedia	0	4
Multiple Projects	1	2
Not a WMF site	0	2
English Wiktionary	0	1
German Wikipedia	0	1
Portuguese Wikipedia	0	1

DMCA takedown notices by country

United States	2	14
United Kingdom	0	3
Australia	1	1
Brazil	0	1
India	0	1
North Macedonia	0	1
Unknown	1	1

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Stories

Derivative DMCA

In May, the Wikimedia Foundation received a surprising Digital Millennium Copyright Act request to take down an image of an artist’s work on Commons. The request was surprising not because of its content, but because the image had already been removed as a result of an earlier DMCA request. Upon further investigation, we discovered that….

DMCA Unleashed

We occasionally receive Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown requests to remove allegedly copyrighted images. We thoroughly examine these requests, and only grant the few that are valid. In January, we received a DMCA takedown notice regarding a photograph of a canis lupus familiaris against a snowy backdrop on Commons. The allegedly infringing photograph was a….