The DMCA is a US law that (among other things) protects hosting services from being sued when their users violate copyright.
In return, the hosting company has to remove content as soon as it receives a copyright-related complaint about it — even if it believes the complaint doesn't stand a chance in court.
Since it is very easy to file a DMCA complaint, it is commonly used to take down content that somebody doesn't like. Making a bad-faith DMCA complaint can in theory be prosecuted, but in reality this almost never happens.
We are an EU company, and our servers are located in the EU. However, our own provider — DigitalOcean — is a US company.
If a site hosted on Brick is claimed to violate copyright, DigitalOcean can be sued in the US unless they fulfill their DMCA obligations — which in their case would mean
So, when a DMCA complaint is filed against DigitalOcean, they forward it to us first and ask us to remove the content. Here is a sample email we received in 2024:
This notice is to inform you that material posted on one or more of your Droplet(s), was the subject of a notification of claimed copyright infringement pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). A copy of that notice is included below.
[...] no later than 3 days from today, you must certify in writing that you have removed or disabled access to the material identified in the attached DMCA notice. If we do not hear from you within 3 days, we may disable access to the Droplet without further notice.
A valid DMCA complaint a) specifically claims copyright infringement, b) says which material is infringing, c) comes from the copyright owner or their agent.
For example, if the complaint says "this person is posting lies about me, delete it" — it's not a DMCA complaint, because no copyright infringement is claimed.
On the other hand, "I own copyright to XYZ posted at https://abc.net, remove it" is a valid complaint. Here XYZ can be anything copyrightable, for example:
US copyright laws have several exceptions, in particular "fair use". However, even if we are sure fair use would apply in a specific case, the DMCA complaint is still formally valid and we still have to remove content.