DMCA and Copyright Notices

Two different requests, two speeds

Photographs get taken down here for two separate reasons, and picking the right one is what makes it fast. Either you own the images and somebody else published them, which is a copyright matter, or the images are of you and you no longer want them public, which is a privacy matter. Both work; they are answered by different routes.

Your situation	Route	What it needs from you
You took the photographs, or hold the rights, and another account is using them	A copyright notice on this page	The elements listed below, including your statement of rights
The photographs are of you and were published without your agreement	Privacy Policy, or [email protected]	The URL and enough for the desk to see it is you
The images are of you, and you were under eighteen when they were taken	Report Trafficking or Exploitation	The URL. Nothing else is required, and it is treated as urgent
The entry is yours and you simply want it gone	Contact Us from the account email	Which entry, and that you want it unpublished

What a copyright notice has to contain

Send it to [email protected]. A notice missing one of these cannot be acted on, and the desk will write back asking for the missing part rather than guessing.

The exact URL on this site where the material appears, copied from the address bar.
Identification of the work: where the original is published, or how it can be recognised.
Your name and a contact address the desk can reply to.
A statement that you believe in good faith the use is not authorised by you, your agent, or the law.
A statement that the information in the notice is accurate, and that you are the rights holder or authorised to act for them.
Your signature, typed is enough.

What happens next

A person reads the notice. A complete one is usually acted on before it is investigated further, because leaving contested material public costs more than taking it down.
The material is removed from public view, and the account that published it is told what was removed and why.
The account may answer. That answer goes to you, and where it establishes a right to publish, the material can be restored.
Accounts that attract repeated valid notices are closed rather than warned again.

A notice sent in bad faith has consequences of its own, and the desk keeps the correspondence. Deliberately claiming rights you do not hold, to remove a competitor's entry, is grounds for the register to refuse further notices from that source and is a breach of the Terms of Use.

If you are the advertiser whose media was removed

You are told which URL was affected and on what basis. If the media is yours, answer with the same specificity the notice required: where you obtained it, what licence or consent you hold, and for which use.

The obligations you accepted when you published are listed in Advertise. One of them decides most of these cases: media you own or are licensed to publish, of adults who agreed to that publication.

Before you send anything

Copyright in Hong Kong does not need registration, which is why a notice here rests on your statement rather than on a certificate.

Three cases catch people out: a photograph taken by a studio, an image bought from a stock library, and a picture a photographer shot of you. In each of them the rights may not sit where you expect, and the Intellectual Property Department's copyright pages explain who holds what better than a directory can. That distinction decides which of the two routes at the top of this page is yours, and getting it wrong is the most common reason a request stalls.

Nothing on this page is legal advice. What the register claims and refuses to claim about the material it publishes is set out in About Us, and it applies to every entry in the register of Hong Kong escort adverts.