DMCA and Content Removal

Has someone shared intimate images of you? Do not send a copyright notice. Start here instead. If you are in immediate danger, call 999.

We build, host and manage websites in the adult and companionship sector. Use this page if you want something taken down from one of those sites. Use it too if we have used your work without permission, or if your page has been removed and you want it back.

It also covers our own work, and what we do when somebody copies it.

If someone has shared intimate images of you

You do not need to own the copyright to get this dealt with. You should not claim that you do.

Copyright in a photograph belongs to whoever took it. If a partner or a photographer took the picture, you do not own it. A copyright notice asks you to state, under penalty of perjury, that you are authorised to act for the owner. That is not a box to tick. Under section 512(f) of the DMCA, anyone who knowingly and materially misrepresents that material is infringing can be made to pay the other side’s costs and damages. A claim you have no standing to make can leave you exposed.

There is a second trap. If the person who posted the material files a counter-notice, we get no discretion. The material goes back up between 10 and 14 business days later, unless by then you have filed a court action in the United States to restrain them. A copyright claim can hand you a fortnight’s deadline to sue in a foreign court.

Use a route built for this instead.

• If the content is on a site we host, email [email protected] with “urgent removal” in the subject line. We will not ask you to prove you own the copyright. We aim to reply the same working day and to act within 48 hours.
• StopNCII.org makes a digital fingerprint of the image on your own device and shares only that. In their words, “a hash will be sent from your device, but not the image/video itself”. Participating platforms then block anything that matches. OnlyFans, Pornhub, Reddit, TikTok, X and ViVAstreet take part. Google does not, so this will not clear your search results. It is run by the Revenge Porn Helpline and its parent charity SWGfL, and it is open to adults anywhere.
• The Revenge Porn Helpline will report content to platforms for you. Give them the URLs and they do the rest. Call 0345 6000 459 or email [email protected], 10am to 4pm Monday to Friday. They are Home Office funded and can only help adults who are in the UK.
• If you are under 18, use Report Remove, run by Childline and the Internet Watch Foundation. The Revenge Porn Helpline cannot take your case, and Report Remove is built for yours.
• Google takes personal sexual content out of search results through a process that has nothing to do with copyright, so you do not need to own the image. Check the eligibility rules first. You are not eligible if you are currently paid to commercialise that content, which rules out a lot of people in this industry.

One warning from the Revenge Porn Helpline is worth repeating. Some adult sites will only remove content if you send a passport, or a photograph of yourself holding your ID. Their guidance is blunt: “We strongly advise that you do not do this.” Let the Helpline report for you, and use an email address that is not your work or personal one.

In England and Wales, sharing an intimate image without consent, or threatening to, is a criminal offence under section 66B of the Sexual Offences Act 2003. That section covers an image which only appears to show you, so a fake counts. Since 6 February 2026, making a fake intimate image of an adult is a separate offence in itself, under section 66E. Asking somebody else to make one is an offence under section 66F. Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own equivalents, so the offence exists across the UK even though the section numbers differ.

Before you send a copyright notice

Three questions save everybody a fortnight.

• Do you actually own it? Appearing in a photograph does not make you its owner. Commissioning one usually does not either. Copyright normally sits with whoever pressed the shutter, unless it was assigned to you in writing.
• Have you asked the site owner? Most of what we see is a licence somebody forgot to renew or a credit that got dropped. An email often fixes it in a day.
• Is it quotation, review or criticism? Fair dealing under UK law allows a certain amount of that. A short quote with a credit is usually not infringement.

How to report copyright infringement

Email [email protected] with “copyright notice” in the subject line.

We use the notice format from the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the DMCA. It is the format Google, Cloudflare and the hosting companies we deal with all work to. A notice in that shape travels well if it has to go further up the chain.

Include all of the following:

1. Your electronic or physical signature, as the copyright owner or someone authorised to act for them.
2. The work you say has been infringed. Where several works on one site are covered, a representative list is enough.
3. Every URL you want dealt with, in full, in the body of the email rather than in an attachment. This is the part that decides whether we can act. A page name or a description of the image is not enough.
4. Contact details good enough for us to reach you: an address and telephone number, and an email address if you have one.
5. A statement that you believe in good faith the use is not authorised by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
6. A statement that the information is accurate, and that under penalty of perjury you are authorised to act for the owner of the right.

If something is missing, we will tell you what is missing and give you the chance to supply it. We will not throw out a genuine complaint on a technicality.

What happens next

We acknowledge notices within two working days.

Then we check the notice against the list above and look at the material ourselves. If the complaint holds up, we remove the material or disable access to it. We tell the site owner what came down and why. If it does not hold up, we say so and give our reasons.

We can only take something down where we host it. If we built a site that somebody else hosts, or we only run the marketing on it, we cannot remove anything from it. In that case we pass your notice to whoever does host it, and we tell you we have done so.

We do not run general monitoring of the sites we host, and nothing in the protection we rely on asks us to. Reports are what we act on. Your own service may carry separate duties under other legislation, and we will talk you through those.

Who gets to see your notice

Treat a copyright notice as a document other people will read.

Where the site owner has to fix something, we pass on what they need in order to respond. That is our choice rather than a legal requirement. If you have a reason to hold your details back, say so when you write. We will work around it where we can.

Further up the chain we have less control. Cloudflare’s published practice is to forward complaints to the website operator and the hosting provider. Google sends copies of the notices it receives to the Lumen database, where they are published. Lumen holds more than 75 million of them and is public and searchable. Google says it strips the sender’s personal contact details before sharing. Lumen names Cloudflare among its other submitters. So assume a notice sent to a search engine or a network provider ends up on the record.

If your page was removed and you think we got it wrong

Tell us before you do anything else. If the notice against you was defective, we will treat it as one. That costs you nothing but an email, and it puts your page back without your name going anywhere. Where we took something down and should not have, we will say so and restore it. Read false and abusive notices below, because in this sector that is often what has happened.

A formal counter-notice is the fallback, not the first move. Send it to [email protected] with:

1. Your signature.
2. The material that was removed, and where it appeared before it came down.
3. A statement, under penalty of perjury, that you believe in good faith it was removed by mistake or misidentification.
4. Your name, address and telephone number.
5. A statement that you consent to the jurisdiction of the US Federal District Court for the district your address sits in, or, if you are outside the United States, any district where we can be found, and that you will accept service of process from the person who sent the notice.

Point 5 is not filler and we would rather you read it twice. If you are in the UK, the second option is the one that applies. You are agreeing that the complainant can sue you in a US federal court. Your real name, address and telephone number go to them as well. For anyone working under a professional name, that is a serious thing to sign.

Once we have a valid counter-notice we pass a copy to the complainant and tell them the material is going back. If they do not file a court action to restrain you, we restore it between 10 and 14 business days after your counter-notice reaches us. We know what a fortnight offline does to a page that ranks. That window is not ours to shorten, which is exactly why we would rather kill a bad notice than answer one.

False and abusive notices

False copyright notices are used as a competitive weapon in this sector. We have dealt with one.

Client sites of ours were targeted alongside roughly 80 other URLs ranking for “London escorts”. The complainant gave no detail of any supposed infringement, did not identify what content was said to have been taken, and could not establish ownership of any original material. We wrote up how to counter that kind of notice.

So we read notices properly before we act on them. Where a notice names no work and shows no evidence of ownership, we go back to the sender rather than take your page down. When it is a close call, we would rather leave a page up and ask another question than take it down and apologise afterwards.

Section 512(f) works in both directions. Anyone who knowingly and materially misrepresents that material is infringing can be liable for the damages and costs that follow. The same goes for a false counter-notice. It only bites where a provider relied on the claim and acted. These claims are hard to win, because the leading US authority tests what the sender actually believed rather than whether that belief was reasonable. It is not a free pass: a sender who avoided looking at all can still be caught. We mention it because it is real, not to wave it at you.

Repeat infringement

Where we host a site and its owner keeps ignoring valid notices, we will suspend or end the service.

That is handled case by case rather than by counting strikes, and we speak to you first. Fixing the cause beats switching a site off.

Complaints this page does not cover

Copyright is narrow. If your complaint is about something else, these are the right routes.

• Something untrue written about you. That is defamation, not copyright.
• Your personal data on a site. UK data protection law gives you a right to erasure. Email us and say that is what you are asking for, and we will either deal with it or tell you who controls the data and can. Our privacy policy covers how we handle your information.
• Your brand name or logo used without permission. That is trade mark law, not copyright.
• Content you want out of Google’s results rather than off a site. Google runs its own removal process.

If you are not sure which applies, send your complaint to us anyway. We will point you to the right one.

Our own work

Copyright in the writing, photography and design on hautelab.agency is owned by Lakewood Media Limited, unless we have credited somebody else. Work we produce for clients is assigned to them under our contracts. The case studies and write-ups we publish here about that work are ours.

Quote a short passage with a link back and we are happy. Republishing a whole article, lifting a case study or copying the design of this site is a different matter. When we find our work somewhere it should not be, we ask first, and we file a notice with the host or with Google if asking gets us nowhere.

If you want to use something properly, ask us. We usually say yes.

Where we stand legally

The DMCA is US law, and we are a UK company, so our own liability is decided here. US law can still reach a UK business whose services are used in the United States. But we have not registered a designated agent with the US Copyright Office. Section 512(c)(2) needs that and a public notice on the site. We have the second and not the first, so the safe harbour is not open to us.

Even so, we follow its process, because it is a fair one. Being outside that safe harbour does not mean we take pages down to protect ourselves. It means the judgement is ours, and we make it in your favour when it is close.

Two pieces of UK law govern our position. Regulation 19 of the Electronic Commerce (EC Directive) Regulations 2002 protects a host that acts promptly once it knows about unlawful material. The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 covers the rest. What matters under UK law is that we publish a contact route, read what arrives, and act promptly once we know about something. That is what this page is for.

Lakewood Media Limited, trading as HauteLab
128 City Road, London EC1V 2NX
Registered in England and Wales, company number 08477710
[email protected]