Guide
How to report copyright infringement
Your product photos are on somebody else's listing. Your descriptions are on somebody else's store. Every platform has a form for this, every form wants the same six things, and each one has a detail that decides whether your report gets read or filed away. Here is the legal groundwork first, then the exact route for each place a copy turns up.
You already own the photos, and that is enough to report
The single most common reason a founder does nothing for six months is a belief that they need to register something first. They do not. The US Copyright Office puts it plainly: your work is under copyright protection the moment it is created and fixed in a tangible form, and registration is voluntary. The photograph you took of your own product on your kitchen table is protected the instant the file is written to the card.
Registration does two specific jobs, and neither of them is reporting. First, you have to register a US work before you can file a lawsuit over it. The Supreme Court settled the timing in 2019: registration is complete when the Copyright Office actually registers the claim, not when you send in the application, so the paperwork has to be finished before the case can start. Second, and this is the part worth acting on, section 412 says you cannot recover statutory damages or attorney's fees for copying that began before your registration, unless the registration was made within three months of the work's first publication. If your photography is valuable enough that you would ever sue over it, register each batch inside that three month window. Otherwise you are limited to proving actual damages, which is hard and expensive.
None of that blocks today's report. Not one of the platform routes below asks for a registration number for a copyright claim. Trademark claims are different: those live on separate forms and normally do want a registration number, which is why the copyright claim on a stolen photo is almost always the faster lane. The wider case for doing both is in the four pillars of a brand protection plan.
The six things every notice has to contain
US law sets out what a copyright notice must include before a provider has to treat it as one. Learn these once and every platform form below becomes the same form with different field labels. When you need the letter itself, start from a copy-paste takedown notice template with every field annotated, or let the notice generator write all six of these for you.
- Your signature, physical or electronic, from a person authorized to act for the owner of the right being infringed.
- Identification of your work. Which photos, which descriptions. If a single site is carrying a lot of it, the statute allows a representative list rather than an exhaustive one.
- Identification of the copies, with information reasonably sufficient to let the provider locate the material. In practice: page level links, one per copy.
- Your contact details. Address, phone, email. Assume these reach the seller.
- A good faith statement that the use complained of is not authorized by you, your agent, or the law.
- A statement under penalty of perjury that the information is accurate and that you are authorized to act for the owner.
Read that last one carefully, because people misread it constantly. The penalty of perjury attaches to your authority to act for the owner; the accuracy statement sits beside it, and the good faith statement is a separate, unsworn element. You are swearing that you are who you say you are, not swearing an opinion about the law.
There is a penalty on the other side too. Section 512(f) makes anyone who knowingly and materially misrepresents that material is infringing liable for the damages and legal costs of the person they reported, and it cuts both ways: a knowingly false counter notice carries the same exposure. So claim only what is yours. Stock imagery you both licensed is not yours. A product shape, a colour, an idea, none of those is a copyright claim. And a genuine reseller of your own goods using your own photos is a business conversation, not a report.
Capture the copy before you touch a form
Copies vanish. The moment a seller senses a report is coming, the listing is edited, hidden or moved, and you are left describing a page nobody can load. Fifteen minutes of capture before you start typing saves the whole claim.
Take a full page screenshot of every page you intend to name, with the URL and the date visible in frame. Save a dated public snapshot to the Internet Archive, because a capture held by a neutral third party carries far more weight than a file on your laptop. Copy the exact page level links, plus the listing or item identifiers the platform uses, because most forms want those rather than the URL. Save the page source, which on lazy copies still references your image filenames or your brand name. And put your originals somewhere you can reach in one click: the raw camera files, the dated invoice from your photographer, an old archived capture of your own product page. Every one of these reports rests on you owning the work first.
If the copy is a whole website rather than a listing, the order of operations is slightly different and there is a separate walkthrough for it: how to get a copied website taken down.
Where to report, platform by platform
Each of these is the platform's own channel, run by the platform, free to use. Work them in parallel rather than in sequence. They are separate queues staffed by separate people and nothing is gained by waiting for one before starting the next.
Shopify
Use Shopify's copyright infringement notice form, which Shopify calls the most efficient route. Trademark claims go through a different form and that one does ask for registration countries and numbers. The copyright form does not. You need your legal name and contact details, a link to or description of your original work, page level URLs of each copy, a description of what was taken, the good faith and accuracy statements, and your signature. A general link to the store is not accepted. The gotcha: Shopify states that a copy of your notice, including any contact information you give, may be provided to the person who posted the content, and the merchant is told through their Shopify admin. Shopify removes what it hosts and can terminate a store for repeat infringement, but it does not control the copycat's domain name. Step by step detail is in the full Shopify reporting walkthrough.
Amazon
Amazon runs two channels and says so plainly: brands enrolled in Brand Registry use the Report a Violation tool, and rights owners who are not enrolled submit through Amazon's Report Infringement form, which covers copyright, trademark and patent. This is the most useful Amazon fact for anyone whose photos were taken: you do not need a trademark, and you do not need a registration number. Amazon accepts a link to or a written description of the copyrighted work. You will need the ASINs of the offending listings, so collect those while you capture. Report a Violation is the better tool if you can reach it, taking up to 50 ASINs or detail page URLs in one submission with a tracked history, but Brand Registry itself requires an active registered trademark or a pending registration, which is what the Brand Registry enrollment checklist covers. Amazon publishes no response time, so do not plan around one. If you get it wrong, there is a retraction route on the same form. And if the seller is passing off fakes under your brand name rather than just using your photos, that is the trademark side of Amazon's system, which has its own rules and its own walkthrough: how to report counterfeit products on Amazon.
Etsy
Everything goes through Etsy's intellectual property reporting portal, with copyright and trademark as separate claim types. No registration needed for copyright. Etsy says that when listings come down the seller receives an email with the contact information of the party who filed the report. Two Etsy specifics are worth knowing before you file. It accepts counter notices for US based copyright reports only, and removed material may go back up 10 business days after a counter notice is processed unless you file a court action or a qualifying case with the Copyright Claims Board and tell Etsy, which is a far cheaper option than federal court. And Etsy states that repeat reports may cost the reporter account privileges, so sloppy reporting on Etsy has a price.
eBay
eBay routes rights owners through its Verified Rights Owner program, which eBay states is only for rights owners or their authorized representatives. The preferred channel now is the VeRO Portal rather than an emailed form, though the underlying document is still the Notice of Claimed Infringement, and it is worth reading before you start so you know what it asks for. Registration is optional: the notice asks for registration information only if the right in question is registered. For a copyright claim you give a link to your original work and the specific location of each copy, along with the eBay item numbers, your contact details, a signature and a certification under penalty of perjury. Listings come down and the seller is told, repeat violators face restrictions or suspension, and a claim you want to withdraw is retracted by email. eBay publishes no timing. If you expect to file more than once, enroll rather than sending one off notices.
Walmart Marketplace
Two doors. Walmart's Brand Portal is the standing tool for rights owners, and registering a brand inside it is the part that requires a USPTO registered trademark. A copyright claim needs no trademark at all: use the online IP claim form. The standard Walmart applies is that the item contains unauthorized use of a creative work protected under state or federal copyright law, with your ownership or a documented license shown, and you declare under penalty of perjury that the information is correct and that you are the rights owner or an authorized agent.
Walmart's quirk is worth exploiting. Trademark and patent claims are passed to the seller before Walmart acts on them. Copyright claims are not forwarded first, which makes copyright both the quieter and the more direct route here. Items found to infringe are unpublished, counterfeit claims can end in termination of the seller's account, and the seller's counter notice route goes to Walmart's IP investigations address. Walmart publishes no timing.
AliExpress and Alibaba
Most guides get this one wrong, because there are now two separate portals. The Alibaba International IPP platform handles AliExpress, Alibaba.com, Lazada and Miravia. The old group address now redirects to the Taobao platform, which covers Taobao, Tmall and 1688, and accounts do not carry across. You have to register an account and pass both identity verification and rights verification before you can file anything, so do that on a quiet afternoon rather than the day you find a copy. No copyright registration is required: unregistered copyright is accepted through a signed copyright claim statement you download from the platform. From User Center you pick the marketplace, the right, the target listings and a reason code, and there is one for image theft. A single complaint takes up to 300 listings, which makes this the most efficient portal in the list when a whole catalog has been lifted. Alibaba says it resolves 95 percent of IP complaints within one business day.
Facebook and Instagram
Meta runs a copyright form for Facebook and a separate one for Instagram. Trademark reports use different forms again. No registration needed, and only the rights owner or an authorized representative may file. There is also a designated agent postal address if you would rather send a formal notice, though the form is faster.
This is the one place where the gotcha matters more than the process. Meta regularly gives the person you reported the report number, your name as the rights owner, the email address you provided and details of the report, and it warns that they may contact you directly. Meta's own advice is to use a generic business email rather than a personal one. Set that address up before you file, not after. Content may be removed without Meta contacting you first, repeat infringement can disable an account, and Meta says fraudulent reports may lead to termination of the reporter's account.
TikTok
TikTok takes copyright reports through its copyright report form, with trademark on a separate one, and TikTok Shop handled through its own commerce path. Ownership is enough on the main platform, no registration required. TikTok says it may provide the user with information about your report, such as the name of the copyright owner, which is a softer forwarding rule than Meta's but still a reason to file under a business identity. Reported accounts can appeal in app, repeat infringement gets accounts banned, and TikTok states that intentionally submitting a misleading or fraudulent report will get the report denied and may lead to liability for damages.
Google Search
Google's legal removal troubleshooter is the entry point. You pick the Google product, give the exact URL of each offending page, and describe the work. Homepage links get rejected, and each Google product needs its own separate notice. You get an emailed confirmation with a reference number. Google publishes an average processing time of around six hours for copyright removals filed through the web form, which makes this the fastest lever in the whole list.
Two things to understand before you use it. Removing the search result does not remove the page: Google says so, and tells you to contact the site owner or host for actual removal. And your notice becomes public. Google may forward it to the Lumen database, which publishes notices with certain personal details stripped, and for web search a link to the Lumen record is shown in place of the removed result. Separately, a copyright complaint about a Google Shopping listing is a product policy report rather than a legal notice, and product policy violations get a warning and a window to fix them. Do not use it as a substitute.
Any other website
When there is no form, you are looking for whoever gives the site its internet. Start with the US Copyright Office's directory of designated copyright agents, which is publicly searchable and is the correct address at most providers. Check the date on the entry: a designation expires three years after it is registered unless the provider renews it, so a stale record can mean a stale contact.
Run the domain through ICANN's lookup to see who is behind it. Registrant names and addresses have been redacted on most domains since 2018, which is fine, because what you need survives: the registrar, the registrar's abuse contact, and the name servers, which tell you which host or CDN is in play. If the answer is Cloudflare, you have found a proxy rather than a host. File through Cloudflare's abuse form anyway: Cloudflare says it shares copyright complaints with the relevant hosting providers and website operators, and that is usually how you learn the origin host's name. Cloudflare removes content itself only where it is the host. Leave the registrar for last. Registrars generally act on fraud, phishing and malware rather than ordinary copyright disputes.
What happens after you send it
Nobody can promise you a timeline, and any vendor who does is selling. What is predictable is the shape of the process. Most platforms forward your notice to the seller. The seller can respond with a counter notice, which under US law contains their signature, the material and the location it was removed from, a statement under penalty of perjury that the removal was a mistake or a misidentification, and their consent to federal jurisdiction and to accepting service.
Then the clock that surprises people starts. Once a valid counter notice is received, the provider must put the material back not less than 10 and not more than 14 business days later, unless it hears from you that you have filed a court action to restrain the seller. That window is written into the statute, so it applies whether or not a given platform prints it on its help pages. Shopify and Etsy both publish it. Meta and TikTok publish nothing about timing, so do not go looking for a number there.
The practical consequence is that a counter notice hands the decision back to you. Doing nothing means the copy returns. Filing suit is expensive, though Etsy's acceptance of a Copyright Claims Board case in place of a lawsuit is a much lower cost path when the copy is on Etsy. Most of the time the right answer is simpler: keep your records, because a seller who counter notices once is usually a repeat operator, and every platform in this list treats repeat infringement more seriously than any single report.
Then expect the relist. Removals are not permanent and the same photos reappear under a new seller account or a new domain, often within days. If you kept the evidence and the notice from the first round, the second report costs you ten minutes instead of an hour.
The same reports, without the Sunday afternoon
Everything above is doable by hand, and for two or three copies a year it is the right answer. What breaks is the arithmetic. Copying your catalog takes an afternoon. Capturing, matching and reporting one listing properly takes an hour, and there are eleven of them across five platforms with five different forms.
Knockoff is one way to run that work. Connect your Shopify store by domain, with no API key and no order or customer data changing hands, and your product photos become the reference. The watching runs on a schedule across the marketplaces and the open web, and a match counts only when your photo appears in the seller's own listing gallery. Each confirmed match arrives as a complete case: an archived copy of the page, a timestamped screenshot, your original beside theirs, the exact notice already written for the right platform, and a link to that platform's own reporting form. A person at Knockoff reads every notice. You approve it and file it yourself through the platform's portal, so the filing record stays yours. When the same photos come back, a follow up case opens without you starting over.
The honest limits, before you pay anyone for this. Knockoff works with Shopify stores only. It prepares filings and you submit them, and nobody at Knockoff is a lawyer. No vendor controls what a platform decides to take down, so treat any promise of removals as a sales line. See what happens between a confirmed match and a notice you can file, compare what these tools do and what they cost, or read about having each notice prepared before you send it. Plans start at $99 a month with monthly billing, no contract and a 30-day money-back guarantee: the three plans and their prices.
Questions
Do I need to register my copyright before I report a copy? +
No. The US Copyright Office states that your work is under copyright protection the moment it is created and fixed in a tangible form, and that registration is voluntary. Your product photos are covered from the shutter click. Registration matters for two later things: you have to register a US work before you can file a lawsuit over it, and under section 412 you cannot recover statutory damages or attorney's fees for copying that started before registration unless you registered within three months of first publishing the work. Every platform report described here works without a registration number.
What has to be in a copyright report before a platform will act on it? +
US law lists six elements: your signature, identification of your work, identification of the copies with enough detail to find them, your contact information, a good faith statement that the use is not authorized, and a statement under penalty of perjury that you are authorized to act for the owner. Most platform forms are just those six fields with different labels. The one that gets reports rejected is the third: give page level links to each copy, never a link to the store's front page.
Will the person I report find out who I am? +
Usually yes, and you should plan for it. Shopify says a copy of the notice, including any contact information you provide, may be given to the person who posted the content. Meta gives the reported person the report number, the rights owner's name and the email address you supplied, and warns that they may contact you directly. TikTok says it may pass on information about your report, such as the name of the copyright owner. Use a business email address you are happy to have published, not a personal one.
What happens if they file a counter notice? +
The provider tells you, and under section 512(g) it must put the material back not less than 10 and not more than 14 business days after receiving the counter notice, unless you tell it you have filed a court action to restrain the seller. Shopify and Etsy both publish that window. So a counter notice puts the ball back with you: if you do nothing, the copy returns. Etsy also accepts a qualifying case filed with the Copyright Claims Board in place of a federal lawsuit, which is a much cheaper route.
Can reporting the wrong thing get me in trouble? +
Yes. Section 512(f) makes anyone who knowingly and materially misrepresents that material is infringing liable for the other side's damages and legal costs, and it applies to bad faith counter notices too. Platforms add their own consequences: Meta says fraudulent reports may lead to termination of your account, TikTok says a misleading report may lead to liability for damages, and Etsy says repeat reports can cost the reporter account privileges. Claim only work you actually own.
What if the copy is on a website with no reporting form? +
Find the provider behind it. The US Copyright Office runs a public directory of designated copyright agents, searchable by company name, and that is the correct address at most hosts. Check the expiry date on the entry, because a designation lapses three years after it is registered unless the provider renews it. If the domain sits behind Cloudflare, file through Cloudflare's abuse form: Cloudflare says it shares copyright complaints with the relevant hosting providers and website operators, which is how you learn who the real host is.
Written August 2026. Platforms change their reporting rules without notice, so confirm current requirements on the platform's own pages before you file. Knockoff is not a law firm and this is general information, not legal advice.
