Has your content been leaked? Free takedown assessment

What this tool is actually for

Finding your own content on a site you have never heard of is a horrible moment, and the first thing it does is scramble your ability to think clearly about it. This tool exists to put the thinking back in order: what you are looking at, whether you have a claim, what you need to keep before anything else, and what the realistic options are.

It does not write a copyright notice for you and it does not send anything anywhere. That is deliberate. A takedown notice is a legal document signed under penalty of perjury, and handing someone a half-finished one to fire off at a stranger is not a favour. What it does is get you to the point where you know which of the available roads you are on.

Why leaked content is usually removable

Copyright exists the moment you create something. You do not register it, you do not file anything, and you do not need a lawyer to have it. If you filmed or photographed the content yourself, you own the copyright in it, and anyone hosting a copy without your permission is infringing that copyright.

That matters because of how the law treats hosting companies. Under the US DMCA, and the equivalent regimes elsewhere, a host is shielded from liability for what its users upload only while it responds properly to copyright complaints. Ignore a valid notice and the shield goes away. That is why a properly directed complaint to a host is far more effective than an angry message to a site owner, and why so many leak sites that ignore emails will quietly remove content when their host gets involved.

This also explains something creators often find surprising: it does not matter much where you or the site are based. Most of the infrastructure the internet runs on is American, and complaints work through that infrastructure.

The evidence that actually matters

Whatever route you take, the same short list keeps coming up. Gather it before you contact anybody, because pages have a habit of vanishing shortly after someone realises they have been spotted, and a page you cannot show existed is a page you cannot complain about.

• •The exact URL of the page hosting the copy, not just the name of the site.
• •A screenshot showing the content in place, with the date visible.
• •Proof that the original is yours: the unedited file, your camera roll, or your original post with its timestamp.
• •A note of where and when you first published it.

Where this gets expensive in time

One copy on one site is an afternoon. The difficulty is that leak sites copy from each other, so the same content tends to appear across several domains, and new copies keep surfacing after you have cleared the ones you found. Creators who handle this themselves usually describe the same arc: the first few takedowns feel great, and then it becomes a second job nobody is paying them for.

There is also the question of your name. A copyright notice normally has to identify the copyright owner, and many hosts forward the whole notice to the person who uploaded the content. Some publish it to the Lumen database, which is public, searchable and permanent. If your creator name and your legal name are deliberately separate, that is worth understanding before you file anything yourself.

That is the specific problem Creator Lighthouse was built to solve. Notices go out under our company details as your authorised agent, so the pirate site never learns who you are.