Has another developer stolen your App? Use this DMCA template!

There’s a serious problem with the App Stores.

Apple, Google Play and Amazon [among others] are distribution giants for hundreds of thousands of apps. The ecosphere has opened up excellent opportunities for indie developers and large corporations alike.

The result of this massive growth and opportunity however, is a chaotic market with clones, rip offs, and purely stolen work. There are no app police, and anything goes in the wild wild west of apps.

Even with Apple’s review process and team in place, many pieces of stolen content end up on the store.

A recent example:Cloud Wars by developer StaalMedia was originally developed as a flash game.

Randomly searching the store Yoeri Staal, the developer and owner of Staal Media, had found his game sitting there without his approval.

Here at Game Brokerage, we hear the same story hundreds, if not thousands of times.

“Our game was decompiled, decrypted, and rebuilt for one or all of the app stores!”

It’s frustrating for developers, who have worked countless hours building their games from the ground up. From concept, to execution, to distribution.

From a creative perspective, these apps are completely butchered versions of their games. Containing excessive advertisements, sloppy mechanics, and some don’t working at all (but load advertisements perfectly fine).

These copies also claim titles and secure ranks for a brand that has already been built elsewhere, either on the web or an alternative platform.

Transitively, this impacts the true developers and innovators financially and emotionally.

The purpose of this post is to help developers worldwide tackle this problem, and get direct copies of their games removed from the stores.

In order to get your app removed from the store, you’ll need to report the infringement with a DMCA take down notice. Each of the app stores have their own process and place to submit DMCA requests. Visit the following pages to start the process.

Apple App Store
https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/appstorenotices/

Google Play
https://support.google.com/legal/troubleshooter/1114905?hl=en

Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/reports/infringement

For official DMCA take down notice requests, our legal team here at Game Brokerage has put together the following Digital Millennium Copyright Act template.

Feel free to use this template and get your cloned app removed from the store!

/////////////// Template

DMCA TAKE DOWN NOTIFICATION

This email serves as notification under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 512(c), or equivalent notice provisions of your local law, that content currently residing within your computer system infringes on the copyrights of [Your Company Name] which is the original creator of [Your App / Game Name].

[INSERT URL TO INFRINGING APP / GAME]

The copy-written material is an [INSERT CATEGORY & PLATFORM TYPE OF GAME] in which artwork, sounds, graphical animations, and characters are all copy-written in the United States.

The infringing Apps are profiting from my copy-written materials. Including, but not limited to, advertisements and in app purchases within the game.

Please remove the material identified in the Notice within 24 hours, or we
will take further legal action.

Thank you,
[NAME]
Director of Operations
[PHONE NUMBER]
[EMAIL ADDRESS]

[ADDRESS]

This template has helped me get over 18 apps removed from the Apple app store. I continue to use this template and report DMCA infringements whenever I notice stolen content.

If you would like help getting your app removed from any of the app stores, you can message me viaTwitter or via Email

Did you find this template useful? Share it with your fellow game developers and lets stop the perpetrators together!

Originally posted on Game Brokerage