DMCA takedown services: which ones remove leaks, and which ones remove your fans

Every creator wants leaks gone. Not every creator wants the fan who posts “just followed her, she is the bomb” silenced along with them. Some DMCA services cannot tell the two apart.

A DMCA takedown service watches the internet for your photos and videos and sends legal notices to get stolen copies removed. For anyone selling content on OnlyFans, Fansly or MYM, that work matters: a leak site gives away what fans would otherwise pay for.

The trouble is that your photos are not only on leak sites. They are also on the pages that bring you new subscribers for free: a fan’s Instagram shout-out, a Reddit recommendation, a creator directory like Findapeach that links straight to your page. A takedown service that removes those is working against you, and you are paying it to do so.

We wanted to know how often that happens, so we went to the public record. Google publishes every copyright removal request it receives for Search. We pulled the full file and looked at what three of the best-known creator protection services, Bruqi, Remove.tech and Leakshield, have asked Google to remove.

Two kinds of page carry your photo

A leak site posts your paid content so people can have it without paying you. It has no reason to send anyone to your page, because the whole point is that they no longer need to. Every one of these should come down.

A promoting page shows a public photo, often your own profile picture, and tells people where to find you. A fan’s post, a shout-out from another creator, a “best creators in London” list, a search engine for creators. These pages exist to send you fans. Taking them down is like tearing down your own poster.

For scale: in the last 30 days, visitors across the Findapeach network, findapeach.com and our 89 country and niche creator sites, clicked through to a creator’s own page 626,258 times. findapeach.com alone sent 345,388 of those clicks to 91,909 different creators. None of those creators paid for a single one. That is one network of directories, and it is exactly the kind of site a careless takedown service reports.

The good news first: most takedowns from all three services do go where they should. The domains each one reports most often are leak and “fappening” sites, and the lists look much the same for all three. The differences are in what else gets caught.

The problem children in the DMCA takedown playground

Two services, two different methods, and the same result for creators: pages that send you fans get reported along with the leaks.

Bruqi: notices everywhere the photo turns up

Bruqi describes itself as an automated DMCA takedown service, and its volume shows it. In Google’s record it has sent 541,242 requests covering 68.1 million web addresses, nearly five times as many as the other two put together.

With a net that wide, the pages promoting you end up in it too. Bruqi reported 3,057 addresses on creator directories and search sites, and Google removed 1,136 of them. It also filed 22 requests against 16 of our own sites, which do nothing but list creators and link to their pages.

The same thing happens away from Google. Say a fan posts on Instagram: “I am now following this model, she is the bomb, everyone should be her fan.” If the post uses your photo, a system that matches pictures and fires off notices will treat it as an infringement. The post comes down, against your wishes and against your interests, and the fan who recommended you is the one who gets reported.

Remove.tech: a whitelist, if you are on it

Remove.tech sounds better on paper. It keeps a whitelist of businesses, and sites on that list are left alone.

The catch is that a whitelist only protects the sites that already know to ask for a place on it. In our experience Remove.tech has no proactive way of working out which sites should never be reported in the first place, meaning the businesses that are actively promoting adult creators for free. If a site has not asked, it gets the same treatment as a leak site.

The record backs that up. Remove.tech sends far fewer notices than Bruqi, but 2,659 of its reported addresses were on creator directories and search sites, and Google removed 1,856 of them. Relative to its size that is the highest rate of the three: 528 directory addresses in every million it reports, against 45 for Bruqi. It also filed 11 requests against our sites, findapeach.com among them.

The top of the class

Leakshield: everything you want down, nothing you want up

And then there is the top shelf of providers, and on the throne sits Leakshield. These guys are the bomb.

Leakshield does not just find your leaks. Its systems can tell a stolen-images site from a site that is actively promoting you. So it gets everything taken down that you want taken down, without you losing the free promotion from the sites sending you fans.

The public record is consistent with that. Leakshield has asked Google to remove 9.5 million addresses, and the sites at the top of its list are the same leak sites the others chase. Yet only 93 of those addresses were on creator directories, 10 in every million, and Google removed 40. Against the Findapeach network it has filed no requests at all.

What to ask before you sign up

Whichever service you look at, these questions sort the good from the bad quickly:

• How do you decide a page is a leak? “It has your photo on it” is the wrong answer.
• What happens to fan posts and shout-outs that use my picture? They should be left alone unless they carry paid content.
• Do you find promoting sites yourselves, or wait for them to ask for a whitelist? Waiting means the promoter gets reported first.
• Can I see every notice you send in my name? You should be able to stop one that hits a page you want up.

How we got these numbers

Visit Leakshield

Go to leakshield.io