An obituary from our funeral home was republished without permission — what now?
Work the sequence below. It is the same one our takedown kits pre-fill, and each step works without the previous one succeeding.
1. Capture evidence first
Before anything else: screenshot the page, save the URL, note the date. Copies sometimes vanish or change after the first complaint, and the evidence supports every later step. (Obituary Watch findings come with a timestamped snapshot and content hash already attached.)
2. Send a DMCA notice to the site
Most republication sites publish a copyright-agent or contact address. Send a short, formal notice: the original obituary URL on your website, the infringing URL, the statutory good-faith statements, your signature. Cite Thomson v. Afterlife Network Inc., 2019 FC 545 — the CAD $20M class judgment over exactly this practice — so the recipient understands the claim is tested. Many aggregators remove on first notice; they prefer losing one page to a dispute.
3. Escalate to the host and registrar
If the site ignores you (or publishes no contact), look up its hosting provider and registrar via ICANN lookup and send the notice to their abuse addresses. Hosts act on DMCA notices independently of the site; registrars log patterns that matter when a domain accumulates complaints.
4. Deindex from Google
File a DMCA removal request with Google for the infringing URL. This removes the copy from search results — usually the main harm — even while the page itself is still up. Families searching the name find your original again.
5. Tell the family, calmly
One short message prevents the reputational damage: what happened, that the authoritative notice lives on your website, that you have requested removal. Our kits include a family-communication template written for a grieving reader.
Common questions
Q: How long does removal take?
A: Google deindexing: typically days. Cooperative sites: days to two weeks. Hosts: one to three weeks. Uncooperative offshore sites: deindexing is your effective remedy, and it works.
Q: The copy has wrong information about the deceased. Does that change anything?
A: It strengthens the family-side urgency and is worth one factual line in the notice ("the copy also alters the original text"), but the legal basis remains copyright — keep the notice on that footing.
Q: How do I find copies I don't know about?
A: A free republication scan checks known republication domains for your recent obituaries; daily monitoring re-checks every new obituary automatically.
See where your obituaries are republished right now. The free scan checks known republication domains in minutes — no account, private report. Continuous monitoring: Obituary Watch from $29/month.
Related answers
- How to protect your funeral home's obituaries from scraping
- How to remove an obituary from an aggregator site
- How to report a fake funeral stream page
Obituary Watch provides monitoring assistance, not legal advice, and is not affiliated with any funeral home, streaming provider, or platform. Findings are similarity signals that require human confirmation — they are not accusations about any website or company.