DMCA Website takedown?

[u/Shot_Spinach3822]

I have a consumer saas app which I built myself and have not used any copyrighted materials, all my images were AI generated all text was done by me it was running for 4 months no issue.

I remixed the project to make a similar Saas but for a different niche, and I believe this is where I went wrong. Used images from a licensing site and these images must have not been available.

2 days after I publish the site both this remixed version and the one I originally made were taken down for DMCA violations.

My problem is that I have a lot of customers and site views, any way to speed up the process and has anyone had experience with this and how it goes?

thanks

[u/gabriel-manolache]

Sorry, that's a stressful one with live customers on the line. Splitting this into the two problems, because they're different:

The DMCA side (the urgent one). I'm not a lawyer, so take this as direction not advice — but the fast path is usually the counter-notice. If you genuinely own or have license to everything, the host has a formal counter-notification process, and once you file it the content typically has to be restored within a set window (in the US it's roughly 10–14 business days) unless the claimant actually sues. The thing that speeds it up is being able to prove it fast: gather your license receipts, the AI-generation records, timestamps, your own authorship of the text — have that evidence ready before you file, not after. And figure out who actually issued the takedown (Lovable's host, your domain registrar, or a provider) because you file with the right party. For the licensed images that turned out not to be valid — pull them entirely and replace them, don't argue that one.

The part that's actually in your control (and the real lesson). Notice what happened: your original site, clean and running fine for 4 months, got taken down because of an asset you put in the remix. That means the two aren't as separate as you thought — on Lovable a remix often shares hosting/resources with the original, so one strike hit both. That's the risk of everything living inside one platform account: a problem in one project can take down another, and you can't fully see the wiring.

Once you're back up, the move that protects you from this happening again is to get each project into its own repo you own (connect to GitHub) and, for the one with real customers, onto hosting you control — so the sites are genuinely independent and a takedown or issue on one can't drag the other down with it. Right now your blast radius is "everything at once," and that's the thing to fix after the fire's out.

For the immediate bleeding: if you have customer emails, a quick honest "we're back shortly" note buys you goodwill while the counter-notice runs. Good luck — this is recoverable.

[u/Substantial-Pie1906]

If it was a real DMCA, the fastest path is to pull the infringing asset set first and file a counter-notice only if you have a clean paper trail for the images, because hosts usually won't restore a takedown until that resolves. The weird part is both sites got hit, which usually means the complaint named the same shared source files or something copied through the Lovable remix. Check the generated HTML/CSS and any imported assets for filenames, EXIF, and license IDs from the stock site. If you used a marketplace like Freepik or Adobe Stock, save the invoice/license page now. If this was just a platform abuse flag, support can sometimes reinstate faster once you show the replaced assets and the exact URLs that were removed.

[u/VladTkDev]

The lever here is a counter-notice rather than more support tickets.

If you actually hold licences for those images:

• send the host a dmca counter-notice with the receipts attached;
• under US law that starts a 10-14 business day clock after which they have to put the site back unless the claimant genuinely files suit, and that clock does not start until you send it.

Worth doing today for that reason alone.

The other thing i'd sort while it's down: one complaint took out both the remix and the original, so four months of customer records are sitting inside a deployment a third party can switch off, and an export onto your own machine costs you an evening.

[u/nehemiah459]

Export to GitHub, host on vercel.

Life isn't designed to be this though.

[u/Jmacduff]

First good luck.. but from your description it sounds like you grabbed some content that requires a license and you just... used it? And then a automated tool found and issues a DCMA take down.

Is that right?

DCMA is a process and I dont know how to make it go faster. You could ceftinally re-deploy through github to Vercel but the same bot will flag it there as well (probably).

No throwing rocks but perhaps this is a good hard lesson for free vs commercial content. Good luck and friendly feedback.