Step by step
- Record the channel and the specific message links. Capture the t.me channel address and the individual message links, with the date. A notice naming a channel and nothing else is much harder to act on than one naming specific messages.
- Identify the original work for each message. Pair each t.me message with the location of your original post. Copyright routes act on identified works, and a notice that describes the material only in general terms is the one that stalls.
- Send the copyright notice to Telegram's published address. Address the notice to dmca@telegram.org, which is the copyright contact openDMCA holds in its routing table for t.me. Include the message links, the original locations, the dates and your authority to act.
- Report the channel in the app as a separate action. In-app reporting is a different process from the copyright address and produces a different result. Filing one does not file the other, and a channel that survives a copyright notice sometimes does not survive a report.
- Delist any t.me link that reached a search index. Public channel links are sometimes indexed. Where a t.me URL returns in a search for your name, submit it for delisting as its own request rather than assuming the notice covers it.
Why a curated contact changes the routing for t.me
Most hosts in this ecosystem publish nothing, so the first rung of the resolver returns a guess. For t.me the routing table holds a real, published address, which means the first notice goes to a monitored recipient rather than to a convention.
That is why silence from t.me is interpretable and silence from an anonymous file host is not. A notice delivered to a published copyright address that produces no removal is a measurement about the host; the same silence from an unverified mailbox measures nothing.
openDMCA routes every infringing URL through the Removal Graph — a live map of which hosts actually remove content, how fast, and through which channel — so each takedown takes the shortest path that has historically worked for that host.
openDMCA gives the first two hops away: you can open resolve a host's abuse address and run it on a URL of your own, with no account and nothing uploaded.
One thing that catches people out on t.me
The t.me copyright address sits in openDMCA's curated routing table as a seeded row rather than being resolved at send time, which means it is the first rung of the ladder and no registry lookup is ever attempted for the domain. That matters because the .me registry answers no lookup at all — without the curated row, a resolver would fall through to a guessed mailbox for one of the few surfaces here that actually publishes a contact.