Copyright and DMCA

Send every notice of claimed copyright infringement to the designated agent below. A notice sent anywhere else, including to support or to an individual person here, may not reach the agent and may not count as a valid notice.

Copyright notices go to the agent below. Every other kind of legal notice goes to [email protected].

A notice has to be in writing and has to contain all six elements set out in 17 U.S.C. 512(c)(3)(A). Email it to the agent above, or post it to the address above.

• A physical or electronic signature of a person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of the exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
• Identification of the copyrighted work you say has been infringed. If one notice covers several works on this service, a representative list of those works.
• Identification of the material you say is infringing, with enough detail for us to find it. A direct link to the page or the file is the fastest way to give us this.
• Your contact details, meaning your address, telephone number, and email address.
• A statement that you have a good faith belief that the use of the material in the way complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
• A statement that the information in the notice is accurate, and, under penalty of perjury, that you are authorized to act on behalf of the owner of the exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

A notice missing one of these elements may not be effective. If you are not sure whether what you found is actually infringing, for example because it may be fair use, consider taking advice before you send one.

We remove or disable the material expeditiously. In practice that means within one business day, and always within three. The statute sets no fixed deadline of its own, so this is a commitment we are making rather than one the law imposes on us.

We then take reasonable steps to tell the member who posted the material that it has been removed or disabled, and we give them a copy of the notice, including your name and your contact details as you supplied them. The statute requires us to pass the notice on, so send only what you are willing for them to read.

We record the notice, the material it concerned, and the account it belonged to. What we do with that record is in the repeat infringers section below.

If your material was removed or disabled and you believe that was a mistake or a misidentification, you can send a counter notice to the same agent. Under 17 U.S.C. 512(g)(3) it has to contain all four of the following.

• Your physical or electronic signature.
• Identification of the material that was removed, and the location where it appeared before it was removed.
• A statement under penalty of perjury that you have a good faith belief the material was removed or disabled as a result of mistake or misidentification.
• Your name, address, and telephone number, a statement that you consent to the jurisdiction of the Federal District Court for the judicial district your address is in, or, if your address is outside the United States, for any judicial district in which Connections Global LLC may be found, and a statement that you will accept service of process from the person who sent the notice or from an agent of that person.

We forward a valid counter notice to the person who sent the original notice. If they do not tell us within ten business days that they have filed a court action to restrain you from the activity, we put the material back. The statute fixes that window: the material is restored not less than ten and not more than fourteen business days after we receive the counter notice.

17 U.S.C. 512(i) makes a repeat infringer policy a condition of the safe harbor on its own, separate from everything above, so this section says plainly what we do and what we do not do.

• Every notice we accept is recorded against the account that posted the material, with the date and what was removed.
• An account that is the subject of repeated notices has its access to Connections terminated, and the person behind it is not allowed to open a new one.
• A person here makes that decision and reads the record first. There is no automatic counter that closes an account without a human looking at it, and we do not publish a fixed number of notices, because one deliberate bulk upload and two disputed clips are not the same thing.
• A notice that is withdrawn, and a notice answered by a counter notice that the sender does not follow into court, do not count against the account.

We can also remove material, limit an account, or close it in the other circumstances covered by our Terms of Service.

17 U.S.C. 512(f) makes anyone who knowingly and materially misrepresents that material is infringing, or that material was removed by mistake, liable for the damages that misrepresentation causes, including costs and legal fees. That applies to a notice and to a counter notice alike. We keep every notice and every counter notice we receive.

One designation covers Connections Global LLC and the services it operates. These are the names it is filed under, so a copyright owner who found their work on any of them is in the right place.