Copyright and takedowns

Stories publishes fiction. Some of it is out of copyright and republished from public archives; the rest is written by authors we commission and upload themselves. If something here is yours and we are not entitled to publish it, this page is how you get it taken down, and how the person who uploaded it can answer if they think you are mistaken.

Where to send a notice

Notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act go to our designated agent. This is the only address that starts the clock — a message to an author, a comment, or any other address on this site is not a notice we are obliged to act on, though we will usually pass it on.

These four details are placeholders until the agent registration with the United States Copyright Office is complete, because what is published here must match what is registered there. Until then, please write to the site operator on WhatsApp at +84 904 879 900. We will act on anything that reaches us; the point of the formal address is that it is the one that carries legal effect.

What a takedown notice must contain

A notice has legal effect when it contains, substantially, all six of the following. We can act on less, and often will, but a notice missing one of the first four cannot be acted on at all because we would not be able to find the material or reply to you. If something is missing we will write back and ask for it rather than ignoring you.

1. Your signature — physical or electronic — as the owner of the right that is being infringed, or as somebody authorised to act for that owner. Typing your name at the foot of an email is an electronic signature. 17 U.S.C. § 512(c)(3)(A)(i)
2. Identification of the work you say has been infringed. Title, author, and where it was published, so we can tell it apart from everything else with a similar name. If a single notice covers several of your works on this site, a representative list of them is enough. § 512(c)(3)(A)(ii)
3. Identification of the material on this site you say is infringing, with enough information for us to find it. In practice that means the URL — the story page, or the specific chapter. "Somewhere on your site" is not enough for us to act on. § 512(c)(3)(A)(iii)
4. How to reach you. Your name, and an address, telephone number or email address. We will use it, and if you send a notice that we act on, it is also the address the other side is told to contact if they answer it. § 512(c)(3)(A)(iv)
5. A statement that you believe in good faith that the use complained of is not authorised by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law. § 512(c)(3)(A)(v)
6. A statement, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notice is accurate, and that you are the owner of the right or authorised to act for the owner. § 512(c)(3)(A)(vi)

A person who knowingly misrepresents that material is infringing can be liable for the damages and costs that misrepresentation causes, including the uploader's legal costs and ours — 17 U.S.C. § 512(f). Fair use, quotation, parody and public-domain works are the cases where that most often comes up. If you are not sure whether the use is lawful, get advice before you sign something under penalty of perjury.

What we do when a notice arrives

1. We log it the day it arrives, with everything it contained, and give it a reference number.
2. We work out which story or chapter it is about.
3. If the notice is properly made out, we disable access to that material expeditiously. We do not wait to hear the other side first.
4. We tell the person who uploaded it what was claimed, and give them this page.
5. The story page stops showing the work and says plainly that it was removed after a copyright notice, with the reference number — rather than pretending the story never existed.
6. The notice counts as a strike against the uploader's account under the repeat infringer policy below, unless it is later withdrawn or successfully answered.

What we do not do is decide who is right. A takedown here is not a finding that anybody infringed anything; it is what the law requires us to do when a notice arrives, and the counter-notice process below is where a dispute actually gets resolved.

If your work was removed and you think that was wrong

If material you uploaded was removed after a notice and you believe it was removed by mistake or because it was misidentified, you can send a counter notice. If you have an account here, the fastest route is your author dashboard, which lists every notice against your uploads and takes the counter notice directly. You can also send one to the agent address above.

Before you send one, understand what it does.

• We are required to send a copy of your counter notice — including your name, address and telephone number — to the person who sent the notice. That is the law, not our choice.
• You are consenting to be sued in a specific court, and agreeing to accept court papers from the person who complained.
• You are making a statement under penalty of perjury.

A counter notice must contain all four of the following. Unlike a takedown notice, there is no allowance here for substantial compliance: if one of these is missing, the clock does not start and the material stays down.

1. Your signature, physical or electronic. 17 U.S.C. § 512(g)(3)(A)
2. Identification of the material that was removed, and where it appeared on this site before it was removed. § 512(g)(3)(B)
3. A statement, under penalty of perjury, that you believe in good faith that the material was removed as a result of a mistake or a misidentification of the material. § 512(g)(3)(C)
4. Your name, address and telephone number, a statement that you consent to the jurisdiction of the United States Federal District Court for the district your address is in — or, if your address is outside the United States, of any district in which this service may be found — and a statement that you will accept service of process from the person who sent the notice, or their agent. § 512(g)(3)(D)

When we receive a complete counter notice we send a copy to the person who complained and tell them the material will go back. We then put it back between 10 and 14 business days later — not sooner, and not later — unless they first tell us they have filed a court action to stop you using the material. If they do, it stays down and the two of you are in the hands of a court rather than ours.

Sending a counter notice cancels the strike the notice put on your account.

Repeat infringer policy

We terminate the accounts of repeat infringers. This is the policy, it is applied, and the numbers below are the numbers the site actually counts.

Every notice we act on adds one strike to the account that uploaded the material. A strike counts for 24 months from the day it is issued, and then stops counting — though it stays on the record.

• First strike. The material stays down. We write to you, quoting this policy.
• Second strike. The material stays down and you cannot publish anything new for 30 days. You keep your account and you can still write and edit drafts — you simply cannot put anything in front of readers during that time.
• Third strike. The account is terminated. Every session and every API key is revoked, and everything you have published is taken off the site.

A strike is removed, and stops counting immediately, if the notice is withdrawn, if you send a counter notice and the material goes back, or if we conclude we got it wrong. You are not penalised for a complaint that did not stand up.

We may terminate an account sooner than three strikes where the infringement is blatant — wholesale copying of somebody else's book, or re-uploading material that has already been taken down. And deleting your account does not clear your strikes: if there are any on it, the record of them is kept with your name and email address removed, because a policy that a new signup resets is not a policy.

If you think a strike is unfair and a counter notice is not the right answer, write to the agent address above and say so. There is a person on the other end of it.

Works republished from public archives

Part of this catalogue is public-domain and openly licensed work loaded from archives such as Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks and Wikisource. Each of those stories carries a note naming its source, its licence and the reason we believe it is clear to publish, and no author is paid for views of it.

Public-domain status is a judgement about dates and jurisdictions, and dates in old editions are sometimes wrong. If one of those works is not in fact clear — because the author died later than the edition says, or because the translation or the annotations are still in copyright even though the underlying text is not — tell us. That case does not need a formal notice and nobody gets a strike for it: it is our import, not an author's upload.

If your complaint is not about copyright

Trademark, defamation, privacy, harassment and content that is simply objectionable are handled through the report button on every story and chapter page, not through this address. Reports are reviewed within 24 hours. Using a copyright notice for a complaint that is not about copyright is one of the things § 512(f) is there to discourage.

What we keep

We keep every notice, every counter notice, and a record of what was removed, when, and by whom — including after the material itself is gone. That record is how we can show what we did, and it is not something we delete on request from either side. We do not publish a complainant's contact details on the site, and we do not publish the uploader's; the reference number is what the two sides use to correspond about a case.