Worlds Unending DMCA Policy
Effective date: October 20, 2020
Welcome to Worlds Unending’s Guide to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, commonly known as the "DMCA." This page is not meant as a comprehensive primer to the statute. However, if you've received a DMCA takedown notice targeting content you've posted on Worlds Unending or if you're a rights-holder looking to issue such a notice, this page will hopefully help to demystify the law a bit as well as our policies for complying with it.
(If you just want to submit a notice, you can skip to the end.)
As with all legal matters, it is always best to consult with a professional about your specific questions or situation. We strongly encourage you to do so before taking any action that might impact your rights. This guide isn't legal advice and shouldn't be taken as such.
1 What Is the DMCA?
In order to understand the DMCA and some of the policy lines it draws, it's perhaps helpful to consider life before it was enacted.
The DMCA provides a safe harbor for service providers that host user-generated content. Since even a single claim of copyright infringement can carry statutory damages of up to $150,000, the possibility of being held liable for user-generated content could be very harmful for service providers. With potential damages multiplied across millions of users, cloud-computing and user-generated content sites might never have existed without the DMCA (or at least not without passing some of that cost downstream to their users).
The DMCA addresses this issue by creating a copyright liability safe harbor for internet service providers hosting allegedly infringing user-generated content. Essentially, so long as a service provider follows the DMCA's notice-and-takedown rules, it won't be liable for copyright infringement based on user-generated content. Because of this, it is important for Worlds Unending to maintain its DMCA safe-harbor status.
2 DMCA Notices In a Nutshell
The DMCA provides two simple, straightforward procedures that all Worlds Unending users should know about: (i) a takedown-notice procedure for copyright holders to request that content be removed; and (ii) a counter-notice procedure for users to get content reenabled when content is taken down by mistake or misidentification.
DMCA takedown notices are used by copyright owners to ask Worlds Unending to take down content they believe to be infringing. If you are writing roleplaying game content, you create copyrighted content every day. If someone else is using your copyrighted content in an unauthorized manner on Worlds Unending, you can send us a DMCA takedown notice to request that the infringing content be changed or removed.
On the other hand, counter notices can be used to correct mistakes. Maybe the person sending the takedown notice does not hold the copyright or did not realize that you have a license or made some other mistake in their takedown notice. Since Worlds Unending usually cannot know if there has been a mistake, the DMCA counter notice allows you to let us know and ask that we put the content back up.
The DMCA notice and takedown process should be used only for complaints about copyright infringement. Notices sent through our DMCA process must identify copyrighted work or works that are allegedly being infringed. The process cannot be used for other complaints, such as complaints about alleged trademark infringement or violations of our community guidelines; we offer separate processes for those situations.
3 How Does This Actually Work?
The DMCA framework is a bit like passing notes in class. The copyright owner hands Worlds Unending a complaint about a user. If it's written correctly, we pass the complaint along to the user. If the user disputes the complaint, they can pass a note back saying so. Worlds Unending exercises little discretion in the process other than determining whether the notices meet the minimum requirements of the DMCA. It is up to the parties (and their lawyers) to evaluate the merit of their claims, bearing in mind that notices must be made under penalty of perjury.
Here are the basic steps in the process.
Copyright Owner Investigates. A copyright owner should always conduct an initial investigation to confirm both (a) that they own the copyright to an original work and (b) that the content on Worlds Unending is unauthorized and infringing. This includes confirming that the use is not protected as fair use. A particular use may be fair if it only uses a small amount of copyrighted content, uses that content in a transformative way, uses it for educational purposes, or some combination of the above.
Example: An employee of Acme Gaming Company finds some of the company's rule book content in a Worlds Unending universe. Acme Gaming Company licenses its rule book text out to several trusted partners. Before sending in a take-down notice, Acme should review those licenses and its agreements to confirm that the rules on Worlds Unending are not authorized under any of them.Copyright Owner Sends A Notice. After conducting an investigation, a copyright owner prepares and sends a takedown notice to Worlds Unending. Assuming the takedown notice is sufficiently detailed according to the statutory requirements (as explained in the how-to guide), we will post the notice and pass the link along to the affected user.
Worlds Unending Will Disable Access to the Content. Worlds Unending will disable a user's content as identified by the copyright owner’s notice.
User May Send A Counter Notice. We encourage users who have had content disabled to consult with a lawyer about their options. If a user believes that their content was disabled as a result of a mistake or misidentification, they may send us a counter notice. As with the original notice, we will make sure that the counter notice is sufficiently detailed (as explained in the how-to guide). If it is, we will post it and pass the notice back to the copyright owner by sending them the link.
Copyright Owner May File a Legal Action. If a copyright owner wishes to keep the content disabled after receiving a counter notice, they will need to initiate a legal action seeking a court order to restrain the user from engaging in infringing activity relating to the content on Worlds Unending. In other words, you might get sued. If the copyright owner does not give Worlds Unending notice within 10-14 days, by sending a copy of a valid legal complaint filed in a court of competent jurisdiction, Worlds Unending will reenable the disabled content.
4 What About Imported Content?
One of the planned features of Worlds Unending is the ability for users to make Content available to other users, either for free, at some cost in a Worlds Unending marketplace. Other Accounts will be able to import that Content into their own universes. As the license or the law allows, users can then make changes to that Content and either make the changes available for others to import or just keep as their own variation.
Worlds Unending will not automatically disable imports derived from Content when disabling the parent Content. This is because imports belong to different users, may have been altered in significant ways, and may be licensed or used in a different way that is protected by the fair-use doctrine. Worlds Unending does not conduct any independent investigation into imported Content. We expect copyright owners to conduct that investigation and, if they believe that the imported content is also infringing, expressly include the imported Content in their takedown notice.
5 Transparency
We believe that transparency is a virtue. The public should know what content is being removed from Worlds Unending and why. An informed public can notice and surface potential issues that would otherwise go unnoticed in an opaque system. We post redacted copies of any legal notices we receive (including original notices, counter notices or retractions). We will not publicly publish your personal contact information; we will remove personal information before publishing notices. We will not, however, redact any other information from your notice unless you specifically ask us to. When we remove content, we will post a link to the related notice in its place.
Please also note that, although we will not publicly publish unredacted notices, we may provide a complete unredacted copy of any notices we receive directly to any party whose rights would be affected by it.
6 Repeated Infringement
It is the policy of Worlds Unending, in appropriate circumstances and in its sole discretion, to disable and terminate the accounts of users who may infringe upon the copyrights or other intellectual property rights of Worlds Unending or others.
7 Submitting Notices
If you are ready to submit a notice or a counter notice: