Guide to Submitting a DMCA Takedown Notice

Effective date: April 2, 2021

The CodeLinaro Service is provided to you by Linaro Limited, a UK registered company number 07180318. Any reference to CodeLinaro is also a reference to Linaro Limited.

This guide describes the information that CodeLinaro needs in order to process a DMCA takedown request. If you have more general questions about what the DMCA is or how CodeLinaro processes DMCA takedown requests, please review the CodeLinaro DMCA Takedown Policy.

Due to the types of content CodeLinaro hosts and the way that content is managed, we need complaints to be as specific as possible. These guidelines are designed to make the processing of alleged infringement notices as straightforward as possible. Our form of notice set forth below is consistent with the form suggested by the DMCA statute, which can be found at the U.S. Copyright Office's official website: https://www.copyright.gov.

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.

Before You Start

Tell the Truth

The DMCA requires that you swear to the facts in your copyright complaint under penalty of perjury. It is a US federal crime to intentionally lie in a sworn declaration. (See U.S. Code, Title 18, Section 1621.) Submitting false information could also result in civil liability — that is, you could get sued for monetary damages. The DMCA itself provides for damages.

Investigate

Users and organizations pour their hearts and souls into the projects they create and contribute to on CodeLinaro. Filing a DMCA complaint against such a project is a serious legal allegation that carries real consequences for real people. Because of that, we require that you first conduct a thorough investigation and consult with an attorney before submitting a takedown to make sure that the use isn't actually legally permissible.

Ask Nicely First

A required first step before sending us a takedown notice is to try contacting the user directly. They may have listed contact information on their public profile page or in the repository's README, or you could get in touch by opening an issue or pull request on the repository.

Send In The Correct Request

We can only accept DMCA takedown notices for works that are protected by copyright, and that identify a specific copyrightable work. If you have a complaint about trademark abuse, please see our trademark policy. If you wish to remove sensitive data such as passwords, please see our policy on sensitive data. If you are dealing with defamation or other abusive behavior, please see the CodeLinaro Community Guidelines.

Code Is Different From Other Creative Content

CodeLinaro has facilities for collaboration on software code. This makes identifying a valid copyright infringement more complicated than it might otherwise be for, say, photos, music, or videos.

There are a number of reasons why code is different from other creative content. For instance:

No Bots

You should have a trained professional evaluate the facts of every takedown notice you send. If you are outsourcing your efforts to a third party, make sure you know how they operate, and make sure they are not using automated bots to submit complaints in bulk. These complaints are often invalid and processing them results in needlessly taking down projects!

Matters of Copyright Are Hard

It can be very difficult to determine whether or not a particular work is protected by copyright. For example, facts (including data) are generally not copyrightable. Words and short phrases are generally not copyrightable. URLs and domain names are generally not copyrightable. Since you can only use the DMCA process to target content that is protected by copyright, you should speak with a lawyer if you have questions about whether or not your content is protectable.

You May Receive a Counter Notice

Any user affected by your takedown notice may decide to submit a counter notice. If they do, we will re-enable their content within 10-14 days unless you notify us that you have initiated a legal action seeking to restrain the user from engaging in infringing activity relating to the content on CodeLinaro.

Your Complaint Will Be Published

As noted in the CodeLinaro DMCA Takedown Policy, after redacting personal information, we publish all complete and actionable takedown notices.

CodeLinaro Isn't The Judge

CodeLinaro 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.

Your Complaint Must ...

  1. Include the following statement: "I have read and understand CodeLinaro's Guide to Filing a DMCA Notice." We won't refuse to process an otherwise complete complaint if you don't include this statement. But we'll know that you haven't read these guidelines and may ask you to go back and do so.
  2. Identify the copyrighted work you believe has been infringed. This information is important because it helps the affected user evaluate your claim and give them the ability to compare your work to theirs. The specificity of your identification will depend on the nature of the work you believe has been infringed. If you have published your work, you might be able to just link back to a web page where it lives. If it is proprietary and not published, you might describe it and explain that it is proprietary. If you have registered it with the Copyright Office, you should include the registration number. If you are alleging that the hosted content is a direct, literal copy of your work, you can also just explain that fact.
  3. Identify the specific material that you allege is infringing the copyrighted work listed in item #2, above. It is important to be as specific as possible in your identification. This identification needs to be reasonably sufficient to permit CodeLinaro to locate the material. At a minimum, this means that you should include the URL to the material allegedly infringing your copyright. If you allege that less than a whole repository infringes, identify the specific file(s) or line numbers within a file that you allege infringe. If you allege that all of the content at a URL infringes, please be explicit about that as well.
    • Please note that CodeLinaro will not automatically disable forks when disabling a parent repository. If you have investigated and analyzed the forks of a repository and believe that they are also infringing, please explicitly identify each allegedly infringing fork. Please also confirm that you have investigated each individual case and that your sworn statements apply to each identified fork. In rare cases, you may be alleging copyright infringement in a full repository that is actively being forked. If at the time that you submitted your notice, you identified all existing forks of that repository as allegedly infringing, we would process a valid claim against all forks in that network at the time we process the notice. We would do this given the likelihood that all newly created forks would contain the same content. In addition, if the reported network that contains the allegedly infringing content is larger than one hundred (100) repositories and thus would be difficult to review in its entirety, we may consider disabling the entire network if you state in your notice that, "Based on the representative number of forks you have reviewed, I believe that all or most of the forks are infringing to the same extent as the parent repository." Your sworn statement would apply to this statement.
  4. Explain what the affected user would need to do in order to remedy the infringement. Again, specificity is important. When we pass your complaint along to the user, this will tell them what they need to do in order to avoid having the rest of their content disabled. Does the user just need to add a statement of attribution? Do they need to delete certain lines within their code, or entire files? Of course, we understand that in some cases, all of a user's content may be alleged to infringe and there's nothing they could do short of deleting it all. If that's the case, please make that clear as well.
  5. Provide your contact information. Include your email address, real name, company (if appropriate), telephone number and physical geographic address. If you do not provide this information we cannot process your request.
  6. Provide contact information, if you know it, for the alleged infringer. Usually this will be satisfied by providing the CodeLinaro username associated with the allegedly infringing content. But there may be cases where you have additional knowledge about the alleged infringer. If so, please share that information with us.
  7. **Include the following statement: **"I have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted materials described above on the infringing web pages is not authorized by the copyright owner, or its agent, or the law. I have taken fair use into consideration."
  8. **Also include the following statement: **"I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in this notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner, or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner, of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed."
  9. Include your physical or electronic signature.

Complaints about Anti-Circumvention Technology

The Copyright Act also prohibits the circumvention of technological measures that effectively control access to works protected by copyright. If you believe that content hosted on CodeLinaro violates this prohibition, please send us a report through our Copyright claims form. A circumvention claim must include the following details about the technical measures in place and the manner in which the accused project circumvents them. Specifically, the notice to CodeLinaro must include detailed statements that describe:

How to Submit Your Complaint

The fastest way to get a response is to enter your information and answer all the questions on our Copyright claims form.

You can also send an email notification to copyright@codelinaro.org. You may include an attachment if you like, but please also include a plain-text version of your letter in the body of your message.

If you must send your notice by physical mail, you can do that too, but it will take substantially longer for us to receive and respond to it. Notices we receive via plain-text email have a much faster turnaround than PDF attachments or physical mail. If you still wish to mail us your notice, our physical address is:

    Linaro, Limited
    Attn: CodeLinaro DMCA Agent
    Harston Mill , Royston Rd 
    Harston Cambridge 
    United Kingdom
    CB22 7GG