Copyright/DMCA Policy

This policy covers copyright concerns about material stored, displayed, indexed, generated, linked, embedded, shared, exported, scheduled, or otherwise handled through Coul, including uploads, thumbnails, captions, public or unlisted templates, previews, duplicated canvases, AI output, competitor references, summaries, and retrieval embeddings.

Coul can restrict access, preserve evidence, notify affected parties, process notices and counter-notices, and apply other policies. It does not act as a court and an interim quarantine, takedown, restoration, or refusal is not a judicial finding about ownership, infringement, fair use, validity, or damages.

Identify the specific copyrighted expression and Coul-controlled location at issue. Ideas, facts, metrics, methods, systems, general formats, titles, names, and short phrases may not be protected in the same way as original expression, but other trademark, privacy, publicity, contract, or database rights can still apply.

The notice-and-counter-notice process in 17 U.S.C. § 512 is a United States statutory mechanism. Coul may process substantially equivalent copyright complaints under another applicable law, but U.S. jurisdiction statements and the 10–14-business-day restoration procedure are not the exclusive global remedy and may not apply to every local claim.

A claimant can use a local copyright process, court order, platform route, or other legal remedy where available. Coul may adapt timing and required statements to controlling law while preserving a fair notice, specific locator, affected-user notification, and review process.

If EU Digital Services Act duties apply, Article 16 requires a hosting-service feature to provide an easy-to-access electronic notice route available to any person or entity and to acknowledge receipt and communicate a timely decision on a sufficiently precise notice. Article 17 can require a specific statement of reasons for a restriction.

Article 20's free electronic internal complaint system, availability for at least six months, and decision under the supervision of appropriately qualified staff—and Article 21 out-of-court dispute settlement—apply only where Coul is an online platform and no classification, micro/small-enterprise, or other exception applies. Coul must verify its operator establishment, EU targeting, service classification, and enterprise status before claiming a particular DSA process.

Coul has not yet verified or published a U.S. Copyright Office designated-agent registration, the operator's full legal identity and physical address, or matching agent name, mailing address, telephone number, and email. This page therefore does not state that Coul qualifies for, relies on, or has satisfied the conditions of 17 U.S.C. § 512 safe harbor.

Before seeking § 512(c) hosting protection, the service provider must register the designated agent with the Copyright Office and publish the same current contact information in an accessible location. The registration must cover Coul and relevant alternate names, domains, apps, and URLs and be renewed or amended as required; an Office designation ordinarily expires three years after registration or the latest amendment or resubmission.

Do not send a statutory notice until Coul marks the designated-agent details below as verified and active. A general legal mailbox is not automatically the registered-agent address. Coul must maintain monitored coverage during absences and promptly update both the public page and Copyright Office record when details change.

Once Coul's designated-agent route is verified and active, a written notice under § 512(c)(3) should include all of the following. A copyright registration certificate is not required merely to submit the statutory notice, although registration can affect litigation rights.

• A physical or electronic signature of the owner of the exclusive right allegedly infringed or a person authorized to act on behalf of that owner.

• Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to be infringed, or a representative list when one notice covers multiple works at one Coul site.

• Identification of the allegedly infringing material and information reasonably sufficient for Coul to locate each exact item, such as its Coul URL, template or canvas identifier, source version, public share link, media or output identifier, and relevant timestamp or screenshot.

• Information reasonably sufficient to contact the claimant, ordinarily name, mailing address, telephone number, and email address if available.

• A statement that the claimant has a good-faith belief the complained-of use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.

• A statement that the notice is accurate and, under penalty of perjury, that the sender is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of the exclusive right allegedly infringed.

An incomplete notice is not automatically ignored. If it identifies the copyrighted work, identifies the allegedly infringing material with enough location information, and provides claimant contact information but omits another required statement or signature, Coul must promptly contact the sender or take other reasonable steps to help cure the notice before relying on the omission under § 512(c)(3)(B)(ii).

Coul may request a better locator, evidence of agency, clarification of the protected element, or a corrected statutory statement. It should not demand a registration certificate, government identification, or unrelated confidential evidence as a routine intake condition.

A notice covering many works must still give a usable representative list and reasonably specific Coul locations. Duplicate notices, corrected notices, withdrawals, safety-sensitive contact information, and notices sent to a general support address must be linked to one rights case rather than silently lost or counted as separate strikes.

After receiving a substantially compliant notice through the verified route, Coul should act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the specifically located material and take reasonable steps to notify the subscriber who supplied it. Where the facts or locator are uncertain, Coul may temporarily quarantine the item while curing or reviewing the notice.

A case decision should identify the affected Coul location, source version, action, time, policy or legal ground, and counter-notice or appeal route. Reporter identity and evidence should be shared only as required for the process, safety, legal advice, or law; an ordinary report must not expose the claimant to the uploader.

Coul's current authenticated template report is not a DMCA intake. It lacks signatures, ownership or agency, work identification, statutory statements, structured locators, cure requests, uploader notice, counter-notice, court-action holds, restoration clocks, withdrawals, appeals, and durable repeat-infringer records. One ordinary report can currently remove an approved template from public listing; that is containment, not a copyright finding.

A complaint should distinguish Coul-hosted thumbnails, captions, previews, media copies, templates, output, summaries, or embeddings from a link or reference to material still hosted by Instagram, TikTok, X, or another source platform. Coul can restrict its own hosted copy, reference, index, or retrieval, but cannot promise to remove the source creator's original post from another platform.

Factual metrics, high-level ideas, themes, methods, and unprotected formats are not automatically protected expression. Public availability, attribution, a link, an internal public-reference label, or an AI transformation is not automatically permission to reproduce a protected script, caption, music, image, voice, likeness, or audiovisual sequence.

A creator may have both a copyright complaint and a privacy or public-data objection. Coul should cross-link those cases without forcing a privacy claimant to sign a DMCA perjury statement or treating source-platform removal as proof that every derived fact infringes.

A template notice should identify the protected work and exact elements allegedly copied, the source template or version, and each known public or unlisted location. Coul can disable the identified listing and preview, remove it from search and recommendations, restrict its embedding, and pause associated publication while the claim is reviewed.

Coul can use source-template, version, duplicate, and content provenance to trace exact or linked copies, but a human must assess whether a downstream canvas preserves the complained-of expression or instead contains independent changes, unprotected ideas, or material covered by a valid user-to-user license or legal exception.

Coul will not promise automatic deletion of every downstream canvas. A lawfully licensed copy, independently modified work, unprotected method, or user-created replacement may not infringe; leaving an exact protected copy searchable or queued merely because the source listing was disabled can also be inadequate.

A valid rights hold should immediately prevent affected material from ordinary product use, search, recommendation, AI retrieval, generation context, embedding refresh, export, duplication, scheduling, retry, and provider publication while preserving a restricted evidentiary copy only where lawful and necessary.

Before launch, Coul must connect copyright cases to template indexes, caches, preview assets, stored media, source versions, duplicated canvases, derived summaries, Qdrant embeddings, exports, scheduled items, retry queues, provider calls, and restored backups. A final pre-publish rights-hold check is required to prevent a stale snapshot racing a quarantine.

Coul cannot recall a third-party download, screenshot, completed export, or already-published social post. A claimant may need to contact the recipient or destination platform. If a backup is restored, the rights restriction must be reapplied before the material returns to product use or publication.

The subscriber who supplied removed or disabled material may send a written counter-notice to the verified designated agent when they believe removal resulted from mistake or misidentification. Under § 512(g)(3), it should include all of the following.

• The subscriber's physical or electronic signature.

• Identification of the removed or disabled material and its Coul location before removal.

• A statement under penalty of perjury that the subscriber has a good-faith belief the material was removed or disabled because of mistake or misidentification.

• The subscriber's name, mailing address, and telephone number.

• Consent to the jurisdiction of the federal district court for the judicial district where the subscriber's address is located, or, if the address is outside the United States, any judicial district where Coul may be found.

• Agreement to accept service of process from the original claimant or that claimant's agent.

After a compliant counter-notice, Coul must promptly send a copy to the original claimant and inform the claimant that Coul will replace the removed material or cease disabling access to it in 10 business days. Separately, for § 512(g) protection, Coul restores the relevant Coul location no earlier than 10 and no later than 14 business days after receiving the counter-notice unless its designated agent first receives notice that the claimant filed an action seeking a court order restraining the subscriber from the allegedly infringing activity.

A demand letter, a repeated takedown notice, or an unsupported statement that litigation is being considered does not silently stop the statutory clock. Coul must record the counter-notice receipt, claimant-forward time, 10th and 14th business-day dates, court-action evidence, decision, and actual restoration time.

Restoration applies only to the eligible Coul material and related indexing. It does not automatically repost to a social network, recreate a deleted schedule, restore a deleted account, reverse an unrelated safety or privacy restriction, or recall third-party copies.

A claimant who files a qualifying action should provide the designated agent with sufficient court and case information to verify the filing and requested restraint before the restoration deadline. A filing covering only some works, versions, users, or locations does not automatically hold unrelated material.

A claimant can withdraw or narrow a notice through the case channel. Coul should notify the affected subscriber and restore eligible material unless another valid notice, court order, policy, license, privacy, safety, or legal ground independently requires restriction.

If material remains restricted for a separate ground, Coul should identify that independent reason and its appeal route rather than saying a DMCA counter-notice failed. A counter-notice cannot compel Coul to violate another law, contract, court order, or consistently applied product rule.

If Coul seeks § 512 protection, it must adopt, inform subscribers of, and reasonably implement a policy for terminating subscribers and account holders who are repeat infringers in appropriate circumstances and must accommodate and not interfere with qualifying standard technical measures under § 512(i).

Coul does not use an automatic “two notices equals termination” rule. A durable incident record should consider substantiated incidents, repeated obvious infringement, court outcomes, claimant withdrawals, cured notices, successful counter-notices, duplicate or fraudulent notices, evasion, severity, recurrence, intent, and whether conduct belongs to one member or a broader workspace.

A mistaken, withdrawn, duplicated, or successfully challenged notice should not automatically become a permanent strike. Removing one offending member or feature can be more proportionate than terminating an innocent multi-client workspace, while coordinated infringement, replacement accounts, or deliberate evasion can justify broader action. Notice and appeal apply where safe and lawful.

Under 17 U.S.C. § 512(f), a person can face liability for knowingly materially misrepresenting that material or activity is infringing, or that material or activity was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification. This warning applies neutrally to notices and counter-notices and is not a threat merely because a claimant or user loses a close, good-faith fair-use or ownership dispute.

Do not use the copyright process to suppress criticism, competition, parody, facts, unprotected ideas, lawful quotation, a trademark or privacy dispute, or material you do not own or control. Do not submit a false signature, fabricated agency, altered evidence, unsafe doxxing material, or a counter-notice from a workspace member who lacks authority for the subscriber.

Coul may reject, restrict, investigate, or report abusive submissions; preserve a minimum audit record; and consider repeated abuse under the Terms. A procedural defect can be cured and should not be treated as proof of bad faith by itself.

The DMCA is not the route for trademark, trade dress, name or likeness, publicity, privacy, defamation, confidential material, contract or license, non-consensual intimate imagery, fraud, impersonation, harassment, or safety complaints unless the same facts also support a copyright claim.

Before launch, Coul must provide a separate accountless rights and abuse route that accepts mixed complaints once and routes each issue internally without forcing a claimant to restate sensitive facts or sign an inapplicable DMCA perjury statement.

Copyright and public-data requests can overlap but have different standards and remedies. A privacy removal may restrict profile data without deciding copyright; a copyright takedown may remove a hosted copy without requiring deletion of independently lawful factual metrics.

Coul does not ordinarily publish notices, counter-notices, or evidence. It limits access to trained personnel, advisers, affected parties when required, service providers supporting the process, authorities, and courts under valid legal process. Reporter identity is not disclosed to an accused user except as required or necessary for the statutory process and safety.

Counter-notice contact details are forwarded to the original claimant as explained above. Notices may also be disclosed under valid process or to investigate fraud. Submit only the evidence needed and use a secure channel for sensitive material; do not email account passwords, access tokens, illegal imagery, or unrelated identity records.

Rights-case records can be retained under a documented schedule for claim defense, repeat-infringer enforcement, counter-notice deadlines, court orders, holds, audit, and legal duties. A deletion request does not require destruction of evidence Coul must lawfully preserve, but preserved records remain restricted and must not be restored to ordinary product use from a backup.

Where a statutory counter-notice is unavailable or does not address the action, Coul should offer a free and accessible internal appeal for a user or claimant to identify error, license, independent creation, public-domain status, fair use or fair dealing, wrong locator, changed version, authority, or another relevant fact.

An appeal should receive a fresh evaluation by a sufficiently independent human with authority to reverse and restore. The reviewer should not rely solely on the first decision or an automated match and should explain the result except where law, confidentiality, or safety limits detail.

Nothing in this policy limits a party's right to seek legal advice, contact a regulator or court, use a source platform's process, or exercise mandatory rights available where they live.

Before publishing this as an active DMCA process, Coul must verify the service-provider entity, address, jurisdiction, designated agent, registered directory record, alternate names, phone, monitored email and mailing address, renewal date, U.S. district for non-U.S. counter-notifiers, and business-day calendar.

Coul must implement a separate rights-case system with accountless intake, signature and statutory fields, cure assistance, case IDs, acknowledgments, evidence minimization, uploader notice, counter-notice forwarding, 10/14-day clocks, court-action holds, withdrawals, restoration, appeals, repeat-infringer records, trained review, and a retention schedule that survives ordinary account deletion appropriately.

It must also connect rights holds to hosted media, templates, source versions, duplicates, previews, search, caches, summaries, Qdrant, exports, schedules, retries, providers, backups, and the last pre-publish check. Until those controls and the agent registration are verified, legal@coul.app is only a proposed general contact and Coul does not represent that emailing it invokes the registered-agent process.