Copyright and DMCA

Designated agent

Vitreco has registered a designated agent with the United States Copyright Office under section 512(c)(2) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Notices of claimed infringement should go to the agent below. Registration number DMCA‑1079915, and the entry can be confirmed in the Copyright Office's public directory of designated agents.

Email reaches the agent fastest and is the preferred route. The postal address and telephone number are published because section 512(c)(2) requires them to be, not because either is a good way to reach us.

What Vitreco actually hosts

Worth saying plainly, because it changes what a notice can sensibly be about. Vitreco is a private workplace tool. There are no public pages of user content, no sharing outside an organization's own workspace, no public profiles, no uploads, no embedding and nothing a search engine can index. What people write is text, readable only by other people in the same workspace, and every message a leader reads has been rewritten before storage.

So the realistic subject of a notice is a passage somebody typed into a message. We will act on a valid one regardless — the process below is real — but nobody should expect to find their photograph, article or song here, because there is nowhere to put one.

Sending a notice of claimed infringement

A notice must be in writing, must be signed physically or electronically by the owner of the exclusive right or somebody authorised to act for them, and under section 512(c)(3)(A) must include all of the following. A notice missing any of them may not be treated as effective:

1. Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed.
2. Identification of the material claimed to be infringing, with enough detail for us to find it — for this product that means the workspace, the topic and, if you have it, the message.
3. Your name, address, telephone number and email address.
4. A statement that you have a good faith belief that the use is not authorised by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
5. A statement that the information in the notice is accurate, and, under penalty of perjury, that you are authorised to act on behalf of the owner.
6. Your signature.

Consider whether the use is actually infringing before you send one. Section 512(f) makes a person who knowingly misrepresents that material is infringing liable for damages, including costs and legal fees. Quotation, criticism and commentary are frequently fair use, and a workplace message discussing a document is not the same thing as republishing it.

What we do with one

We will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to material that is the subject of a valid notice, and we will tell the person who wrote it that we have, along with a copy of the notice. Because a message may be anonymous to everybody else in the workspace, that contact goes to its author and not to their organization, and the notice itself is not shown to anyone else in the workspace.

Counter-notification

If your material was removed and you believe that was a mistake or a misidentification, you may send a counter-notification under section 512(g)(3). It must include your signature, identification of the material and where it was, a statement under penalty of perjury that you have a good faith belief it was removed as a result of mistake or misidentification, and your name, address and telephone number together with a statement consenting to the jurisdiction of the federal district court for your address — or, if you are outside the United States, for any district in which we may be found — and that you will accept service of process from the person who sent the original notice.

If we receive a valid counter-notification we will forward it to the original complainant and tell them we will restore the material in ten to fourteen business days unless they notify us that they have filed an action seeking a court order to restrain the activity.

Repeat infringers

Section 512(i) makes the safe harbour conditional on this, so it is a policy rather than a sentiment. Vitreco terminates, in appropriate circumstances, the accounts of people who repeatedly infringe copyright. In practice, and because accounts here belong to an organization rather than to the public:

• A valid notice is recorded against the account that wrote the material, in the same security log as every other account action.
• An account that is the subject of three valid, uncontested notices is suspended, and the organization that owns the workspace is told that an account has been suspended for this reason without being told which messages were involved.
• A notice withdrawn by the complainant, or answered by a counter-notification that goes unchallenged, does not count.
• We may act sooner where the infringement is flagrant, and we may decline to act on a pattern of notices that appear to be abusive.

Suspension is the account, not the organization's workspace: everything the team has written stays readable and exportable, as described in the terms.

This is not the route for everything

Copyright notices go to the agent above. Anything else has a better address: the privacy notice covers data about you and how to export or erase it, the security page covers reporting a vulnerability, and a message you wrote yourself can be withdrawn from inside the product without asking anybody. Sending a copyright notice to have your own words taken down is slower than the button.