Copyright & DMCA

Gyroink hosts writing uploaded by its users. We do not pre-screen it for copyright, and we act on valid notices from rights holders. This page explains how to send one, how to dispute one, and what happens to accounts that keep infringing.

Send a takedown notice

Email hello@gyroink.com with the subject line DMCA Notice. To be actionable, your notice must include all six of these:

A physical or electronic signature of the copyright owner, or a person authorised to act for them.
Identification of the copyrighted work you say was infringed. If several works on Gyroink are covered by one notice, a representative list is fine.
Identification of the material you want removed, specific enough for us to find it — a direct link to the story, chapter or comment, not just an author's name.
Your contact details: name, postal address, telephone number and email address.
A statement that you have a good-faith belief the use is not authorised by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
A statement that the information in the notice is accurate, and — under penalty of perjury — that you are the owner or authorised to act for the owner.

Notices missing any of these get one reply asking for the missing piece. We cannot act on an incomplete notice.

What happens next

We aim to act on complete notices within two business days. If we remove or disable something, the person who posted it is told what was removed, who asked, and how to file a counter-notice. We keep a copy of the notice.

Filing a notice is a legal statement, not a complaint form. Under 17 U.S.C. §512(f), knowingly misrepresenting that material is infringing makes you liable for damages, including the other side's legal costs. We do refer obviously bad-faith notices back to the sender.

File a counter-notice

If your work was removed and you believe that was a mistake or a misidentification, email hello@gyroink.com with the subject DMCA Counter-Notice, including:

Your physical or electronic signature.
Identification of the material that was removed, and where it appeared before removal.
A statement, under penalty of perjury, that you have a good-faith belief it was removed as a result of mistake or misidentification.
Your name, postal address and telephone number, and a statement that you consent to the jurisdiction of the federal district court for the district where you live — or, if you are outside the United States, any judicial district in which Gyroink may be found — and that you will accept service of process from the person who sent the notice.

We forward valid counter-notices to the person who sent the original notice. If they do not tell us within 10 to 14 business days that they have filed a court action, we may restore the material.

Repeat infringers

Each takedown we act on is recorded against the account that posted the material. A counter-notice that goes uncontested, or a notice we retract, does not count. Three recorded takedowns and the account is terminated and its stories removed. We may terminate sooner for wholesale copying — a novel reposted chapter by chapter is not a borderline case.

Fanfiction, specifically

Gyroink is largely a fanfiction platform, and we know what that means. Writing new stories with someone else's characters is what most of this site is. Much of it is transformative, and in many places it is lawful.

We are not the right body to decide fair use, and we do not pretend to be. What we can say is how we behave:

We do not remove a story because it uses characters or a setting from an existing work. That alone is not a notice we can act on.
We do act on verbatim copying — someone else's prose reposted as your own, whether the original author is a published novelist or another Gyroink writer.
Cover art is copyrighted too. Uploading art you did not make and have no licence for is the most common notice we receive.
Plagiarism between our own writers is handled as a copyright matter on the same terms, not as a lesser thing.

If you are a rights holder who would rather ask an author to add attribution or a disclaimer than have their work removed, say so in your email and we will pass it on first.

Trademark and other complaints

For trademark, publicity-rights or defamation complaints — anything that is not copyright — email hello@gyroink.com describing the problem and linking to the material. The DMCA process above does not apply to those.

Designated agent

Notices should go to hello@gyroink.com, which reaches our designated agent. Gyroink is operated by Gyrodile Media OPC Private Limited. We will also accept notices by post; email us for the postal address if you need to serve one that way.

See also our Terms of Service, the content policy, and Support for reporting anything that is not a copyright matter.