PLAGIARISM POLICY

(This statement was adapted from the Digital Media Law Project‘s Digital Millennium Copyright Act Policy statement from their website, used under the Creative Commons license. BindleSnitch is solely responsible for its interpretation and implementation of these policies.)

Our Version of the DMCA Take Down Process

We don’t like lawyers. You probably don’t either, so here’s our no-nonsense version of the Copyright Violation Take Down Process as required by The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. (Your results may differ. We don’t care.)

BindleSnitch.com is a third-party aggregator of new, previously unreviewed writing. As such, BindleSnitch.com accepts no responsibility or financial liability for the publication of articles that violate your copyright, nor are we liable under U.S. law.

However, in accordance with the United States Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA), we will remove from our website any materials that are proven to violate the copyright of a third part upon the presentation of proof of the violation.

In order to prove copyright violations, you must communicate – by email ONLY – the following information to our Copyright Violations Manager:

1. Each complaint must be in a separate document. Only one issue per complaint will be addressed.
2. You must provide a verifiable name, organization, address, telephone number, and email address of the complainer.
3. Also provide documentary evidence that the complainer has the legal right to make the complaint on behalf of the organization, such as an enabling board motion or a job description.
4. The title of the article that you believe infringes upon your copyright.
5. The name of the author who posted the article.
6. The date when you believe the copyright infringement occurred.
7. Specification as to whether the infringement involves text, illustrations or both.
8. The identification of the material that is claimed to be infringing your copyright.
9. Documentation that the original material was copyrighted at least 24 hour before the time and date of its first use on BindleSnitch.
10. Copy and paste this statement into your complaint:

“I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate, that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed, and that the use of the material in question  was not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law. By virtue of the fact that this item was transmitted from my email address, I hereby certify that my printed name constitutes my electronic signature. I understand that I may be liable for damages (including costs and attorneys’ fees) if I deliberately or accidentally materially misrepresent that material is infringing your copyright when in fact it does not do so. I understand that BindleSnitch.com will aggressively pursue any person who makes false claims in an effort to interrupt our business or interfere with our contributors.”

Our Process Upon Receipt of the Complaint

Upon receipt of your complaint, we will immediately contact the author of the article in question. If the author of the article admits that the material was intentionally used in violation of your copyrights, we will immediately disable the material on our website. This means that we will make the material invisible. We will not remove the material from our database but we will mark it as private. It is against our policies to remove any articles from our system for a variety of legal issues that do not concern you.

If the author of the article in question can disprove your claim, either by proving prior ownership, by documenting that the widespread use of the material in question places it in the public domain, or by documenting that the material falls under the editorial use rule, we will not disable the article in question and we will inform you of this decision.

If you choose to pursue the matter further, be advised that your cause of action is against the author of the article rather than BindleSnitch.com which, as a third-party aggregator, bears no responsibility or liability for the republication of copyrighted materials. We cannot remove an author’s article in the absence of firm proof that the article violates someone’s copyright because the authors so interfered with would then be deprived of the income they might have accrued from said article, which leaves us liable to a cause of action against us by the authors of the article.

Please note:  If we cannot contact the author of the article within 14 business days, we will assume that the author of the article is non-responsive and we will temporarily disable the article until such time as the author has been terminated for non-compliance, at which point the article will be permanently disabled.

Repeat Infringers

BindleSnitch.com operates under a three-strike rule. Any contributor who has been found to have published copyrighted material not belonging to them on our website will be permanently banned from the site after the third such violation in any 12 month period.

It is expected that all users of the BindleSnitch platform will conform to the BindleSnitch Terms of Use as expressly defined on these specific pages on the BindleSnitch website and are hereby incorporated into this document by these references. Our liability with respect to such copyright infringements, as a third-party publisher of non-reviewed submissions, is to remove any items that violate the copyright privileges of a third-party and we accept no further expressed or implied liability.

Accommodation of Standard Technical Measures

BindleSnitch.com will not deliberately interfere with standard technical measures used to  identify copyright violations but will not comply with requests to turn off our own copyright protection systems, thus exposing our copyrighted materials to misappropriation.

Please address all copyright issues to the following address:

Email:   copyrightviolations@bindlesnitch.com (preferred method of notification)
or:  Copyright Violations BindleSnitch.com  798 NW 32nd Avenue, Delray Beach Fl 33445

click here for a pdf version of this statement