DMCA and Copyright

Reelio respects copyright. If you own material that appears on this site and you believe it is being used without permission, this page tells you exactly how to get it taken down and how long that will take.

We respond to every copyright notice within 24 hours. If your claim is clear we will usually have removed the material before we reply.

Before filing, it may be quicker to write to hi@itsreelio.com. Most claims we receive are about a photograph, and most of those are resolved the same day by removing it, correcting a credit line, or showing you the licence we hold. You lose nothing by asking first, and a formal notice remains available.

Designated agent

Notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act go to our designated agent:

Teja Pagidimarri, Designated Copyright Agent ItsReelio 3668 Oak Ave Fort Worth, TX 76112, United States hi@itsreelio.com

Registration of this agent with the United States Copyright Office is in progress and not yet complete. Until it is, notices sent to the address above still reach us and are still acted on, but the statutory safe harbour under 17 U.S.C. 512(c) is not available to Reelio. We would rather say that plainly than let the wording imply a protection that is not yet in place.

Email reaches the agent fastest. Post is monitored but slower.

Sending a takedown notice

A notice under 17 U.S.C. 512(c)(3) must include all six of the following. A notice missing an element may not be effective, and we will tell you which part is missing rather than ignoring it.

1. A physical or electronic signature of the copyright owner, or of a person authorised to act for them.
2. Identification of the copyrighted work you say has been infringed. Where several works are covered by one notice, a representative list is sufficient.
3. Identification of the material you say is infringing, with enough detail for us to find it. The URL of the page and a description of the image or passage is what we need.
4. Your contact details: name, postal address, telephone number and email address.
5. A statement that you have a good faith belief that the use is not authorised by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
6. A statement that the information in the notice is accurate, and, under penalty of perjury, that you are the owner or are authorised to act on the owner's behalf.

Send it to hi@itsreelio.com with "DMCA notice" in the subject line.

A false statement matters. Under 17 U.S.C. 512(f), anyone who knowingly misrepresents that material is infringing may be liable for damages, including costs and legal fees. Courts have also held that a rights holder must consider whether a use is fair before sending a notice. We are not saying this to discourage you. We are saying it because we take notices seriously and we expect the same in return.

What happens next

1. We acknowledge your notice within 24 hours.
2. If the notice is complete and the claim is clear, we remove or disable access to the material immediately.
3. We tell you what we did.
4. Where a person other than Reelio supplied the material, we forward the notice to them and tell them they may file a counter notice.
5. We record the notice in our internal register, which is what our repeat infringer policy runs on.

Removing material is not an admission that the use was infringing. It is what the statute asks us to do promptly, and we would rather act first and discuss afterwards.

Sending a counter notice

If your material was removed and you believe that was a mistake or a misidentification, you may send a counter notice under 17 U.S.C. 512(g)(3). It must include:

1. Your physical or electronic signature.
2. Identification of the material that was removed, and the location where it appeared before removal.
3. A statement under penalty of perjury that you have a good faith belief the material was removed as a result of mistake or misidentification.
4. Your name, postal address and telephone number.
5. A statement that you consent to the jurisdiction of the federal district court for the district in which your address is located, or, if your address is outside the United States, of any district in which we may be found, and that you will accept service of process from the person who filed the original notice.

Send it to hi@itsreelio.com with "DMCA counter notice" in the subject line.

We forward your counter notice to the original complainant. If they do not tell us within 10 to 14 business days that they have filed a court action seeking to restrain the activity, we may restore the material.

Repeat infringer policy

We terminate the accounts and access of repeat infringers in appropriate circumstances. Having this policy, and actually applying it, is a statutory condition of safe harbour rather than a courtesy.

In practice:

• Every valid notice is recorded against the person who supplied the material, with the date and the work.
• A contributor with two valid, uncontested notices against them is suspended and their published work is audited in full.
• A third results in permanent termination of their access and removal of the material they supplied.
• A counter notice that goes uncontested removes the strike.

Reelio is small enough that this register is a spreadsheet a person reads. That is not a weakness of the policy. It means every entry has been looked at.

A note on what this page does and does not cover

The safe harbour above protects Reelio from liability for material posted by other people. It does not protect us for photographs our own editors place in articles, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

That protection comes only from sourcing images correctly in the first place: from a studio press kit, a licensed wire or stock agency, a Creative Commons or public domain source, or our own camera, with the licence, the term and the credit recorded as required fields before the picture can be published. Image credits explains each tier.

If we got that wrong on a specific image, tell us. We will take it down while we check, which is faster than either of us would like a lawyer to be.

If you are a photographer or a rights agency

Write to hi@itsreelio.com. Include the URL and the image. We will reply within 24 hours with the licence reference we hold for it, or with confirmation that it has been removed.

We would rather pay a licence fee we owe than argue about one. If we have used your work without a licence, say so and tell us what your standard editorial rate is.

Changes

We update this page when our designated agent details or our procedures change, and we re-register with the Copyright Office when required. The effective date at the top reflects the last change.