Skip to content
Welcome back Continue →

DMCA, trademark and impersonation takedown

Reviewed by Clausery editors · · 3 min read

How to report infringing copies; how we respond; how to submit a legitimate takedown notice.

What we take down

Clausery is open source under the AGPLv3. People who follow the license are welcome — that is the point of publishing the code. We file takedown notices (DMCA on US hosts, UDRP on domains, trademark/abuse reports elsewhere) when a copy falls into one of these categories:

  • Unlicensed rebrands. A hosted copy that still uses the Clausery name, logo, app icon, screenshots or marketing copy without a commercial white-label license (see open-source license and TRADEMARKS.md).
  • Closed SaaS clones. A publicly-accessible modified Clausery instance — including re-uploads wrapped in someone else's wrapper — that does not publish corresponding source as required by AGPL s13.
  • Stripped attribution. A copy from which the copyright/AGPL banners, license HTML comments, visible footer or source-on-GitHub link have been removed (removal of CMI under 17 U.S.C. §1202).
  • Impersonation. Social-media accounts, app-store listings, browser extensions, domains or search ads that present themselves as Clausery, as an "official" download, or as affiliated with the project, when they are not.
  • Scraped SEO spam. Sites that republish Clausery page content verbatim to capture search traffic meant for this site.

How to report

Send a notice to getclausery@gmail.com (subject: "Clausery takedown / DMCA") with:

  1. The URL(s) of the infringing material, and which hosting provider, app store or domain registrar they are on if you can tell.
  2. Which of the categories above applies — copyright (which AGPL section), trademark, CMI removal, impersonation, or scraped content.
  3. A screenshot or excerpt of the infringing material.
  4. Your name, email and, if you are reporting on behalf of a rights-holder, a statement that you are authorised to act.
  5. The statement required by 17 U.S.C. §512(c)(3): "I have a good-faith belief that the use is not authorised by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law"; "I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in this notification is accurate and that I am authorised to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed"; and a physical or electronic signature.

We respond to complete notices within 14 days. Notices that target legitimate AGPL-compliant forks (renamed, with source published, without the Clausery brand) will be declined — those are allowed by the license and are not infringements.

What we do on receipt

We verify the claim against the code history and the license terms. For confirmed infringements we send a properly-targeted notice: DMCA to US-based hosts and GitHub, a UDRP complaint to the registrar for confusingly-similar domains, trademark/impersonation reports to app stores and social platforms, and a scraped-content notice to search engines via their standard spam-report flows. Where the host responds with a counter-notice, we follow 17 U.S.C. §512(g) and, if the material stays up, file in an appropriate court within 14 days.

Changelogs and proof of ownership

The canonical source of truth for Clausery is the public GitHub repository, where every change is timestamped in git. The changelog lists releases with dates back to the first public version, which is earlier than any clone's "about" page will be able to honestly claim.

False reports

Takedown notices that misrepresent a legitimate AGPL fork as infringing are themselves a problem: they damage the open-source ecosystem we rely on. If you have received a notice you believe was sent in error, reply to the sending address and we will review and, if we got it wrong, retract.

Continue drafting Top