Version 1.0. This page explains how to tell us that a work published on BSVSearch infringes your rights, and what happens after you do.
1. What this page is for
Works in Creations are sold by their creators, not by BSVSearch. Creators warrant that they own what they submit. When that warranty is wrong, this is how you tell us.
This process is for rights claims — copyright, trademark, or another right you hold in a work someone else has published here.
Other complaints — illegal content, malware, harassment, or anything else that breaks our rules — go to the same address, but they are not handled under the 14-day process below. Say plainly what the problem is and we will deal with it.
2. How to file a notice
File it here, on this page, using the form below.
It asks for six things. Five are required, and without them we usually cannot act — if something is missing we will write back and tell you which, rather than leave you waiting.
- Your name, and an email address we can reply to.
- Who you are acting for, if you are filing on somebody else’s behalf. This one is optional.
- The address of the work on BSVSearch. Copy it from your browser’s address bar. One work per claim, please — a claim about several works cannot be answered as one.
- What right you hold, and in what. For example: copyright in the text, a trademark, a right of privacy or of publicity.
- Why you say the published work infringes it. Say as much as you can. What you write here is passed to the person who uploaded the work in full, in your own words, so that they can answer it.
And one box you cannot skip:
I have a good-faith belief that the use complained of is not authorised by the rights holder, their agent, or the law — and the information I have given here is accurate.
That statement is stored with your claim. It is the one thing a form does better than an email, and it is the reason this is a form.
If the form will not take your claim, email takedown@bsvsearch.com instead — a claim sent that way is treated exactly the same. The form limits how many claims can be filed from one place in an hour, so a burst of automated submissions cannot bury a real one; if you meet that limit, use the address. There is deliberately no CAPTCHA. This is the one route a rights holder must be able to use, and we are not putting an accessibility barrier in front of a legal remedy.
We confirm receipt of every claim, and we reply by email.
What we do with what you write. We keep your claim and your contact details so that the claim can be answered and so that we have a record of it, and we share them with the person who uploaded the work — they are entitled to know who is asking for their work to come down, and to answer you. We do not publish them, and we do not send them to anybody who bought the work. We keep a notice for 365 days after it is closed. Where a work is removed, the record of the removal is kept for longer — section 4 says what, and why.
3. What happens then
Filing a claim does not take anything down. It creates a record that a person reads. Nothing here is unpublished, hidden or switched off by the act of filling the form in, and nobody who has already paid for a work loses any of the time they paid for while we look at it.
A person then reads it, and there are three outcomes.
Not accepted. A claim that is incomplete, or that is plainly not a rights claim, is not accepted. We record the reason and we tell you what it was.
A duplicate of a claim already open about the same work. The claim it duplicates is unaffected and carries on.
Accepted for review — and this is the outcome that has consequences.
When a claim is accepted, the work is quarantined. It comes down: unpublished, removed from the site’s listings and from search, and access is switched off — including for people who have paid for it. Their access is suspended, not cancelled, and their clock stops for as long as the suspension lasts. No money moves in either direction.
We tell the person who published it — by email and on the site — what has happened and why: what was claimed, by whom, on what basis, and how to contest it. That notification includes your name and the email address you gave us, and we keep a record of it, because it is what starts the clock.
They have 14 calendar days from that notification to send a counter-notice.
4. If no counter-notice arrives
The claim stands unopposed. We treat it as established, the work is deleted, and the suspension of everyone’s paid access becomes permanent. We tell every person who had paid access, and we tell them that their recourse is against the person who sold it.
We delete the work. We do not delete the record of what happened. We keep, for as long as we may need it to answer a legal claim: every invoice, payment and transaction ID involving the work; every access grant; the acceptance records showing which version of which terms each person agreed to; the notification we sent; and a fingerprint of the file. The parts of that record which are on the blockchain cannot be deleted by anyone, including us.
5. If a counter-notice arrives
A counter-notice must say why the person believes their work does not infringe, and include their name and a reply address. We forward it to you in full, with those details, for the same reason we gave yours to them.
You then have 14 calendar days to show us that you have started legal action about the work — not simply to tell us you intend to. If you do not, or you withdraw the claim, the work goes back up.
If you do show us, the work stays quarantined until the matter is resolved. We are not the ones who decide who is right. When it is resolved:
- if the claim succeeds, the deletion and permanent suspension in section 4 apply;
- if it does not, the work goes back up.
Whenever a work goes back up, suspended access is restored and extended by however long it was suspended. That is true of every route back — a withdrawn claim, a lapsed deadline, or a case the person who published the work won. A claim that does not succeed leaves buyers exactly where they were.
6. When access is taken away
Quarantine is the only situation in which BSVSearch removes access that somebody paid for because of something the creator did. A creator withdrawing their own work does not do this, and never will.
Access can also end for a reason of the buyer’s own — the Selling Terms describe what happens if someone gets around the paywall, shares their access, or republishes a work they bought. That is a separate matter and has nothing to do with this page.
7. People who do this repeatedly
An established infringement is recorded against the account that submitted the work. An account with more than one loses the ability to submit new works, and after that the account goes. A single established infringement may also cost an account, depending on what it was.
The same applies to notices. If you repeatedly file claims that are not accepted or are not pursued, we may stop acting on yours.
8. Works inscribed on the blockchain
Some works here are inscribed on the BSV blockchain. Two things follow, and both are uncomfortable, so we would rather state them than let you discover them.
Inscribing something on a blockchain does not show that you own it. A work is assessed here on the same basis whether it was inscribed or uploaded, and an inscription does not by itself answer a claim.
We cannot remove anything from the blockchain. Taking a work down removes BSVSearch’s copy, our cached copy, and our serving of it. The underlying inscription stays on a public chain that we do not control and cannot edit, and anyone who knows where to look can still read it. If erasure is the outcome you need, this process cannot give it to you.
9. Honest limits
BSVSearch is a small, experimental service. We read every notice and act on them ourselves; there is no team and no automated system behind this page. We act on accepted notices promptly, and we aim to acknowledge every notice within a few days.
We are not a court. We do not decide who owns what. What this process does is take a disputed work out of circulation while the people who actually have the dispute resolve it, and keep everyone’s position intact in the meantime.