Copyright & DMCA Policy

Depth respects the rights of copyright holders. If you believe that material made public on depth.microfalls.com/community infringes a copyright you own or are authorized to enforce, you can ask us to remove it by sending a notice that meets the requirements below. We follow a notice-and-takedown process modeled on 17 U.S.C. § 512 (the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act).

01Designated agent

Send copyright complaints to our designated agent by email:

Email is the fastest route and is sufficient for us to evaluate and act on a notice. We monitor the inbox during business days and aim to acknowledge receipt within two business days. Notices sent to other addresses, or by other means, may be delayed.

02What a takedown notice must include

To allow us to act on your complaint, your notice should include all of the following (these mirror the elements required by 17 U.S.C. § 512(c)(3)):

1. A physical or electronic signature of the copyright owner, or of a person authorized to act on the owner's behalf.
2. Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed — a single work, or a representative list if the notice covers multiple works on our site.
3. Identification of the material claimed to be infringing and reasonably sufficient information to let us locate it — typically the full https://depth.microfalls.com/s/<slug> URL of the published summary, and the specific portions of the summary you believe infringe.
4. Reasonably sufficient contact information for you — name, mailing address, telephone number, and email address.
5. A statement that you have a good-faith belief that the use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
6. A statement, made under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notice is accurate and that you are the copyright owner or are authorized to act on the owner's behalf.

A notice that omits required elements may be ineffective for purposes of § 512(c)(3), and we may ask you to supplement it before we act. Knowingly making material misrepresentations in a takedown notice can expose you to liability under § 512(f).

03What happens after we receive a notice

On receipt of a complete notice, we typically take the following steps:

• Acknowledge receipt by email, usually within two business days.
• Remove or disable access to the identified material expeditiously, pending further review. On Depth this is implemented by flipping is_hidden = true on the affected row, so the summary stops appearing on /community and on its /s/<slug> page.
• Notify the user who published the summary, if we have a way to reach them, and forward your notice. We may redact your personal information from what we forward.
• Consider a counter-notice from the publishing user (see section 04) and restore the material if appropriate.

We may keep an internal record of the notice, the URL affected, and our action so we can enforce the repeat-infringer policy in section 05.

04Counter-notice

If you are the user who published a summary that was removed, and you believe the removal was a mistake or misidentification, you may submit a counter-notice to the designated agent address above. A counter-notice must include:

1. Your physical or electronic signature.
2. Identification of the material that was removed and the location at which it appeared before removal — the /s/<slug> URL is fine.
3. A statement under penalty of perjury that you have a good-faith belief that the material was removed as a result of mistake or misidentification.
4. Your name, address, and telephone number, and a statement that you consent to the jurisdiction of the federal district court for the judicial district in which your address is located (or, if your address is outside the United States, of any judicial district in which Depth may be found), and that you will accept service of process from the person who provided the original notice or that person's agent.

On receipt of a valid counter-notice we will forward a copy to the original complainant. We will restore the material after 10 business days, unless the complainant has by then notified us that they have filed an action seeking a court order restraining the publishing user from continuing to engage in infringing activity. This window is what § 512(g) requires of us.

05Repeat infringers

Accounts that repeatedly publish material that is the subject of valid takedown notices are terminated. "Repeatedly" means more than once after we have already notified the user that a prior publication of theirs was the subject of a takedown. Termination cancels the user's ability to publish further summaries to /community and revokes any saved share URLs they own. We may terminate sooner in cases of egregious or malicious infringement.

06Other ways to flag content

If you are not a rightsholder but believe a published summary on Depth violates a publisher's terms of service, exposes private information, or is otherwise problematic, the in-page "Report" link on each /s/<slug> page is the fastest way to flag it. Independent reports from three different users automatically hide a summary while we review. The Report flow is for non-copyright concerns; rightsholders should use the DMCA process above so we can apply the § 512 framework.

07Why we keep the bar this high

The publish flow already refuses summaries from a curated list of paywalled publishers and private (per-account) services, and the model prompt instructs Depth to synthesize at a higher level of abstraction rather than reproducing the article's wording or structure. Those measures are upstream of this policy and aim to make a takedown unnecessary in the first place. When something slips through, this page is how we put it right quickly.

08Updates

We may update this policy from time to time. When we do, we'll change the "Effective" date at the top of this page. The designated-agent contact address will remain the same unless we publish a change here and, where applicable, refile with the U.S. Copyright Office.