DMCA / Copyright Policy

The short version

We respect copyright and expect users to do the same.
If you own a work and believe it is posted here without permission, send a notice with the details listed below. We act on complete, valid notices.
If your own content was removed, you can send a counter-notice and we may restore it.
Accounts that repeatedly infringe are terminated.
You keep the copyright in your own submissions. This policy is about material someone else owns — not about code you wrote.

1. What this policy covers

This policy applies to material posted on this AIOJ instance (the "Instance"): problem statements, editorials, blogs, comments, images, test data, and submitted code. It describes how we handle claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. § 512) and, where applicable, equivalent notice-and-takedown regimes such as the EU Digital Services Act, the UK eCommerce Regulations, and similar laws.

It does not cover trademark disputes, patent claims, privacy complaints, or defamation — see Other complaints for where to send those.

2. Before you send a notice

Please check first:

Is the material actually hosted here? Content may appear in search results or in a feed cache while the original is on another site. We can only remove what our servers serve.
Do you own the rights, or are you authorised to act for the owner? Agents must be able to show authority.
Is there a licence? Problem statements imported from other judges may be used under an open licence, with attribution, or with the author's permission. Some uses are fair use or otherwise lawful. We do not adjudicate fair use, but we will not remove plainly licensed material on request alone.

If your concern is that someone copied your solution or editorial and posted it as their own, that is a plagiarism matter rather than a takedown matter, and the contest integrity process is usually faster and more effective. Report it to the operator with links and evidence.

3. What a valid notice must contain

To be effective under 17 U.S.C. § 512(c)(3), your written notice must include substantially all of the following:

A physical or electronic signature of the copyright owner or a person authorised to act on the owner's behalf.
Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to be infringed. If a single notice covers multiple works, a representative list.
Identification of the infringing material and information reasonably sufficient for us to locate it — the full URL of each page or file, and the title or submitter if you know it. "Somewhere on your site" is not enough.
Your contact information: full name, mailing address, telephone number, and email address.
A good-faith statement that you believe the use of the material is not authorised by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
A statement of accuracy and authority, made under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notice is accurate and that you are the copyright owner or authorised to act on the owner's behalf.

Where local law requires a different set of elements, include the equivalent information.

4. How to send it

Send the notice to the designated copyright agent for this Instance. The agent's name, email address, and postal address are the ones published for this Instance; if no agent is listed, send the notice to the operator's legal contact and mark it "DMCA Notice — Urgent".

Keep a copy. We may ask you to resend a notice that is incomplete, and we may decline to act on a notice that is materially deficient.

Operators of US-facing instances: register a designated agent with the U.S. Copyright Office and keep the registration current — § 512(c) safe harbour depends on it. The software cannot do this for you.

5. What happens after a valid notice

We acknowledge receipt, normally within 1–2 business days.
We review the notice for completeness and validity.
If it is valid, we remove or disable access to the identified material, usually within a few business days.
We notify the uploader, with a copy of the notice (contact details may be redacted) and an explanation of the counter-notice process.
We record the notice against the uploader's account for the repeat-infringer policy.

We may also remove material proactively when infringement is obvious, and we may decline to remove material where the notice is incomplete, targets licensed or fair-use material, or appears to be abusive.

6. Counter-notification

If your material was removed and you believe it was a mistake or misidentification, send a counter-notice to the designated agent containing:

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

Where local law provides an equivalent procedure, include the equivalent information.

What happens next. We forward the counter-notice to the original claimant. If they do not notify us within 10–14 business days that they have filed a court action seeking to restrain the infringement, we may restore the material. We may keep it disabled where the dispute is clearly not a misidentification, where the material is unlawful for other reasons, or where the account is already under sanction.

7. Repeat infringers

We terminate accounts that repeatedly infringe copyright. Our working policy:

Each valid takedown notice that identifies a user's content as infringing is recorded as a strike.
Two valid strikes within twelve months may lead to suspension pending review, and a third may lead to permanent termination, at the operator's discretion. Serious infringement can shorten the ladder; see below.
Strikes may be removed on a successful counter-notice, on proof of a licence or permission, or where the notice was withdrawn.
We do not count notices that were incomplete, withdrawn, successfully countered, or that targeted material we concluded was licensed or lawful.
Serious single incidents — for example, uploading a paid textbook, a commercial problem set, or another platform's private test data — may result in immediate termination without the strike ladder.

We also act on abuse of this process: knowingly false notices, and counter-notices sent in bad faith, can lead to suspension or termination.

8. Misrepresentation and liability

Under 17 U.S.C. § 512(f), a person who knowingly materially misrepresents that material is infringing, or that it was removed by mistake, may be liable for damages, including costs and attorneys' fees, incurred by the uploader, the operator, or the rights holder. We may pursue recovery for costs caused by an abusive notice.

9. Other complaints

Trademarks — contact the operator's legal contact with the mark, the registration (if any), and the URL.
Privacy or personal data — for content that exposes personal information, use the operator's privacy contact; for data-subject requests, see the Privacy Policy.
Harassment, threats, or illegal content — report to the operator's abuse contact. These are handled under the Terms of Service, not this policy.
Source-code licence violations — if you believe an Instance is using AIOJ software in breach of the MIT License, contact the operator first, then the AIOJ project.

10. Your rights as an author

Posting your work on AIOJ does not transfer your copyright. You choose the visibility of what you publish, you can edit or delete it, and you keep the right to publish it elsewhere. The licence you grant us is limited to operating the Instance — see section 4 of the Terms.

If you find your work republished here without permission and you would rather not file a formal notice, contact the operator's support channel with links and evidence; informal resolution is often quicker, and it avoids the penalties that come with a bad-faith filing.

11. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy to reflect changes in law or in the Instance's procedures. The date at the top shows the current version. Substantive changes will be announced in the interface where practical. A notice you send is governed by the policy in force when we receive it.