Copyright, Trade Mark and Intellectual Property Policy

been reviewed or approved by a qualified lawyer in any jurisdiction. It must not be published, linked from the product, or relied upon until it has been reviewed by counsel admitted in each jurisdiction in which the service is offered. Safe harbour under 17 U.S.C. section 512 depends on steps that have not yet been taken, including registration of a designated agent with the United States Copyright Office. Every item marked [CONFIRM: ...] is an open question the client must answer.

• Document: Copyright, Trade Mark and Intellectual Property Policy
• Service: clothy.co virtual clothing try-on service (the "Service")
• Provider: [CONFIRM: legal entity name, company number, registered address, country of incorporation]
• Version: 0.1 draft
• Effective: [CONFIRM: effective date]

0. Plain-language summary

• Users of clothy.co upload photographs and screenshots of clothing listings. Those listings belong to retailers and brands. If you own rights in material that has been uploaded to us, you can ask us to remove it.
• Copyright, United States. Send a takedown notice to our designated agent. Section 3 tells you exactly what it must contain. If we remove your material and you think we were wrong, you can send a counter-notice under section 4, and unless the complainant goes to court we put the material back after 10 to 14 business days.
• Copyright, EU and UK. Section 6 sets out an equivalent notice-and-action route.
• Trade marks. Section 7. Uploading a photograph of a branded garment is normally fine. Passing yourself off as the brand is not.
• We will terminate repeat infringers. Section 5.
• Do not send a false notice. If you knowingly misrepresent that material is infringing, you can be liable for damages and legal costs under 17 U.S.C. section 512(f).
• We are not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. If you are unsure whether you hold the rights, get advice before sending a notice.

1. Scope

1.1 This policy explains how we handle complaints that material on the Service infringes copyright, trade mark or other intellectual property rights, and how a user whose material has been removed can respond.

1.2 It covers:

(a) copyright complaints under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. section 512 ("DMCA"), at sections 2 to 5; (b) equivalent notice-and-action complaints for the European Union and the United Kingdom, at section 6; (c) trade mark complaints, at section 7; (d) other intellectual property complaints, at section 8; (e) our own intellectual property and the licence you grant us, at section 9.

1.3 Complaints about content that is not an intellectual property matter, including privacy complaints, images of a person uploaded without consent, and non-consensual intimate imagery, go through the routes in the Acceptable Use Policy and content-moderation-and-safety-policy.md, not through this document. If you send a copyright notice about a photograph of yourself that someone else uploaded, we will treat it as a privacy complaint as well, because that is usually the faster and more effective route for you.

2. Designated agent for copyright notices (United States)

2.1 Under 17 U.S.C. section 512(c)(2), a service provider seeking the hosting safe harbour must designate an agent to receive notifications of claimed infringement, make the agent's contact information available on its website, and provide it to the United States Copyright Office.

2.2 Our designated agent is:

• Name of agent: [CONFIRM: designated agent name or the name of the department or role. The Copyright Office permits an organisation name or a role rather than an individual.]
• Organisation: [CONFIRM: legal entity name]
• Postal address: [CONFIRM: full physical address. A post office box is only acceptable in limited circumstances under the Copyright Office rules.]
• Telephone: [CONFIRM: telephone number]
• Email: [CONFIRM: dedicated copyright notice email address. Use a dedicated address, not general support.]
• Online form: [CONFIRM: whether an online submission form will be offered]

2.3 [CONFIRM: registration status. The designated agent must be registered through the United States Copyright Office electronic DMCA Designated Agent Directory. Registration attracts a fee and must be renewed periodically or it lapses, and a lapsed registration means no safe harbour. Confirm the fee and renewal period against the current Copyright Office rules at 37 C.F.R. Part 201, diarise the renewal date, and assign an owner. As at the date of this draft, no registration has been made.]

2.4 The address in section 2.2 is for copyright notices only. Notices sent elsewhere may not be actioned and may not start any clock.

2.5 Safe harbour caveat. Nothing in this policy is an admission that we are, or are not, a service provider within 17 U.S.C. section 512(c), or that any particular safe harbour applies. We reserve all defences. [CONFIRM: counsel to record a view on whether clothy.co is storing material "at the direction of a user" within section 512(c). It is storing user-uploaded garment images, so the answer is probably yes for those. The generated renders are arguably not stored at the direction of a user in the same sense, and counsel should consider whether the 512(c) safe harbour extends to AI-generated output derived from user uploads. This is unsettled and should be flagged as a risk rather than assumed away.]

3. Submitting a copyright takedown notice (United States)

3.1 To be effective under 17 U.S.C. section 512(c)(3)(A), a notification of claimed infringement must be a written communication provided to our designated agent that includes substantially all of the following:

(i) a physical or electronic signature of a person authorised to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed; (ii) identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed, or, if multiple copyrighted works at a single site are covered by a single notification, a representative list of such works at that site; (iii) identification of the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity and that is to be removed or access to which is to be disabled, and information reasonably sufficient to permit us to locate the material; (iv) information reasonably sufficient to permit us to contact you, such as an address, telephone number, and, if available, an electronic mail address at which you may be contacted; (v) a statement that you have a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorised by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law; and (vi) a statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that you are authorised to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

3.2 Practical guidance on element (iii). Because the Service stores material privately for individual users rather than publishing it, there may be no public URL for you to point to. Give us whatever you have: the account email or username if you know it, the date and approximate time of upload, a copy or description of the work, and any reference number we or a third party have given you. If you cannot identify the material with reasonable specificity, we may be unable to act, and we will tell you why. [CONFIRM: whether the Service has any publicly accessible surface at all. If it does not, a rights holder will rarely be able to see infringing material in the first place, and the practical volume of DMCA notices will be near zero. That does not remove the need for the policy and the registered agent, because safe harbour is lost without them.]

3.3 A notice that does not substantially comply with section 3.1 may not be effective, and under 17 U.S.C. section 512(c)(3)(B) it may not be considered in determining whether we had actual or constructive knowledge of infringement. If your notice is defective in a way we can identify, we will try to tell you.

3.4 Section 512(f) warning. Under 17 U.S.C. section 512(f), any person who knowingly materially misrepresents that material or activity is infringing is liable for damages, including costs and attorneys' fees, incurred by the alleged infringer, by any copyright owner or its licensee, and by us. Before sending a notice you should consider whether the use is authorised by law, including whether it is a fair use under 17 U.S.C. section 107.

3.5 Do not send us physical evidence, samples, or original artwork. We cannot store or return them.

4. What happens after we receive a copyright notice

4.1 Acknowledgement. We acknowledge receipt of a notice sent to the designated agent within [CONFIRM: target, suggest 2 business days].

4.2 Assessment. We assess whether the notice substantially complies with section 3.1. We do not adjudicate the merits of a copyright claim, and nothing in this policy makes us the judge of whether infringement occurred.

4.3 Action. Where the notice substantially complies, we expeditiously remove or disable access to the identified material.

4.4 Notice to the user. We take reasonable steps to notify the user who uploaded the material, and we provide them with a copy of the notice and information about the counter-notice procedure in section 5. We may redact the complainant's personal contact details from the copy we provide, but you should assume that the substance of your notice, and in most cases your name or your organisation's name, will be passed on.

4.5 Record. We record every notice received, the action taken, and the date, in the account's enforcement record and in the audit log. This record supports the repeat infringer policy in section 5.

4.6 Where material has already expired. Uploads are retained for a limited period (UPLOAD_RETENTION_DAYS, default 30 days) and are then purged by an hourly sweep. Material older than the retention period may already be gone. We will tell you if that is the case. Note that this means a notice sent more than 30 days after an upload is likely to be moot.

4.7 Preservation. Where a notice leads to litigation or to a preservation request, the legal hold rule in content-moderation-and-safety-policy.md section 9 applies and blocks destruction of the relevant encryption key.

5. Counter-notice, restoration, and repeat infringers

5.1 Submitting a counter-notice

5.1.1 If your material was removed and you believe the removal was the result of a mistake or misidentification, you may send a counter-notification to our designated agent at the address in section 2.2.

5.1.2 Under 17 U.S.C. section 512(g)(3), an effective counter-notification must be a written communication to our designated agent that includes substantially all of the following:

(A) a physical or electronic signature of the subscriber; (B) identification of the material that has been removed or to which access has been disabled and the location at which the material appeared before it was removed or access to it was disabled; (C) a statement under penalty of perjury that the subscriber has a good faith belief that the material was removed or disabled as a result of mistake or misidentification of the material to be removed or disabled; (D) the subscriber's name, address, and telephone number, and a statement that the subscriber consents to the jurisdiction of the Federal District Court for the judicial district in which the address is located, or if the subscriber's address is outside of the United States, for any judicial district in which we may be found, and that the subscriber will accept service of process from the person who provided notification under section 512(c)(1)(C) or an agent of such person.

5.1.3 Read (D) carefully. Sending a counter-notice means consenting to be sued in a particular court and giving your real name, address and telephone number to the person who complained about you. We are required to pass those details on. If you are not prepared for that, do not send a counter-notice.

5.1.4 Section 512(f) applies to counter-notices too. A person who knowingly materially misrepresents that material was removed by mistake or misidentification is liable for damages under 17 U.S.C. section 512(f).

5.2 Restoration timeline

5.2.1 On receipt of a counter-notification that substantially complies with section 5.1.2, we promptly provide the complainant with a copy and inform them that we will replace the removed material or cease disabling access to it in 10 business days.

5.2.2 We replace the removed material and cease disabling access to it not less than 10, nor more than 14, business days following receipt of the counter-notice, unless our designated agent first receives notice from the complainant that they have filed an action seeking a court order to restrain the subscriber from engaging in infringing activity relating to the material. This follows 17 U.S.C. section 512(g)(2)(C).

5.2.3 Practical limitation. Because uploads are retained for a limited period and purged by an hourly sweep, material subject to a counter-notice may no longer exist by the time the 10 to 14 business day window closes. Where that is the case we will say so. We do not undertake to preserve removed material for the duration of the counter-notice window unless a preservation obligation applies. [CONFIRM: whether the client wants to preserve DMCA-removed material for the full counter-notice window. Doing so is the only way the restoration remedy in section 512(g) can actually function, and a provider that structurally cannot restore material may find that its counter-notice procedure is treated as illusory. This is a real product decision: it means adding a hold that survives the 30-day purge.]

5.3 Repeat infringer policy

5.3.1 Under 17 U.S.C. section 512(i)(1)(A), the safe harbours are available only to a service provider that has adopted and reasonably implemented, and informed subscribers and account holders of, a policy that provides for the termination in appropriate circumstances of subscribers and account holders who are repeat infringers.

5.3.2 This is that policy.

5.3.3 What counts as a strike. A strike is recorded against an account when we remove or disable access to material in response to a notice that substantially complies with section 3.1, and either no counter-notice is received within [CONFIRM: window, suggest 14 days] or a counter-notice is received and the complainant files a court action.

5.3.4 A strike is withdrawn where a counter-notice is received and no court action follows, where we determine the notice was defective or abusive, or where the complainant retracts the notice.

5.3.5 Consequences.

5.3.6 We may terminate an account at any point, including on a first strike, where the circumstances are appropriate. Circumstances that are appropriate include blatant or commercial scale infringement, evidence that the account exists for the purpose of infringement, and circumvention of a previous termination.

5.3.7 Strikes are counted over a rolling [CONFIRM: period, suggest 12 months].

5.3.8 A terminated repeat infringer may not open a new account. Doing so is a breach of the Acceptable Use Policy.

5.3.9 [CONFIRM: the client should be aware of the case law on "reasonable implementation". BMG v Cox and EMI v MP3tunes are the usual references and they show that a policy that exists on paper but is not applied consistently forfeits the safe harbour. Whoever operates this policy must actually apply the table above and must record why they departed from it when they do.]

5.4 Subpoenas under section 512(h)

5.4.1 A copyright owner may seek a subpoena from a United States district court under 17 U.S.C. section 512(h) to obtain identifying information about an alleged infringer.

5.4.2 We treat section 512(h) subpoenas under law-enforcement-guidelines.md, including the user notification policy in section 6 of that document. We will notify the affected user before producing information unless we are prohibited from doing so or a recognised exception applies.

6. Notice and action for the European Union and the United Kingdom

6.1 This section provides the equivalent of section 3 for rights holders in the European Union and the United Kingdom. You may use it instead of, or in addition to, the DMCA route.

6.2 European Union

6.2.1 Article 16 of Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 (the Digital Services Act) requires providers of hosting services to put in place mechanisms allowing any individual or entity to notify them of specific items of information they consider to be illegal content.

6.2.2 To submit a notice, contact [CONFIRM: notice and action contact address. This may be the same address as the copyright agent, but it must accept notices about any illegal content, not only copyright.] and include:

(a) a sufficiently substantiated explanation of the reasons why you allege the information in question to be illegal content; (b) a clear indication of the exact electronic location of that information, such as the exact URL or URLs, and, where necessary, additional information enabling the identification of the illegal content adapted to the type of content and to the specific type of hosting service; (c) your name and email address, except where the content relates to offences referred to in Articles 3 to 7 of Directive 2011/93/EU (offences concerning the sexual abuse and sexual exploitation of children and child pornography), in which case the notice may be anonymous; (d) a statement confirming your bona fide belief that the information and allegations contained in the notice are accurate and complete.

6.2.3 We will confirm receipt without undue delay, decide in a timely, diligent, non-arbitrary and objective manner, and notify you of our decision and of the redress possibilities available, including whether automated means were used in processing or deciding on the notice. This follows Article 16(4) to 16(6) of the Digital Services Act.

6.2.4 Where a notice under section 6.2.2 contains the information necessary to enable a diligent provider to identify the illegality of the content without a detailed legal examination, it gives rise to actual knowledge or awareness for the purposes of Article 6 of the Digital Services Act.

6.2.5 The affected user receives a statement of reasons under Article 17. See content-moderation-and-safety-policy.md section 6.

6.2.6 Trusted flaggers. Notices from entities awarded trusted flagger status under Article 22 of the Digital Services Act by a Digital Services Coordinator are given priority and are processed and decided without undue delay. [CONFIRM: whether the client wishes to build a trusted flagger intake channel. It is only required for online platforms.]

6.2.7 Misuse. Under Article 23(2) of the Digital Services Act we may suspend, after prior warning and for a reasonable period, the processing of notices submitted by individuals or entities that frequently submit notices that are manifestly unfounded.

6.2.8 [CONFIRM: whether Directive (EU) 2019/790 Article 17 applies. It applies to online content sharing service providers, which are services whose main purpose is to store and give the public access to a large amount of copyright-protected works uploaded by users. clothy.co, as described in the brief, stores content for the uploading user and does not give the public access to it, so Article 17 almost certainly does not apply. Record the reasoning.]

6.3 United Kingdom

6.3.1 To submit a notice, use the contact address in section 6.2.2.

6.3.2 The hosting defence in regulation 19 of the Electronic Commerce (EC Directive) Regulations 2002, as retained in UK law, is available to an intermediary that does not have actual knowledge of unlawful activity or information and that, on obtaining such knowledge or awareness, acts expeditiously to remove or disable access to the information. A notice under this section is intended to give us that knowledge, and we act on it accordingly.

6.3.3 A UK notice should contain the same information as section 6.2.2, and in addition should identify the right relied on, for example a specific work in which copyright subsists under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or a registered trade mark and its registration number.

6.3.4 [CONFIRM: whether the Service is a regulated user-to-user service under the Online Safety Act 2023. Illegal content duties under that Act are separate from and additional to intellectual property notice and action, and turn on whether user content is encountered by other users.]

6.4 Counter-notice in the EU and UK

6.4.1 A user whose content is removed following a notice under section 6.2 or 6.3 may object through the appeal route in Acceptable Use Policy section 8, and, if we are an online platform under the Digital Services Act, through the internal complaint-handling system required by Article 20 and the out-of-court dispute settlement mechanism in Article 21.

6.4.2 There is no EU or UK statutory equivalent of the automatic 10 to 14 business day restoration in 17 U.S.C. section 512(g). Restoration in the EU and UK is a matter for our assessment on appeal.

7. Trade mark complaints

7.1 The Service handles a large volume of branded material by design. Users upload retailer listings, and those listings carry brand names, logos and product imagery. This section explains how we treat that.

7.2 What we consider ordinarily permissible

7.2.1 A user uploading a photograph or screenshot of a retail listing so that the Service can read the brand, item and listed size, and can look up the brand's published size chart, is using the brand name descriptively to identify the product they are considering buying. That is ordinarily a permissible referential or nominative use, and it does not indicate origin, sponsorship or affiliation.

7.2.2 Displaying a brand name in a private, per-user fit report so that the user knows which garment the report is about is likewise ordinarily permissible.

7.2.3 [CONFIRM: counsel to record a considered view on the client's own use of third-party brand names and size charts, which is a broader question than user uploads. Points to address: (a) whether size chart data is protected by copyright or by the sui generis database right under Directive 96/9/EC and the Copyright and Rights in Databases Regulations 1997, given that a size chart is arguably a compilation of facts but the arrangement may attract protection; (b) whether scraping or ingesting brand size charts breaches the source website's terms of use, which is a contract question not an IP question and may be the more serious exposure; (c) whether the product's marketing uses brand names in a way that goes beyond nominative fair use; (d) the position under Article 14 of Regulation (EU) 2017/1001 on the EU trade mark, and section 11 of the Trade Marks Act 1994, on descriptive and referential use.]

7.3 What is not permissible

7.3.1 Use of a mark that suggests the brand endorses, sponsors, supplies or is affiliated with the Service or with a user.

7.3.2 Reproducing a brand's logo, styling or trade dress in a way that is likely to cause confusion.

7.3.3 Use of a mark in connection with counterfeit goods, or to advertise or facilitate the sale of counterfeit goods.

7.3.4 Registering an account name, display name, or any user-controlled field that consists of or incorporates a third-party mark in a confusing way.

7.4 Submitting a trade mark complaint

7.4.1 Send trade mark complaints to [CONFIRM: trade mark complaints email address. This should be a separate address from the copyright agent address, because trade mark complaints do not attract DMCA safe harbour treatment and mixing them creates confusion about which clock is running.]

7.4.2 A trade mark complaint should include:

(a) your name, organisation, address, telephone number and email address, and your relationship to the rights holder; (b) the mark relied on, the registration number or numbers, the jurisdiction of registration, and the classes of goods or services covered, or, where an unregistered right is relied on, an explanation of the goodwill and reputation relied on and the basis of the claim, for example passing off in the United Kingdom; (c) identification of the material or account complained of, and information reasonably sufficient for us to locate it; (d) an explanation of why the use complained of infringes, addressing why it is not descriptive or referential use; (e) a statement that you have a good faith belief that the use complained of is not authorised by the rights holder, its agent or the law; (f) a statement that the information in the complaint is accurate and that you are authorised to act on behalf of the rights holder; (g) your signature, physical or electronic.

7.4.3 We assess trade mark complaints on their substance. Unlike a compliant DMCA notice, a trade mark complaint does not oblige us to remove material, and there is no statutory safe harbour that turns on our response. We may decline where the use appears to be descriptive, referential, comparative, or otherwise lawful, and we will explain why.

7.4.4 We will normally notify the affected user and give them an opportunity to respond before acting, unless the complaint concerns counterfeiting or the material is plainly infringing.

7.4.5 Repeated trade mark infringement is treated under the enforcement ladder in Acceptable Use Policy section 6.2, and persistent infringement leads to termination.

8. Other intellectual property and related complaints

8.1 Design rights. Complaints concerning registered or unregistered design rights in garments should be sent to the address in section 7.4.1, with the equivalent information, identifying the design registration or the basis of the unregistered right.

8.2 Database rights. Complaints concerning the extraction or re-utilisation of a substantial part of a database, including a size chart database, should be sent to the address in section 7.4.1.

8.3 Publicity and image rights. A complaint that a person's likeness has been used without authorisation is not an intellectual property complaint in most of the jurisdictions we expect to operate in, and the faster route is the privacy and depicted-person removal route in Acceptable Use Policy section 3.2.3. Where a right of publicity claim is made under a United States state statute, send it to [CONFIRM: address].

8.4 Trade secrets and confidential information. Send to [CONFIRM: address].

9. Our intellectual property, and the licence you grant us

9.1 The Service, its software, interfaces, models, prompts, size chart corpus, documentation and branding are owned by us or our licensors. Nothing in this policy or in your use of the Service transfers any of it to you.

9.2 Your content stays yours. You retain all rights you already hold in the photographs you upload and in the material you submit.

9.3 The licence you grant us. You grant us a limited licence to host, store, encrypt, transmit, process, analyse and modify your content, and to create derived data from it, strictly to the extent necessary to operate the Service for you, to comply with law, and to enforce our policies. That licence:

(a) is non-exclusive, worldwide and royalty free; (b) is limited to the purposes in this section and does not extend to marketing, publication or resale; (c) does not permit us to train, fine-tune or evaluate machine learning models on your content, and we contractually prohibit our AI processor from doing so; (d) ends when your content is deleted or your account is closed, subject only to backups that are rendered unreadable by destruction of your per-user data encryption key, and to any preservation obligation under content-moderation-and-safety-policy.md section 9.

9.4 [CONFIRM: alignment with the Terms of Service. The licence grant will also appear there and the two must match word for word. Where they differ, the Terms of Service should govern and this document should cross-refer rather than restate.]

9.5 Ownership of generated outputs. [CONFIRM: the client's position on who owns the AI generated try-on render. Points for counsel: (a) under United States law, purely machine-generated output without sufficient human authorship is not copyrightable, per the Copyright Office guidance following Thaler v Perlmutter, so there may be nothing to own; (b) the underlying photograph is the user's and the render is a derivative of it, which points towards assigning whatever rights exist to the user; (c) the AI provider's terms will contain their own allocation of output rights and must be checked and made consistent; (d) the simplest and most user-friendly position is to assign to the user whatever rights we have in the output, and that is what is recommended.]

10. Abuse of this policy

10.1 We may decline to process, and may suspend a complainant's access to, the notice channels in this policy where a person repeatedly submits notices that are manifestly unfounded. This is consistent with Article 23(2) of the Digital Services Act.

10.2 We may report abusive notice campaigns to the relevant regulator.

10.3 Nothing in this section limits the statutory remedies available to a person harmed by a false notice, including under 17 U.S.C. section 512(f).

11. Contact summary