Copyright Policy

01·Scope of this policy#

Vinfirm hosts material that people upload: scanned service documents, and photographs of vehicles. If something on Vinfirm is your copyrighted work and you did not permit it, this page is how you tell us, and how the person who uploaded it can respond if they think you are wrong.

In practice the claim that reaches us is almost always a photograph. A repair invoice is rarely anyone's creative work; a photograph of a car usually belongs to whoever took it, and a seller who pulled an image from a previous listing may not have the right to republish it.

This is a copyright process specifically, and it is the slower of the two routes because the statute prescribes the steps. If your concern is that your name, address or phone number appears on somebody else's document, use the content removal process instead: it requires no account, no sworn statement, and no waiting period. If your concern is a review written about you, Terms section 10 covers that. Anything else can go to help@vinfirm.com.

02·Sending a notice#

Send the notice to the agent in section 03. To be effective under 17 U.S.C. § 512(c)(3) it must include all six of the following. An incomplete notice is one we may not be able to act on.

One: your physical or electronic signature. Two: identification of the copyrighted work you say was infringed. Three: identification of the material on Vinfirm you want removed, specific enough that we can find it: the profile URL and which image or document, not just the VIN.

Four: how we can reach you: address, telephone number, and email. Five: a statement that you believe in good faith that the use is not authorised by you, your agent, or the law. Six: a statement that the information in the notice is accurate, and, under penalty of perjury, that you are the copyright owner or authorised to act for them.

Section 07 applies to any notice sent under this section. A notice is a sworn statement, and there is a penalty for knowingly misrepresenting it.

03·Designated agent#

Vinfirm LLC has designated an agent to receive notices of claimed copyright infringement:

Copyright Agent, Vinfirm LLC, 5534 Saint Joe Road, Fort Wayne, IN 46835, USA.

Telephone: (260) 285-4375. Email: copyright@vinfirm.com. Email reaches us fastest and we treat it as received on the day it arrives.

This designation is also filed with the United States Copyright Office directory of designated agents, under registration number DMCA-1079954.

04·What we do when a notice arrives#

A notice is reviewed on arrival. If it is complete and valid on its face, we remove or disable access to the material, ordinarily within a few business days, and we tell the person who uploaded it what we removed and why. We send them a copy of the notice, including your contact details, because they are entitled to know who is asking and to respond.

Removing a photograph does not remove the Service Record it sat on, and removing one document does not remove the Vehicle Profile. We take down the narrowest thing that answers the notice.

If the notice is incomplete we will tell you what is missing. If it is plainly not a copyright claim, because the material is not yours or the objection is about accuracy or privacy, we will tell you that and direct you to the route that fits.

05·Counter-notice#

If your material was removed and you believe that was a mistake or a misidentification, you can send a counter-notice to the same agent. Under 17 U.S.C. § 512(g)(3) it must include: your signature; identification of the material and where it appeared before removal; a statement under penalty of perjury that you believe in good faith it was removed as a result of mistake or misidentification; your name, address and telephone number; and your consent to the jurisdiction of the federal district court for the district where you live, or if you are outside the United States, the district where Vinfirm may be found, together with your agreement to accept service of process from the person who sent the original notice.

We forward the counter-notice to whoever sent the original notice. If they do not tell us within 10 to 14 business days that they have filed a court action seeking to restrain you, we may restore the material.

A counter-notice is also a sworn statement, and section 07 applies to it in the same way.

06·Repeat infringers#

We terminate the accounts of repeat infringers in appropriate circumstances. What follows is what that means here.

An account receives a strike when we remove material in response to a valid notice that is not successfully answered by a counter-notice. We keep a record of strikes against the account, not against the vehicle, so deleting a profile does not clear one. Three strikes closes the account.

We may act sooner than three strikes where the pattern is obvious, such as a single session in which a listing's worth of other people's photographs is uploaded. We may also decline to count a strike where a notice was withdrawn or turned out to be wrong.

An account closed under this section does not get a refund, and we may decline to open a new one for the same person.

07·Misrepresentation#

Under 17 U.S.C. § 512(f), anyone who knowingly and materially misrepresents that material is infringing, or that it was removed by mistake, can be liable for damages, including costs and legal fees, to the other side and to us.

Both of these processes are sometimes used for something other than copyright: to take down a competitor's listing, or to pursue a dispute about a vehicle. Where the underlying problem is not copyright, the routes in section 01 are faster and do not carry this exposure.

Questions about this page, rather than a notice under it, can go to help@vinfirm.com.