Hostable Legal
First draft — v0.1, not yet legally reviewed, not published. Every document on this site must be reviewed by a solicitor before it is relied on. See the status note on the home page.

Copyright / DMCA Policy

Last updated: [PUBLISH DATE] · Version: 0.1 (first draft — not yet legally reviewed, not yet published)

Before this document is published, Hostable must register a DMCA agent with the US Copyright Office (https://www.copyright.gov/dmca-directory/) and pay the registration fee. Without a registered agent, Hostable does not qualify for the DMCA safe harbor even if this policy is published.

1. Why this exists

Hostable hosts Minecraft servers on behalf of users, including content users configure on those servers (worlds, mods, resource packs). Under 17 U.S.C. §512 (the DMCA), a host that hosts content at a user's direction can qualify for a safe harbor — protection from liability for infringing material it didn't create and doesn't have specific knowledge of — provided it: designates and registers an agent for takedown notices, responds properly to valid notices, has a repeat-infringer policy, and doesn't have actual knowledge of the infringement it's failing to act on.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act provides a parallel, broader protection for third-party content generally (not just copyright) — see the Terms of Service §6.

2. Our registered DMCA agent

[NAME] [ADDRESS] Email: dmca@hostable.games US Copyright Office registration: [PENDING — must be filed before this policy goes live]

3. How to submit a takedown notice

Send a written notice to the agent above containing, per 17 U.S.C. §512(c)(3):

  1. Your physical or electronic signature.
  2. Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to be infringed.
  3. Identification of the material claimed to be infringing, with enough information to locate it (server ID, world name, file path if known, or the domain name if you're reporting content reached through a domain attached to a Hostable server).
  4. Your contact information (address, phone, email).
  5. A statement that you have a good-faith belief the use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
  6. A statement, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notice is accurate and that you're authorized to act for the copyright owner.

Notices missing any of these elements may not be actionable under the DMCA and may be rejected.

4. What happens after a valid notice

We remove or disable access to the identified material and notify the account holder, including a copy of the notice, without unreasonable delay. In practice, Hostable's admin tools act at the server or account level (stopping the server, disabling the account), not by selectively deleting one file or world from a running server — where the infringing material is inseparable from the rest of what's running, disabling the whole server is how we "remove or disable access to the identified material" until a narrower response is possible.

5. Counter-notice

If your content was removed and you believe it was a mistake or misidentification, you can submit a counter-notice with:

  1. Your physical or electronic signature.
  2. Identification of the material and where it appeared before removal.
  3. A statement under penalty of perjury that you have a good-faith belief the material was removed as a result of mistake or misidentification.
  4. Your name, address, phone number, and consent to the jurisdiction of the federal court for your district (or, if outside the US, any district where Hostable may be found), and that you'll accept service of process from the original complainant.

We forward valid counter-notices to the original complainant. Unless they notify us they've filed a court action within 10 business days, we may restore the material.

6. Repeat infringer policy

An account that receives three valid, unrebutted takedown notices is terminated. Today this record is kept manually against the DMCA agent's own inbox (not yet a tracked field in Hostable's account system — there is no notice-count column or admin view for this, unlike, say, the Breach Register), so the three-strikes count is only as reliable as that manual process. [Product gap — flagged 2026-08-23. Consider a simple notice counter on the account record, admin-visible, once volume makes manual tracking unreliable; not urgent at current scale but should be built before relying on this policy at any real volume.]

7. Reporting outside the US / no DMCA agent available

Users outside the US can still report infringement via the same dmca@hostable.games address; we'll treat a clear, good-faith notice the same way procedurally even where DMCA's specific formal requirements don't technically apply, cross-referenced against the Acceptable Use Policy §1's general prohibition on infringing content.

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