Copyright and DMCA Policy

Gavel respects copyright. Students use Gavel to study from their own class notes and their own case reading, and our Community Guidelines prohibit adding anyone else's material without the right to do so. When something slips through anyway, this page is how it gets taken down.

1. Reporting material you believe infringes

If you own a copyright, or are authorised to act for the owner, and you believe material on Gavel infringes it, send a written notice to our designated agent using the details in section 3. To be effective under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, your notice must include all six of the following:

• Your physical or electronic signature, as the owner of the exclusive right allegedly infringed or a person authorised to act for them.
• Identification of the copyrighted work you say has been infringed. If your notice covers several works on Gavel, a representative list of them is enough.
• Identification of the material you say is infringing, described well enough that we can actually find it. A URL is best. For a shared note set, the share link. Where the material is inside a student account rather than at a public address, tell us everything you know that would let us locate it.
• Your contact details: mailing address, telephone number, and email address.
• A statement that you have a good faith belief that the use is not authorised by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
• A statement that the information in your notice is accurate, and, under penalty of perjury, that you are the owner or are authorised to act on the owner's behalf.

A notice missing any of these may not be effective, and we may come back to you for the missing part before we can act.

2. What we do when we receive a notice

• We remove or disable access to the material expeditiously, or narrow it to the account that holds it.
• We take reasonable steps to tell the account holder what was removed and why, and we give them a copy of your notice. That copy will include your contact details, so send us only what you are willing to have forwarded.
• We tell the account holder they may file a counter-notice under section 5, and what happens if they do.
• We record the notice against the account for the purposes of section 6.

Removing material is not a finding that anyone did anything wrong. It is what the statute asks a service provider to do while the people with an actual stake sort it out.

3. Where to send a notice

Notices go to our designated agent:

Our postal address and telephone number for copyright notices are being finalised and will be published here. Until they are, email reaches the agent and is the fastest route. Nothing about the process in this policy depends on that detail.

Please put "DMCA Notice" in the subject line. This address is for copyright notices. Anything else sent here (support questions, business enquiries, general complaints) will be slower to answer than if you write to contact@gavelstudy.com.

4. Knowingly false notices carry liability

Under 17 U.S.C. section 512(f), a person who knowingly materially misrepresents that material is infringing, or that it was removed by mistake, is liable for damages, including costs and attorneys' fees, incurred by the alleged infringer, by any copyright owner, or by us. Before you send a notice, consider whether the use might be authorised, licensed, or a fair use. If you are not sure, talk to a lawyer rather than sending the notice and finding out.

5. Counter-notice

If your material was removed and you believe it was a mistake or a misidentification, you may send a counter-notice to the same agent. To be effective it must include all four of the following:

• Your physical or electronic signature.
• Identification of the material that was removed and the location where it appeared before it was removed.
• 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 your address is in, or, if your address is outside the United States, any district in which we may be found; and a statement that you will accept service of process from the person who sent the original notice, or their agent.

If we receive an effective counter-notice, we forward it to the person who sent the original notice, including your contact details, and tell them we will restore the material in ten to fourteen business days. We will restore it in that window unless they first tell us they have filed a court action seeking to restrain you from the activity in question.

The same warning cuts both ways: a counter-notice is sworn under penalty of perjury, and section 512(f) liability applies to a knowing misrepresentation here just as it does to a notice.

6. Repeat infringers

We have adopted and we implement a policy of terminating, in appropriate circumstances, the accounts of users who repeatedly infringe copyright. In practice:

• A first effective notice results in removal of the material and a written warning to the account holder explaining what was removed and what the rules are.
• A second effective notice against the same account results in removal, a final warning, and suspension of the ability to create share links or publish to a class.
• A third effective notice against the same account results in termination of the account.
• We may terminate an account sooner where the conduct is flagrant, for example uploading a commercial casebook, a publisher's question bank, or another provider's materials, or attempting to distribute such material through share links or a class.
• A notice that is withdrawn, that is successfully answered by a counter-notice, or that we determine was not effective does not count toward this total.

Terminating an account removes its content and, where a subscription is running, ends it. We also accommodate standard technical measures used by copyright owners to identify and protect their works, and we do not interfere with them.

7. Complaints that are not copyright complaints

Not everything that ought to come down is a copyright matter, and filing a DMCA notice for something else is the slow way to get it removed. If your concern is academic integrity, exam security, or course materials being used in a way your institution does not permit, our Academic Honor Code has a direct route for faculty and administrators and is usually faster. For anything else, including trademark complaints and personal information appearing where it should not, write to contact@gavelstudy.com and describe the problem.

8. How this fits the rest of the rules

This policy is part of our Terms of Service. What you may and may not add to Gavel is set out in the Community Guidelines, and what we do with your material is set out in the Privacy Policy. Nothing on this page is legal advice.

This document was last updated August 23, 2026.