Copyright & DMCA Policy
This Copyright & DMCA Policy is a working draft published in good faith and pending final legal review. We may revise this text as that review completes; the effective date above will change when we do.
Our respect for copyright
Mazedly lets people upload image masks and design, save, share, and publish the mazes they make. We respect intellectual property, and we expect the people who use Mazedly to respect it too. If you own a copyright and you believe material hosted on Mazedly infringes it, you can ask us to take it down, and we’ll act on a proper request.
This page explains how that works — both for you as a copyright owner sending a notice, and for the person whose content is removed and wants to respond. It follows the notice-and-takedown process set out in the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (the DMCA), 17 U.S.C. section 512.
A note on what this policy covers. It applies to content that people bring to Mazedly and host with us — most often an image mask someone uploads to shape a maze, or a maze someone makes public with a share link, publishes to mazedly.com, or embeds elsewhere. It does not concern the mazes themselves as algorithm output: our engine is deterministic and algorithmic. We do not use generative AI, and we do not train any model on your content. So a copyright concern on Mazedly is almost always about an image or other material a person supplied, not something the engine invented.
This is a description of our process, not legal advice. Sending or responding to a copyright notice has real legal consequences, and misusing the process can make you liable for damages (see “A warning about false claims” below). If you’re unsure of your rights, please talk to a lawyer.
How to file a copyright notice
If you believe material on Mazedly infringes a copyright you own or are authorized to enforce, send a written notice to our Designated Copyright Agent (see “Our Designated Copyright Agent” below). To be effective under the DMCA, your notice must include all six of the following. We’ve kept the language plain, but each item is required, so please include every one:
- Your signature. A physical or electronic signature of the copyright owner, or of a person authorized to act on the owner’s behalf.
- The work you say was infringed. Identification of the copyrighted work you claim has been infringed — or, if your notice covers several works on Mazedly, a representative list of them.
- The material to remove, and where to find it. Identification of the material you say is infringing, with enough detail for us to locate it. Because mazes on Mazedly are reached by a share link or a public page, please give us the exact share link or public page URL; if your complaint is about an image mask, tell us the maze or page where it appears.
- How to reach you. Your contact information — your name, mailing address, telephone number, and email address — so we and, where applicable, the person who posted the material can contact you.
- A good-faith statement. A statement that you have a good-faith belief that the use of the material in the way complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
- An accuracy-and-authority statement, under penalty of perjury. A statement that the information in your notice is accurate, and — under penalty of perjury — that you are the copyright owner or are authorized to act on the owner’s behalf.
If your notice is missing element 2, 3, 4, or 6, it may not be valid under the DMCA, and we may not be able to act on it. If we receive a notice that is substantially complete but missing some detail, we may try to reach you to fill the gap. The clearer and more specific your notice, the faster we can act.
Counter-notification: if your content was removed
If we removed or disabled access to your maze or mask and you believe that was a mistake or a misidentification — for example, the material is yours, is properly licensed, or is a fair use — you can send our Designated Copyright Agent a counter-notification. To be effective under the DMCA, your counter-notification must include all four of the following:
- Your signature. Your physical or electronic signature.
- The material and where it was. Identification of the material that was removed or disabled, and the location where it appeared before it was removed — for a maze, its share link or public page URL.
- A good-faith statement, under penalty of perjury. A statement, under penalty of perjury, that you have a good-faith belief the material was removed or disabled as a result of mistake or misidentification.
- Your contact information and your consent to jurisdiction. Your name, mailing address, and telephone number, together with a statement that you consent to the jurisdiction of the U.S. federal district court for the judicial district in which your address is located — or, if your address is outside the United States, for any judicial district in which Mazedly may be found — and that you will accept service of process from the person who filed the original notice, or from that person’s agent.
Please send only one thing at a time and to the right place: counter-notifications go to the Designated Copyright Agent, the same address as notices.
One thing to understand before you file: when we forward a valid counter-notification, it goes to the person who sent the original complaint, and it contains your name, mailing address, and telephone number. In other words, filing a counter-notification shares that contact information with the complainant. If that concerns you, consider getting legal advice first.
What we do, and when
When we receive a notice that satisfies “How to file a copyright notice” above, we act promptly to remove or disable public access to the identified material. On Mazedly, that means we withhold the maze or mask from every public surface it appears on — its gallery entries, its published page, and its share link — so it is no longer reachable by the public. We do this by restricting the maze rather than deleting it outright: the share link resolves to a short notice stating the maze was removed in response to a copyright complaint, and, because the underlying link is preserved rather than destroyed, the material can be restored later at the same address if that becomes appropriate. We keep a record of the notices we act on.
We then notify the person who posted the material that it was removed and why, and we let them know they can respond with a counter-notification. We forward valid counter-notifications to the person who sent the original notice.
After we forward a valid counter-notification, unless the original complainant notifies us that they have filed a court action seeking to keep the material offline, we may restore the removed material in not less than 10 and not more than 14 business days. If the complainant tells us within that window that they’ve gone to court, we leave the material down.
We don’t promise a specific turnaround for the initial removal beyond acting promptly, and we can’t guarantee restoration if a dispute is ongoing — the timelines above are the DMCA’s, and we follow them.
Repeat infringers
Mazedly will, in appropriate circumstances and at our discretion, terminate the accounts of people who repeatedly infringe copyright. As a general matter, we treat someone as a repeat infringer if they are the subject of more than one valid takedown notice, or if we remove their material more than once. We may notify the affected account by email when we take this step.
This is consistent with our Acceptable Use Policy and our Terms of Use, under which we may suspend or terminate accounts that break our rules — and maintaining a repeat-infringer policy is a condition of the safe harbor the DMCA provides to services like ours. Where a repeat infringer used Mazedly without an account, we may block the material and take other reasonable steps at the session level rather than terminating an account, since there is no account to close.
A warning about false claims
The DMCA process runs in both directions, and the law guards both ends of it. Under Section 512(f), a person who knowingly and materially misrepresents that material is infringing — in a takedown notice — or that material was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification — in a counter-notification — may be liable for damages, including costs and attorneys’ fees, incurred by the other party as a result.
Please don’t send a notice or a counter-notification unless you have a genuine, good-faith basis for it. Copyright is not a tool for silencing content you simply dislike, and a counter-notification is not a way to reclaim material you don’t actually have the rights to. When in doubt, get advice before you file.
Forks and descendants: how a takedown reaches copies
Mazes on Mazedly can be forked — someone can take a public maze as a starting point and make their own version, which then stands on its own. As a general rule, a fork is independent once it’s created: if the person who published the original later unpublishes or deletes it, that action does not by itself reach any descendant maze someone else already forked from it. That independence is intentional, and it’s described in our Terms of Use and our Community & Content Guidelines. A creator taking down their own work is not the same thing as a copyright claim against a copy.
A valid copyright takedown is the exception. If a fork or other descendant maze itself infringes your copyright, a proper DMCA notice can reach that copy — the fact that it descends from another maze does not shield it. So if you find infringing material that has been forked or reproduced across more than one maze or page, identify each infringing maze or page in your notice under “How to file a copyright notice” — the exact share link or public page URL for each one — and we will act on the ones your notice properly identifies. We remove the specific material a valid notice covers; we don’t take down other people’s independent forks that your notice doesn’t identify and that don’t infringe.
Our Designated Copyright Agent
Sevensoft LLC has designated the following agent to receive notifications of claimed copyright infringement and counter-notifications under the DMCA. Please send copyright notices and counter-notifications to:
- Copyright Agent
- Sevensoft LLC
- 100 N Howard Street, Suite R
- Spokane, WA 99201
- United States
Email: copyright@mazedly.com
U.S. Copyright Office Designated Agent Directory Registration No. DMCA-1075169
This agent receives copyright matters only. Please don’t send general questions, support requests, or non-copyright complaints here — see “Complaints that aren’t about copyright” below for where those should go. Email is the fastest way to reach the agent; the mailing address is provided for formal service and for anyone who prefers to write.
Complaints that aren’t about copyright
The Designated Copyright Agent is only for copyright. Many concerns are better handled elsewhere, and routing them correctly gets them to the right people faster.
If your concern is a trademark issue, a privacy or safety concern, defamation, harassment, or content that breaks our Acceptable Use Policy or Community & Content Guidelines, please don’t send it to the copyright agent. Instead, use the report control on the shared or published maze page — every public maze has a “Report this maze” option with categories: Sexual or explicit · Hate or harassment · Violence or gore · Illegal content · Spam or misleading · Copyright/IP · Other — or email us at abuse@mazedly.com. For general questions, write to support@mazedly.com.
One routing note that ties the two paths together: the in-product report control includes a Copyright/IP category, and choosing it deliberately sends you here, to this page, rather than opening a free-text report. That’s because a valid copyright notice needs the specific, sworn elements listed under “How to file a copyright notice,” which a short report box can’t collect. So if you start a report and it’s really a copyright claim, you’ll be pointed back to the notice process above — and following it is what lets us act.
Changes to this policy
We may update this Copyright & DMCA Policy from time to time, including as we complete legal review of this draft and as the law or our process evolves. When we make material changes, we’ll update the effective date at the top of the page. Your continued use of Mazedly after a change takes effect means you accept the updated policy.
This policy is incorporated by reference into our Terms of Use and works alongside our Acceptable Use Policy, our Community & Content Guidelines, and our Privacy Policy, which explains how we handle the contact information in a notice or counter-notification.