Copyright and DMCA

Send copyright notices to our copyright agent at support@backdoor.tools, with “DMCA notice” in the subject line. Everything in section 2 needs to be in the message.

We have not yet registered a designated agent with the U.S. Copyright Office. Registration under 17 U.S.C. §512(c)(2) is a condition of the safe harbour, so until it is filed we cannot claim that protection — whatever we do about a notice. We are telling you this rather than implying a registration we do not hold. When it is filed, the agent’s name, postal address and telephone number appear here alongside the email address, as §512(c)(2) requires. The process below is the one we follow today, and we follow it now.

A notice sent to any other address may take longer to reach the right person. Please do not use this route for anything that is not a copyright complaint — for a refund, a cancelled event or a ticket problem, see the terms of sale.

17 U.S.C. §512(c)(3)(A) sets out what a takedown notice has to include. Please give us all of it:

• A physical or electronic signature of the copyright owner, or of someone authorised to act for them.
• Identification of the copyrighted work you say has been infringed.
• Identification of the material you want removed, with enough detail for us to find it — a link to the event page, or which image on it.
• Your address, telephone number and email address.
• A statement that you have a good-faith belief the use is not authorised by the copyright owner, its agent or the law.
• 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.

If something is missing we will usually come back to you for it rather than ignore the notice, but a notice that is missing the statement under penalty of perjury or the identification of the material cannot be acted on as a DMCA notice.

§512(f) makes it unlawful to knowingly misrepresent that material is infringing, and the person who sent the notice is liable to the organizer and to us for the damage that causes. Consider whether the use might be fair use before sending one.

We record every notice we receive: who sent it, when it arrived, what it identified, and what we did. That record is the reason we can answer questions about a notice months later, and the reason the policy in section 5 is something we can actually run.

On a notice that is substantially complete, we will:

• remove or disable access to the material — for an event listing that usually means unpublishing the event, which stops sales immediately;
• tell the organizer what was removed, and pass on the notice, including your name and contact details;
• record the removal against that organization for the purposes of section 5.

If tickets have already been sold to an event we unpublish, the organizer’s refund policy applies to the people holding them and the organizer is responsible for honouring it, as the Organizer Agreement requires.

If your material was removed and you believe that was a mistake or a misidentification, you can send a counter-notice to support@backdoor.tools. 17 U.S.C. §512(g)(3) requires it to contain:

• Your physical or electronic signature.
• Identification of the material that was removed, and 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 a mistake or misidentification.
• Your name, address and telephone number.
• A statement that you consent to the jurisdiction of the federal court for the district your address is in (or, if you are outside the United States, any district in which we may be found), and that you will accept service of process from the person who sent the notice.

We will forward the counter-notice to the person who sent the original notice. If they do not tell us within 10 to 14 business days that they have filed a court action to restrain you, we may put the material back. §512(f) applies to a counter-notice as much as to a notice: a knowing misrepresentation that material was removed by mistake carries the same liability.

We terminate the accounts of repeat infringers. In the ordinary case that means an organization we have acted against on 3 separate notices loses its ability to sell through the platform; a removal reversed on a counter-notice or a withdrawn notice does not count against it.

The number is a threshold, not an allowance. A single notice about something serious enough — bootleg recordings, wholesale copying of another promoter’s listing, material we have already removed once — can end an account on its own, and the Organizer Agreementsays the same thing from the organizer’s side.

This page is about copyright. If your complaint is about a trademark, about someone’s name, image or likeness being used without permission, or about an event that is not what it claims to be, write to support@backdoor.tools anyway and say what the problem is. Those claims are not DMCA notices and the process above does not apply to them, but the Organizer Agreement requires organizers to hold the rights to everything they upload, and we can act on a breach of it.