Copyright and DMCA Policy

1.How we handle other people's copyright

GoPickStack is one person writing about other people's software. Nearly everything on this site is either our own writing, a fact we checked against a vendor's own published page, or a quotation of a vendor's own product description and pricing.

Our reviews quote vendor-supplied material in order to criticise it, compare it, and explain it. In US law that is generally fair use, and its equivalents under UK and EU law are fair dealing. Quoting a price in order to say the price is too high is a different act from copying a work in order to replace it, and the law treats them differently.

We are also honest about where we stand. The safe harbour in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, at 17 U.S.C. section 512, protects service providers that host material supplied by others, link to it, or cache it. We are not a hosting platform, and a publisher editing its own site is not automatically entitled to that protection. We therefore do not claim it and we do not rely on it.

What we do instead is simpler and is the only thing that matters in practice: we read good-faith notices properly, we act on the valid ones quickly, and we publish this process so nobody has to guess where to send anything.

2.How to send a takedown notice

If you own the copyright in material on this site and you believe it is being used without permission, send a written notice of claimed infringement to us. Email is the fastest route and it leaves a record you can point to.

Designated agent: Muhammad Shadab Shams, trading as GoPickStack. Email: hi@gopickstack.com. Post: P/O Lang Shumali, Jhang 35300, Punjab, Pakistan. That address is where you can serve papers on us, and it is the address we publish as our contact point.

Put the words copyright notice in the subject line so the message is not filed as a general enquiry. If your notice concerns more than one page, list every page rather than sending one message per page.

3.Our registration status, stated plainly

We have not registered a DMCA agent with the U.S. Copyright Office, and we do not need to. Voluntary registration is not required for a publisher that does not store material posted by third parties, and we do not accept user-uploaded content today.

The section 512 safe harbour is created for service providers who store or link material placed online by other people, and it is optional for anyone who claims it. GoPickStack authors its own editorial, and we do not publish material submitted by third parties, so there is no third-party content for a safe harbour to protect.

It is worth being precise about the one thing that could change this. If we ever ship features that let members post their own content, such as live forum threads or member-written tool reviews, we would register a designated agent with the Copyright Office at that point. Registering requires the registrant's full legal name and a physical street address rather than a post office box, under 37 CFR 201.38(b)(1)(i), with a post office box accepted only where the Register approves a written safety waiver. We would need to arrange that address and register, and we would update this page to say so. Until then, this page is the whole of our position, and we would rather state the gap than imply protection we have not set up.

None of that affects the part that matters to you in practice. A valid notice sent to the address above is honoured whether or not a federal register lists us. We action notices on their merits, and we tell you what we did.

4.What a valid notice must contain

A notice under 17 U.S.C. section 512(c)(3) must contain all six of the elements below. A missing element is the most common reason a notice fails, and a notice that fails costs time rather than securing anything.

• (i) A signature. A physical or electronic signature of a person authorised to act on behalf of the copyright owner. A name typed at the end of an email without any indication of authority is not enough.
• (ii) Identification of the copyrighted work. Either the work claimed to have been infringed, or a representative list of the works if several are involved at one site.
• (iii) Identification of the infringing material. The specific material you object to, plus enough detail for us to locate it. A direct URL is strongly preferred, because a page title is not a location.
• (iv) Information sufficient to contact you. That means your postal address, your telephone number, and your email address if you have one.
• (v) A good faith statement. A statement that you believe the use in question is not authorised by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
• (vi) A statement under penalty of perjury. That the information in the notice is accurate, and that you are the owner of the exclusive right or are authorised to act on the owner's behalf.

If a notice is missing one of these, we may write back and ask for the missing item rather than act on an incomplete notice. That is the honest position: acting on half a notice risks removing something that was properly quoted.

5.If we remove material and you disagree

If we remove or disable material in response to a valid notice, the person who posted it may send a counter-notification under 17 U.S.C. section 512(d)(3). It must contain all five of the following.

• A signature. A physical or electronic signature from the subscriber.
• Identification of the material removed. What was taken down, and the location it previously occupied on this site.
• A statement under penalty of perjury that the subscriber believes in good faith the material was removed as a result of mistake or misidentification.
• The subscriber's details. Name, address, and telephone number.
• Consent to jurisdiction. A statement that the subscriber consents to the jurisdiction of the Federal District Court for the district in which the subscriber resides, or of any district in which we may be found if the subscriber lives outside the United States, and that the subscriber will accept service of process from the person who filed the counter-notice.

Send a counter-notice to the same address you sent the original notice to. We do not charge for handling one, and we do not ignore one.

6.What happens after you send it

So there is no guesswork about timing, this is the sequence we follow.

• We read the notice and check it against the six requirements in section 3.
• If it is valid, we remove or disable the material you identified and confirm that we have done so.
• We forward the notice to the subscriber who posted the material, and we forward any counter-notice they send us.
• If that subscriber does not notify us within 10 business days that they have filed a court action seeking to restrain the activity, we may restore the material.
• We keep a record of the notices we have acted on, so a repeated problem on the same page becomes visible to us rather than staying invisible.

There is also a commercial reason to move quickly. Google operates a legal removals system, and a site that accumulates a significant volume of valid copyright removal requests can be demoted in search results. We handle notices promptly because a notice is usually correct and you have a right to be heard quickly, and the search consequence follows from that rather than the other way round.

7.Knowingly false notices

17 U.S.C. section 512(f) makes any person who knowingly and materially misrepresents that material is infringing, or that material was removed through mistake, liable for damages. That includes costs and legal fees.

We treat that as a real remedy rather than a threat. If we have good reason to believe a notice is knowingly false, we will say so, we will explain what we think the position actually is, and we will use what the law gives us.

The same standard applies in the other direction, and it is the reason we are careful: we do not remove material on a notice we have good grounds to think is false.

8.Questions before you send anything

If you are not sure whether something on this site infringes your copyright, email us first and describe what you are concerned about. A short question costs you nothing and is frequently faster than a notice we would have to reject for a missing element.

Notices, counter-notices, and questions: hi@gopickstack.com. Postal address as given above. Everything reaches the same person, and we do not use a form that quietly drops attachments.

This document is governed by the laws of England and Wales, without limiting any right you have under the law of your own country. The requirements described above are the United States requirements, because the DMCA is a United States statute.