DMCA AND TAKEDOWNS

Use the form at /report and choose Copyright. That form is the intake: it writes the notice straight into the queue a person works from, and you need no account to use it. One report names one file — paste the stashbay link or the waybill code printed on its download page, either is accepted. You get a reference of the form SB-XXXX-XXXX on the receipt and in every reply, which identifies the notice without naming you to anyone who asks. A notice emailed to abuse@stashbay.net reaches the same desk, but has to be entered by hand, so it starts later.

Beyond the link: the original work, identified by title, catalogue number or the address you publish it at; a description of what was copied and where in the file it appears; the full legal name that signs the notice; and an email address we can reply to. Two declarations are mandatory and the form refuses the report without both — a good-faith belief that the use is not authorised by the rights holder, its agent or the law, and a statement, under penalty of perjury, that the information is accurate and that you are the rights holder or authorised to act for them. Whether you are the holder or an authorised agent is recorded with the notice, and the moment the declarations were made is stamped on it.

A person reads every report. Our target for a first human reply is 6 hours, and for closing a copyright notice one way or the other 24 hours; material depicting minors and credible threats to someone's safety are escalated in minutes. We reply to the address you gave, including when the decision is to leave the file up. The time of that first human answer is recorded against the notice, and the response times published on the report page are measured from it rather than asserted. A link that does not resolve is still filed rather than rejected: answering "no such link" would confirm which links are real to anyone willing to guess.

Actioning a notice does five things at once. Access to the file is cut. Its SHA-256 goes onto the takedown ledger, so the same bytes cannot be uploaded again. Every other copy of that hash still being served is delisted with it — whoever uploaded it, however many owners hold it, and whether or not your notice named them. Each affected owner's storage quota is released. And a strike is recorded against the account the notice was actioned against. The sweep across the other owners does not strike them: they lose the file for hosting the hash, while a strike is issued by a person acting on a notice rather than by a loop.

A file's hash is compared against the takedown ledger before it goes live only where the hash is known at that moment. Uploads too large for the browser to hash, files fetched from a remote URL, and files that arrive through the Telegram bot have no hash yet, so they pass that gate. A scheduled job reads each such object back out of storage, computes its hash, stamps it on the record, and if it is on the ledger delists it and every copy of it through the same path as any other takedown. This is why a notice keeps working after it is closed: the ledger entry outlives the file that produced it.

Delisted is not deleted. A delisted file's bytes are retained for 30 days from the moment it was blocked, because 17 U.S.C. 512(g) expects material to be restorable if a counter-notice succeeds, and that needs the bytes to still exist. Through that window the file cannot be downloaded, previewed, shared or renamed, and the publisher's record for it shows the date the bytes are released. Filing a counter-notice is not self-serve end to end: an operator enables it on the record, and the publisher then opens a support thread that carries the file, its hash and the delisting date. Restoration is two steps and refuses to be one — the hash comes off the ledger first, because restoring while it is still listed would only have the file swept again on the next run. Once the 30 days pass a scheduled job deletes the object, and only where no other file still serving that content points at it. Nothing brings those bytes back afterwards. The takedown, the strike and the earnings trail stay on the record either way.

Strikes are counted per account under 17 U.S.C. 512(i), and each carries its reason, the file it came from, the administrator who issued it and the date. A publisher can read their own strikes on their security page, and a reviewer sees whether a notice is an account's first or its fifth before acting on it. What a count leads to is decided by a person, who may suspend or ban the account. Nothing terminates an account automatically at a number, and we would rather say that than publish a threshold the code does not enforce.

A notice is a sworn statement. Knowingly misrepresenting that material is infringing carries liability under 17 U.S.C. 512(f) for the costs and damages of the wrongful removal, and the form says so before you submit it. We do not adjudicate the merits of a claim before acting on it, which is exactly why the declarations are mandatory rather than decorative.

Copyright notices and counter-notices reach our designated agent at abuse@stashbay.net, and the form at /report is the same desk by a faster route. Automated mail from Stashbay is sent from post@stashbay.net and is read by nobody; a notice sent there reaches nobody either.