Copyright & Takedown Policy

Send your notice by email to support@autolenstudios.com with the subject line Copyright Notice. A complete notice must include all of the following:

1. Your identity and role. Your name, the rights holder’s name if different, and a statement of your authority to act (owner, exclusive licensee, or authorized agent).
2. Contact details. A mailing address, telephone number, and email address at which we can reach you.
3. Identification of the work. A description of the copyrighted work you claim has been infringed — for photographs, enough detail to identify the specific images (a URL where the original appears, a filename, or a copy attached to the notice). If you are claiming multiple works, a representative list is acceptable.
4. Identification of the allegedly infringing material. The specific listing, URL, image, or account, with enough detail for us to locate it. A live URL is the most useful thing you can give us.
5. Location and date of the infringement if known, including the date and time you observed it.
6. A good-faith statement that you believe in good faith that the use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
7. A statement of accuracy that the information in the notice is accurate, and — where you are asserting rights under U.S. law — that under penalty of perjury you are authorized to act on the owner’s behalf.
8. Your signature (physical or electronic).

An incomplete notice may delay our response. If your notice is missing something we will normally tell you what is missing rather than ignore it.

Please do not send notices about content that is not stored or published through AutoLens. If the material is on a dealership’s own website or on a third-party marketplace, that operator is the right recipient.

AutoLens LTD — Copyright Notices
Alberta, Canada
support@autolenstudios.com

On receiving a notice we will, as promptly as is practicable:

• acknowledge receipt to the sender;
• record the notice and the material it identifies in our internal log, with timestamps;
• locate the material and, where the claim appears substantiated, remove or disable access to it in the AutoLens service;
• notify the customer whose account the material is associated with, forward them a copy of the notice, and give them the counter-notice information in Section 5;
• where the customer has published the material to a third-party platform such as Facebook Marketplace, tell the customer that removing it from AutoLens does not remove it from that platform and that they must remove it there themselves. We cannot remove content from a customer’s Facebook account, and the platform operates its own separate copyright process;
• record the action taken against the customer’s account for the purposes of Section 4.

We may act on a credible notice without adjudicating the merits of the claim. Removal is not an admission that infringement occurred, and declining to remove is not a determination that it did not.

Where the Copyright Act (Canada) ss. 41.25–41.26 applies to us in respect of a notice, we operate a notice-and-notice process:

• on receiving a notice of claimed infringement that meets the statutory requirements, we forward it to the relevant customer without delay, at the electronic address associated with their account;
• we confirm to the claimant that the notice was forwarded, or tell them why it was not;
• we retain records allowing the identity of the customer to be determined, for the retention period the Act requires;
• we do not disclose the customer’s identity to the claimant without a court order or other lawful authority.

A statutory notice under this regime must not contain an offer to settle, a demand for payment, or a request for personal information. We may decline to forward a notice that does.

If your content was removed or disabled and you believe that was a mistake, or that you hold the rights or a licence to the material, you may send a counter-notice to support@autolenstudios.com with the subject line Counter-Notice. Include:

1. your name, address, telephone number, and email address;
2. identification of the material that was removed or disabled and the location where it appeared before removal;
3. a statement, made in good faith, that the material was removed or disabled as a result of mistake or misidentification — and an explanation of the basis on which you hold the rights (for example, an assignment from the photographer, or a licence from your website vendor);
4. supporting documentation where you have it. A written licence or assignment is the most useful thing you can send;
5. a statement consenting to the jurisdiction of the courts of Alberta, Canada, and that you will accept service of process from the party who sent the original notice; and
6. your signature (physical or electronic).

We will forward a complete counter-notice to the original claimant. If we consider the counter-notice substantiated and we do not receive notice that the claimant has commenced proceedings, we may restore the material. We are not obliged to restore material, and we will not restore material where doing so would expose AutoLens or another customer to liability.

Sending a materially false notice or counter-notice may expose you to liability for damages, including costs and legal fees.

We terminate the accounts of repeat infringers. We maintain a record of copyright notices received in respect of each account. In appropriate circumstances — which we assess taking into account the number of substantiated notices, whether they were contested, the time between them, and whether the customer changed their behaviour after being notified — we will suspend or permanently terminate the account, without refund.

As a working standard, an account that is the subject of three or more substantiated, uncontested copyright notices will be terminated. We may terminate sooner where the conduct is deliberate or egregious — for example, where a customer has used the capture features against a third-party marketplace or a competitor’s website in breach of the Acceptable Use Policy. Termination for repeat infringement does not entitle you to a refund and does not limit the indemnity you owe under the Terms of Service.

Most copyright problems in this industry are not deliberate. They happen because someone assumed that paying for a photograph, or having inventory displayed on a website, means owning the copyright in the images and text. Often it does not:

• a photographer commissioned on or after November 7, 2012 is the first owner of copyright in Canada unless there is a written assignment;
• many dealership website vendors claim copyright in the photography, descriptions, and page content on the sites they build and host — sometimes jointly with the dealership, sometimes alone;
• inventory syndicators and marketplace aggregators generally own the media they produce, even when it is displayed on your site.

The cheapest protection is to know what you own. Ask your photographer and your website vendor for a written assignment or a licence that permits commercial republication, and keep it on file. Photographs your own staff take in the course of their employment are generally owned by the dealership. When in doubt, shoot your own.

This is background information, not legal advice. Get advice from your own counsel about your own contracts.

We may update this policy as our process, the Service, and the legal environment change. When we make a material change we will update the date above and give notice in the app or by email.