Copyright & DMCA Policy

Copyright Ownership

Creator retains ownership. Subject only to the narrow operating licenses you grant in the Terms of Service §4, you retain full, unconditional ownership of all copyright, neighbouring rights (including performer's rights and producer's rights in sound recordings under the Copyright Act, 1978 (Act No. 98 of 1978) of South Africa), moral rights, database rights, trademark rights and other intellectual property rights in every original work you upload, publish or submit to SynthVerse. This applies equally to cover songs (you own the recording — for the underlying musical work you must obtain a mechanical license from the relevant collective management organisation before publishing), to original compositions, to artwork, to liner notes, to metadata and to AI-assisted works where you are the human creative director (see AI Ownership Policy).

SynthVerse trademarks and platform IP. The SynthVerse name, logo, brand identity, Documentation Vault™ mark, "SynthVerse Studio", "SynthVerse Forge", "SynthVerse Radio", the distinctive look-and-feel of the platform, proprietary recommendation algorithms, AI base models and all source code of the platform are copyright or trademark of SynthVerse (Pty) Ltd or its licensors. You may not reproduce them without prior written permission, other than the limited, revocable right to use them to refer to the service as permitted by fair dealing / fair use.

Cover songs, samples, remixes. It is the uploading creator's sole responsibility to obtain all necessary licenses, clearances and permissions before uploading any work that incorporates third-party copyright material, including but not limited to: samples, cover songs, interpolations, remixes, acappella remakes, spoken-word samples, dialogue excerpts, orchestral mock-ups of copyrighted scores, and royalty-free sample-pack content where the end-user license requires attribution or excludes commercial use. SynthVerse does not pre-clear samples and does not offer sample-clearance services as part of any plan tier.

Licenses Granted by Creators to SynthVerse

By publishing a work on SynthVerse you grant us only the narrow, non-exclusive licenses strictly necessary to operate the platform and deliver services to you. Specifically:

• Streaming & on-demand delivery. License to stream, download-to-cache, transcode into any audio codec, perform publicly, communicate to the public and make available on-demand, solely via the SynthVerse client applications and SynthVerse Radio linear stream, to end-users consistent with their plan tier.
• Distribution sub-license (optional, opt-in). If you elect DSP distribution on a Professional or Enterprise tier, you appoint SynthVerse as your non-exclusive licensee to deliver your releases to Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, TIDAL, Deezer and other supported DSP partners, and to collect, report and remit attributable revenue, all against the distribution fee disclosed at the time you enable the feature.
• Metadata adaptation. Right to adapt, re-format and enrich metadata (genre tags, ISRC, UPC, language codes, parental-advisory flags, AI provenance grades, feature flags) for indexing, search, recommendation, charting, playlist curation and downstream DSP compatibility, without altering the substantive creative content of the work.
• Promotional use. Limited, revocable right to use 30-second audio clips, reduced-resolution cover-art thumbnails, artist name and release title in public-facing marketing materials such as on-platform billboards, "New Releases" featured carousels, annual SynthVerse wrapped retrospectives, press examples of "creators on SynthVerse" and social media posts, provided such use is not misleading and does not imply endorsement of a third-party product. You may opt out of promotional use from Account > Privacy > Visibility & Promotion.
• Documentation Vault™ provenance. Right to record hashes, timestamps, chain-of-custody metadata, ownership assertions and license scopes into the Documentation Vault for the purpose of generating tamper-evident ownership certificates at your explicit request or at your plan tier's automatic cadence.

All of the above licenses terminate when you unpublish a work, subject to: (a) a reasonable wind-down period (up to 14 days) for SynthVerse to remove the work from caches, recommendation indexes, search and Vault derivative indices; (b) retention of Vault chain-of-custody hashes indefinitely for evidentiary value (these are hashes, not copies of the work itself); and (c) retention of archival copies for copyright-audit and royalty-statement purposes only.

DMCA Designated Copyright Agent

SynthVerse has designated a Copyright Agent to receive notifications of claimed copyright infringement under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (17 U.S.C. § 512) ("DMCA") and equivalent local notice-and-takedown regimes (including the notice procedures under South Africa's Electronic Communications and Transactions Act, 2002 (Act No. 25 of 2002) Chapter XI).

Notices should be sent exclusively to the designated agent below; notices sent to any other SynthVerse email address, physical address, support ticket channel or social media inbox are not received by the designated agent and will not trigger a DMCA 512(c) safe-harbor response.

A registration for the designated agent has been filed with the U.S. Copyright Office DMCA Designated Agent Directory at dmca.copyright.gov.

DMCA Takedown Notice — 6 Required Elements

To be legally effective and to trigger the safe-harbor protections for both you and SynthVerse, a DMCA notification of claimed infringement must include all six of the following elements, under penalty of perjury. Notices missing one or more elements will be acknowledged, returned with a request for the missing information, and will not be treated as a valid DMCA notice until corrected.

1. 1. Physical or electronic signature of a person authorised to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
   Electronic signature means a typed full legal name in the signature block of an email sent from the authorised person's own email address, plus a statement "I declare under penalty of perjury that the foregoing is accurate and that I am authorised to act on behalf of the copyright owner". Attorneys and agents acting for a copyright owner must attach a signed letter of authorisation or be on record with the copyright owner's law firm domain.

2. 2. Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed, or, if multiple copyrighted works at a single online site are covered by a single notification, a representative list of such works at that site.
   For each work include: song/composition title, recording artist, composer(s), label name (if applicable), ISRC or UPC if available, Spotify/Apple/YouTube link to the original if you have one, and registration number from your country's copyright register if registered. Bulk notices covering many works may be sent as a structured CSV attachment with one row per work, plus the signed statement in the email body.

3. 3. Identification of the material that is to be removed or access to which is to be disabled, and information reasonably sufficient to permit SynthVerse to locate the material.
   For each allegedly-infringing copy on SynthVerse, provide the exact full URL (e.g. https://synthverse.co.za/releases/{slug} or https://artists.synthverse.co.za/releases/{uuid}) and, where applicable, the track index number within a multi-track release. We cannot act on "search for artist X on your site" instructions — you must tell us the exact URLs to investigate.

4. 4. Information reasonably sufficient to permit SynthVerse to contact the complaining party, such as an address, telephone number and, if available, an electronic mail address at which the complaining party may be contacted.
   Minimum: full legal name, email address that we can reply to, and country. A postal address and phone number are also required for notices from registered copyright-enforcement entities; individuals may omit postal address and phone at their option provided we can reply by email.

5. 5. A statement that the complaining party has a good-faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorised by the copyright owner, its agent or the law.
   You may verbatim copy the standard sentence: "I have a good faith belief that the use of the material identified above in the manner complained of is not authorised by the copyright owner, its agent or the law."

6. 6. A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorised to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
   You may verbatim copy: "I declare, under penalty of perjury under the laws of the Republic of South Africa and the United States of America (where applicable), that the information contained in this notification is accurate and complete and that I am the copyright owner or am duly authorised to act on behalf of the owner of the exclusive right that is allegedly infringed."

Takedown Procedure and Response Times

Upon receipt of a complete, valid DMCA notice (all six elements present, no deficiencies), the following procedure applies:

1. Acknowledgement (same business day). The designated agent or a deputy responds by email to the complaining party with a ticket number and confirmation that the notice has been accepted as legally complete.
2. Investigation (up to 24 business hours). A review officer independently confirms: (a) the work identified in the notice matches the material at the provided URLs; (b) the URL is a SynthVerse-hosted work (not merely a link to an external site); (c) the complaining party's claimed rights are facially plausible (e.g., a label acting for an artist it represents must show chain of title). We do not adjudicate substantive copyright ownership — we are limited to determining facial validity of the notice and sufficiency of counter-notice.
3. Removal or disablement (within 48 business hours of receipt of complete notice). Where the notice passes investigation, access to the identified material is disabled: the release is unpublished, removed from recommendation indexes, hidden from public search and directory, and a placeholder "This release has been temporarily removed due to a claim of copyright infringement" message is displayed in place of the artwork. Streaming and download URLs return HTTP 451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons.
4. Notice to the uploader (without unreasonable delay). SynthVerse sends the uploader a detailed notice: (a) advising that the material has been removed or access to it disabled; (b) reproducing the complaining party's DMCA notice in full (including contact information, except that we will redact the complaining party's physical address unless the law requires disclosure); (c) explaining the uploader's right to submit a counter-notice under §512(g); (d) providing a link and form for submitting a counter-notice; and (e) advising that repeated valid notices against the same account will trigger the graduated repeat-infringer policy.
5. Forwarding and record-keeping. A copy of every valid received notice (and every counter-notice) is retained in the Copyright Takedown Register for a minimum of 7 years, and — where required by regulation — forwarded to the U.S. Copyright Office and/or the South African Film and Publication Board.

Incomplete notices (missing any of the six elements) are not acted upon as DMCA notices; we return them within 2 business days with a list of missing items and re-submission instructions. Where possible we also flag the notice to our Trust & Safety team for separate manual review under the Acceptable Use policy, but such review does not count toward the 48-hour DMCA safe-harbor clock.

Counter-Notice and Restoration Procedure

If you are the uploader whose material was removed and you believe that the material was removed or disabled as a result of mistake or misidentification of the material to be removed or disabled — including where you have a valid license, where the use is fair dealing / fair use, where the work is in the public domain, or where the complainant has confused your original work with another's — you may send a counter-notification ("counter-notice") to the designated copyright agent. A valid counter-notice must contain the following elements, under penalty of perjury:

1. Your physical or electronic signature (typed full legal name from your own SynthVerse-registered email address, plus a statement that you are the account holder or duly authorised to act for the account holder that uploaded the material).
2. Identification of the material that has been removed or to which access has been disabled, and the location at which the material appeared before it was removed or access to it was disabled (original SynthVerse URL(s)).
3. A statement under penalty of perjury that you have a good faith belief that the material was removed or disabled as a result of mistake or misidentification of the material to be removed or disabled.
4. Your name, address, telephone number and email address.
5. A statement that you consent to the jurisdiction of: (i) the Magistrate's Court / High Court of South Africa (Johannesburg) if either you or SynthVerse are domiciled in South Africa, or (ii) the judicial district in which your address is located otherwise; and (iii) that you will accept service of process from the complaining party who initiated the DMCA notice or an agent of such person.

Upon receipt of a valid counter-notice, the following statutory procedure applies:

• Forward counter-notice to complainant (within 2 business days). SynthVerse sends a complete copy of the counter-notice to the original complaining party, informing them that SynthVerse will restore the removed material in no fewer than 10 business days and no more than 14 business days from the date of the counter-notice, unless the designated agent first receives notice from the complaining party that an action has been filed seeking a court order to restrain the alleged infringer from engaging in infringing activity relating to the material on SynthVerse's system or network.
• Restoration (10th–14th business day, absent court order). If the 10–14 business day window closes and we have received no notice of a court action from the original complainant, the material is restored: the release is re-published, the placeholder is removed, recommendation/search indexes are re-built, HTTP 451 responses cease, and the uploader is notified of restoration by email.
• Filed lawsuit freeze. If, during the 10–14 day window, the complaining party sends a copy of a filed summons / complaint / application for a court order (or a reasonable facsimile evidencing that proceedings have been issued), the material remains disabled pending resolution of the litigation, and both parties are informed of the freeze by SynthVerse.
• No strike on upheld counter-notice. If a counter-notice is not challenged by court action within the window and the material is restored, the original takedown does not count as a strike against the uploader under the repeat-infringer policy, because the complainant elected not to pursue their claim in court. A strike is only recorded when the takedown is undisputed for the full window, or when a court subsequently finds infringement.

Repeat-Infringer Policy (Graduated 3-Strike)

In accordance with §512(i)(1)(A) of the DMCA and the Terms of Service §8 (Enforcement), SynthVerse implements a graduated 3-strike repeat-infringer policy. A "strike" is recorded only when a DMCA takedown against a work uploaded by a given account is undisputed for the full 10–14 day counter-notice window (i.e., no counter-notice submitted), or when a court or arbitral tribunal of competent jurisdiction issues a final non-appealable order finding that the uploader infringed copyright in the work. Counter-notices that are not challenged in court (and result in restoration) do not count as strikes.

The graduated sanctions on a single SynthVerse account are:

1. Strike 1 — Written warning. The uploader receives a formal warning email from Trust & Safety, together with the full DMCA notice, a restatement of the Acceptable Use & Content Policy, and a requirement to confirm within 48 hours that they have reviewed the policy. Verified and Featured status is suspended for 30 days pending a cure declaration; chart and playlist eligibility are suspended for 60 days.
2. Strike 2 — Temporary suspension of publish and distribution privileges. The uploader account loses the ability to publish new releases for 30 days. Already-published non-infringing releases remain online. DSP distribution (if enabled) is paused for the 30-day window (no new deliveries to DSPs; already-delivered releases remain available unless individually the subject of a DMCA notice). Verified / Featured / Chart / Playlist eligibility is revoked permanently (must be re-applied for after 12 months with a clean record). All royalties accrue normally during the suspension window and are paid out on the regular schedule.
3. Strike 3 — Permanent termination of the account. The account is permanently closed, all publishing and distribution privileges are irrevocably revoked, all remaining (non-infringing) works are unpublished from SynthVerse and DSP partners (with a 14-day wind-down window so listeners can finish already-purchased downloads and cached Premium offline plays), and the account holder is added to a repeat-infringer register so that they may not open a new SynthVerse account in any capacity for at least 3 years from the date of termination. Accrued royalties above the minimum payout threshold are remitted in the next regular statement period, minus any chargebacks, DMCA enforcement costs, legal fees, or damages properly chargeable to the account holder under the Terms of Service §10.

All strike actions are individually appealable via the appeal process described in Terms of Service §8.3. Appeals are reviewed by a panel independent of Trust & Safety and the Copyright Agent, and may reduce or vacate a strike where the panel finds, on a balance of probabilities, that the notice was meritless, vexatious or brought in bad faith.

User-Generated Content Safe Harbor (DMCA §512(c) & ECTA Chapter XI)

SynthVerse operates as a "service provider" within the meaning of 17 U.S.C. § 512(k)(1) of the DMCA and as a "service provider" hosting "information" under Chapter XI of South Africa's Electronic Communications and Transactions Act, 2002. SynthVerse is accordingly entitled to the safe harbours from monetary liability (and, where applicable, injunctive relief) provided by those statutes for copyright-infringing material uploaded or stored by end-users, provided all applicable statutory conditions are met — including (without limitation):

• SynthVerse does not have actual knowledge that the material or an activity using the material on the SynthVerse system or network is infringing;
• In the absence of such actual knowledge, SynthVerse is not aware of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent; and
• Upon obtaining such knowledge or awareness, SynthVerse acts expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material — exactly as described in the Takedown Procedure section above.
• SynthVerse does not receive a financial benefit directly attributable to the infringing activity, in a case in which the service provider has the right and ability to control such activity. Creator plan subscription fees are flat-rate, not per-download or per-stream, and are therefore not "directly attributable" to any specific upload.

SynthVerse additionally satisfies the §512(i) conditions for safe harbor eligibility: it has adopted and reasonably implemented, and informs subscribers and account holders of, a policy that provides for the termination in appropriate circumstances of subscribers and account holders who are repeat infringers (the 3-Strike Policy above).

No general monitoring obligation. Nothing in this policy imposes on SynthVerse an affirmative duty to monitor, pre-screen, proactively scan or filter uploaded works for infringing content — except to the extent (a) it is required by a specific, individual, lawful court order directed at SynthVerse by name, or (b) SynthVerse elects to run optional detection tools such as audio-fingerprinting offered by rightsholders on a voluntary opt-in basis. SynthVerse does not use automated upload filters as a condition of publishing.

Moral Rights and Attribution

SynthVerse respects the moral rights of authors recognised by the Copyright Act, 1978 (s. 20) of South Africa (right of attribution, right to have the work published under the author's real or chosen pseudonym, right of integrity against distortion or mutilation of the work) and analogous moral rights provisions under other applicable laws (e.g., French droit moral, Canadian s.14.1 Copyright Act, Berne Convention Article 6bis).

Accordingly:

• Attribution. SynthVerse displays creator metadata (artist, featured artists, producer, composer, lyricist, cover-art designer, photographer, mastering engineer, AI model attribution per the AI Ownership Policy) on every release detail page, every play overlay, every Download receipt, every Vault certificate, and — where format metadata supports it — embedded in the audio file ID3 tags of downloads. You may edit your own attribution credits at any time from the Release edit screen; corrections are re-embedded into future downloads and updated on release pages within 1 hour.
• Right of integrity. SynthVerse will not edit, alter, truncate, remix, sample, re-master, speed-shift, pitch-shift or otherwise transform a work you upload without your explicit written consent — other than (a) standard lossy/lossless transcoding for streaming and download formats, which is a necessary technical step and not a creative transformation; (b) automatic volume normalisation (ReplayGain / ITU-R BS.1770-4) applied uniformly to all streams, which preserves creative intent while protecting listeners from clipping; (c) 30-second promotional previews authorised under the promotional license above; and (d) AI-generated recommendations that present excerpts of the work alongside other works, where the integrity of each excerpt itself is preserved.
• Pseudonym and anonymity. A creator may publish under any legal pseudonym (or, in appropriate cases, anonymously). SynthVerse will record the creator's real identity privately for payout, tax and DMCA purposes, but will not disclose it publicly or to third parties without (a) the creator's explicit consent, or (b) a lawful court order or subpoena accompanied by proper legal process and reviewed by our legal team. Creators are, however, expected to supply accurate real identity information privately for financial and legal accountability.

UGC License Grant Back to the Community

In addition to the operating licenses granted to SynthVerse, you may optionally choose to share specific categories of user-generated text content (comments, reviews, playlist descriptions, public biographies, forum posts where applicable, "why I made this" release notes, liner notes) under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license, by ticking the "Allow community reuse (CC BY 4.0)" box when posting. This is entirely optional; the default for all UGC is "All rights reserved, exclusive license to SynthVerse for platform operation only".

Where you do elect CC BY 4.0, anyone (including other users, music journalists, and Wikipedia editors) may reproduce, adapt, redistribute and build upon your text UGC, even commercially, provided they give appropriate credit to you by your display name or pseudonym, link back to the source content URL on SynthVerse, indicate if changes were made, and do not suggest that SynthVerse endorses their reuse. You may revoke a CC BY 4.0 election prospectively at any time by editing the post and un-ticking the box; existing uses before the revocation date remain valid under the earlier license.

Audio works, cover artwork, music videos and other creative uploads to SynthVerse are not covered by this optional UGC grant — they remain fully "All rights reserved" by the creator unless the creator separately attaches a Creative Commons license tag to the release via the Release metadata screen (supported CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-NC / CC BY-SA / CC BY-NC-SA tags are displayed on the release detail page and embedded in audio file ID3 tags of downloads).

Content Ratings

All creator-submitted audio and audiovisual content must carry one of three SynthVerse Content Ratings. Ratings are declared by the uploading creator. Mis-rating content to avoid filters or to present explicit content to minors is a breach of the Terms of Service (§7.2) and may result in a warning, content re-rating by Trust & Safety, or enforcement action under the graduated policy.

Additionally, the AI Provenance Grade (A / B / C / D) defined in the AI Ownership Policy is displayed alongside the content rating, to give listeners transparent information about the degree of human creative direction vs. model-assisted generation behind a given release.

Consequences of False or Abusive Notices / Counter-Notices

Both DMCA notices and counter-notices are given under penalty of perjury. Knowingly and materially false statements in either are serious:

• 17 U.S.C. § 512(f). Under DMCA §512(f), any person who knowingly materially misrepresents that material or activity is infringing, or that material or activity was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification, is liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys' fees, incurred by the alleged infringer, by any copyright owner or copyright owner's authorized licensee, or by SynthVerse, who is injured by such misrepresentation, as the result of SynthVerse relying upon such misrepresentation in removing or disabling access to the material or activity claimed to be infringing, or in replacing the removed material or ceasing to disable access to it.
• SynthVerse private action. SynthVerse reserves the right to (a) ban parties who repeatedly submit bad-faith DMCA notices (i.e., a pattern of notices that are found to be unsubstantiated after counter-notice restoration, or that courts find to be §512(f) violations) from using the copyright notice process going forward, and to treat submissions from them as non-DMCA manual review only; and (b) to recover costs and reasonable attorney's fees from such parties where we expend resources processing their false notices.
• Bad-faith counter-notices. Uploaders who file counter-notices that are subsequently found by a court to knowingly misrepresent restoration entitlement lose the "no strike" protection described in the Counter-Notice section, and a strike is recorded against their account in addition to any liability ordered by the court.

SynthVerse does not take sides between the parties to a copyright dispute. Our role is strictly that of a neutral service provider administering the statutory notice-and-counter-notice process accurately, on time, and with full documentation retained in the Copyright Takedown Register for audit purposes.