IPR Compliance

It is for reports that material published through SorviAI by one of our customers infringes intellectual property you own or are authorised to act for.

That includes:

• Public storefronts. Catalogue pages, product images and product copy served from a SorviAI address.
• Uploaded material. Logos, images, attachments and documents a customer has published through the platform, including a Nest file shared by public link (public links are switched on by default).
• Portal content. Material a customer has made reachable to their own customers or suppliers.

It is not the route for:

• A commercial dispute with one of our customers. Pricing, delivery, refunds and contract terms are between you and them. We have no standing in it.
• A complaint about SorviAI’s own name or logo. Write to [email protected]; our Legal Notice and Grievance Officer page explains who owns them.
• Content we do not host. If the material sits on a domain that is not ours, the complaint belongs with whoever does host it.
• Other illegal content. Fraud, phishing, defamation, terrorist material and similar reports go through the route in our Abuse Policy.

Two things are worth knowing before you write, because both change what a complaint can achieve.

We cannot adjudicate ownership. Deciding who holds the rights in a photograph is not something a hosting platform is equipped to do, and a platform that tries ends up arbitrating between two parties it knows nothing about. What we can do is act on a properly made complaint, tell our customer what was removed and why, and pass any counter-notice back to you.

A complaint has consequences for the person who sends it. Knowingly false complaints can make the sender liable to the business affected, and Indian law lets a person threatened with groundless infringement proceedings go to court over the threat. See notices sent in bad faith.

If the material looks like a misunderstanding rather than deliberate copying, contacting the business directly is usually faster than either of us.

A takedown notice has required elements. An incomplete notice is the single biggest source of delay here, so they are listed rather than summarised: if one is missing we will write back saying which, and we will not act on the notice until it is there.

Please include:

• Your full name, postal address, telephone number and an email address we can reply to.
• A description of the work, with enough information to identify it.
• Details showing that you own the copyright in the work or hold an exclusive licence, or are authorised to act for the person who does.
• Why the material infringes: what has been copied, and why the use is not licensed and is not an act the Copyright Act 1957 permits (section 52 or any other provision).
• The exact location of the material: the full URL of each item, with enough detail for us to find it.
• The person responsible for uploading it, if you know who that is.
• A statement that the information in your notice is accurate and complete, and your signature, which can be your typed full name.

The rule 75 procedure

If you want us to act under rule 75 of the Copyright Rules 2013 (complaints under section 52(1)(c) of the Copyright Act 1957), also include your undertaking to file an infringement suit in a competent court against the person responsible for uploading the material, and to produce the court’s order within 21 days of our receiving your notice. If the notice satisfies us that the material is an infringing copy, we disable access to it within 36 hours, for 21 days or until we receive an order of a competent court, whichever is earlier. If no order arrives in that time, we may restore it.

Rule 75 also asks the host to show a notice giving the reasons to anyone who tries to reach a disabled item. SorviAI cannot show one in place of an item yet; until it can, we give the reasons to our customer and to you in writing.

The safe harbour

Under section 79 of the Information Technology Act 2000, an intermediary is not liable for material it hosts for others while it observes due diligence under the IT Rules and acts expeditiously once it has actual knowledge that the material is unlawful. A notice with the elements above is what gives us that knowledge. Our customer, as the business that published the material, is the person primarily responsible for it and the proper defendant to any claim. If a court orders us to remove or block material, or an authorised government officer notifies us under the IT Rules, we comply within the time the IT Rules set.

Trade mark complaints are common on a platform where businesses list goods, and the copyright notice above does not map onto them. There is an intake route for them, and it asks for different things.

Tell us, at minimum:

• The mark, its registration number and the register it is on: the Trade Marks Registry in India, or an international registration under the Madrid system designating India. A trade mark registered only in another country gives no protection in India.
• The goods or services it is registered for.
• The exact listings or pages you are complaining about, by URL.
• Why the use complained of infringes: counterfeit goods, use of the mark in listings, or something else.
• Your contact details, and the statement and signature asked for above.

Assessment differs from copyright, and we will not decide a trade mark dispute between two businesses. Where a listing is plainly counterfeit we act on it; where the question is whether one company may use a word another has registered, we pass the complaint to the customer and leave it with the parties. If you rely on an unregistered mark, explain the basis of your claim in passing off, including your goodwill in India.

Counterfeit goods

If a storefront offers counterfeit goods, send us a complaint through the route below so that we can disable the listing. Separately, Indian customs can act against suspected counterfeit imports on an application by the rights holder, and selling goods under a falsified trade mark is an offence under the Trade Marks Act 1999. Neither route depends on a complaint to us.

Copyright and trade mark complaints go to our Grievance Officer under the IT Rules. Every complaint reaches the same team, and every complaint is read and decided by a person.

Put “IPR complaint” in the subject line. Our full company details are on our Legal Notice and Grievance Officer page.

Our team handles every complaint by hand, and keeps a record of each one: the time it was received, who sent it, the addresses complained of and the customer whose content is involved. The record is the evidence that the process was followed.

We act narrowly, on purpose. Taking down an entire storefront over one image turns a third party’s complaint into an outage for a paying business that may have done nothing wrong. Removal is item by item.

Notice and complaint records are kept for 6 years.

A takedown route with no way to challenge it is its own problem. If we remove material belonging to one of our customers, they can tell us we got it wrong, and anyone affected by a decision can ask for it to be looked at again.

Counter-notices

A counter-notice goes to the Grievance Officer, needs the same seriousness as a complaint, and should contain:

• The signature of the customer or someone authorised to act for them.
• Identification of the material removed and where it appeared before removal.
• A statement of a good-faith belief that the material was removed as a result of a mistake or a misidentification, with the reasons.
• Contact details.

We validate it the same way and forward it to whoever sent the original complaint. Under the rule 75 procedure, if no court order reaches us within 21 days of the complaint, the material may be restored. For other complaints we wait 10 to 14 working days after forwarding the counter-notice; if we are not told in that time that proceedings have been brought, the material may be restored. Where a complaint sets out specific facts showing a clear infringement, we do not restore the material merely because the period has passed. We do not decide who was right; the waiting period exists so that a court can.

Asking for a review, and appeal

Our customer, and anyone who sent us a complaint, can ask for any decision on it to be reviewed, free of charge, by email to [email protected], for six months after we tell them of it. A senior member of our team who did not take the original decision looks at it again where one is available, and tells you the result and the reasons.

Separately, anyone aggrieved by the Grievance Officer’s decision, or whose complaint is not resolved in time, can appeal to the Grievance Appellate Committee within 30 days at gac.gov.in (rule 3A of the IT Rules). Neither route stops you going to court.

We terminate the accounts of customers who repeatedly infringe. Our terms reserve that right, as the IT Rules expect, and it has to be applied rather than only published.

• Every valid complaint acted on is recorded against the customer it concerns, whether or not they dispute it. No count is kept automatically; our team keeps the count by hand from the complaints it records.
• A counter-notice that goes unchallenged does not count against them, because on the face of it the removal was wrong.
• The threshold at which an account is terminated is 3 upheld notices within 12 months. We warn the customer first, and tell them the reasons when we act.

Termination ends the service for that business, which is why it is a threshold rather than a judgement call made once per complaint. A terminated customer can still have its data exported, as our Terms of Service set out.

A complaint is a legal instrument, and sending one to remove material you have no rights in is not a free action.

• A person threatened with groundless proceedings for copyright infringement can ask a court to declare the threat unjustified, stop it and award damages (section 60 of the Copyright Act 1957), unless the person making the threat starts and pursues an infringement action with due diligence.
• The Trade Marks Act 1999 gives the same remedy against groundless threats of trade mark infringement proceedings (section 142).
• If someone frequently sends us complaints that are manifestly unfounded, we warn them and may then give their complaints closer scrutiny before acting on them.

Every complaint we receive is recorded, including the ones we decline to act on. If a pattern of unfounded complaints comes from one source, that record is what the affected business will be given.

We may update this page as the law and our process change. The version and effective date at the top tell you which one you are reading. This is the first published version. Every later version will be published here with its date, and earlier versions will be kept at this address.

The words on this page that carry a specific legal meaning, in plain language.