Copyright & Takedown

CueSyncStudio lets people upload files — most often recorded music, alongside PDFs, images and production documents — and share them with the collaborators they invite. Anything a user uploads is that user's content, not ours. This policy is how a rights holder gets infringing material removed, and how a user whose material was removed in error gets it back.

It covers material stored in Studio projects and in the personal audio library. It does not cover the CueSync software, website, documentation or brand, which are ours and are addressed in the Terms of Service.

Studio is a private workspace: uploads are visible to the project's members and to nobody else. That does not make an unlicensed upload lawful, and it does not change how we handle a notice.

Two things are worth checking first, because both are common and neither needs a legal process to resolve.

• Is the use licensed? A production may hold a synchronisation, grand-rights or theatrical licence that covers a rehearsal file being shared with its own crew. Uploading a track to a private show workspace is not a public performance or a distribution to the public.
• Do you hold the right you are asserting? Master recording, composition and publishing rights are frequently held by different parties. A notice has to come from the owner of the right, or from someone authorised to act for them.

A notice sent under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act carries a penalty-of-perjury statement and exposes the sender to liability for a knowing misrepresentation. It is a serious document. If a direct request to the uploader would resolve the matter, that is usually faster for everyone.

Send notices to our designated agent (below) at copyright@cuesync.live, with "DMCA Notice" in the subject line. To be effective under 17 U.S.C. §512(c)(3), a notice must be a written communication that includes substantially all of the following:

1. A physical or electronic signature of a person authorised to act on behalf of the owner of the exclusive right that is allegedly infringed. Typing your full name at the end of the email is an electronic signature for this purpose.
2. Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed — or, if a single notice covers multiple works at one site, a representative list of them.
3. Identification of the material that is claimed to be infringing and that you want removed or disabled, with information reasonably sufficient for us to locate it. For Studio that means the project and, where you can give it, the track or file name; if you have a link, include it.
4. Information reasonably sufficient for us to contact you: your name, postal address, telephone number, and email address.
5. A statement that you have a good-faith belief that the use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorised by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
6. A statement that the information in the notice is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that you are authorised to act on behalf of the owner of the exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

A notice that is missing items 2, 3 or 4 does not put us on notice under the statute, and we will come back to you asking for what is missing rather than acting on it. Please do not send a notice for material you cannot identify to us: we cannot search other customers' private projects speculatively.

Our designated agent to receive notifications of claimed infringement is:

to be confirmed — write to contact@cuesync.live

Email: copyright@cuesync.live

1. We acknowledge receipt to the sender, normally within 2 business days.
2. Where the notice is effective, we remove or disable access to the identified material expeditiously. In Studio that usually means the file stops being served and the collaborators on the project stop being able to download it.
3. We notify the user who uploaded it and the owner of the project it was in, and we forward them a copy of the notice — including your name and contact details, which the statute requires us to pass on so they can respond.
4. We record the removal against the uploader's account for the purposes of the repeat-infringer policy below.

We do not adjudicate the underlying dispute. We are not in a position to decide whether a production's licence covers a particular use, and a hosting provider that starts making that call is doing something the process does not ask of it.

If your material was removed and you believe that was a mistake or a misidentification, you can send a counter-notice to copyright@cuesync.live with "DMCA Counter-Notice" in the subject line. Under 17 U.S.C. §512(g)(3) it must include substantially all of:

1. Your physical or electronic signature.
2. Identification of the material that was removed or disabled, and the location at which it appeared before it was removed.
3. A statement under penalty of perjury that you have a good-faith belief the material was removed or disabled as a result of mistake or misidentification.
4. Your name, address and telephone number, and a statement that you consent to the jurisdiction of the Federal District Court for the judicial district in which your address is located — or, if your address is outside the United States, to any judicial district in which we may be found — and that you will accept service of process from the person who sent the original notice or their agent.

We terminate, in appropriate circumstances, the accounts of users who are repeat infringers. This is what that means in practice rather than in the abstract:

Under 17 U.S.C. §512(f), a person who knowingly and materially misrepresents that material is infringing, or that it was removed by mistake, is liable for the damages that misrepresentation causes — including the costs and legal fees incurred by the other side and by us.

We keep a record of every notice and counter-notice we receive, including the sender's identity and the material identified, for the period stated in the Data Retention Schedule.

European law treats a hosting service's copyright responsibilities differently depending on what the service does with the uploads it stores, so it is worth saying where we think Studio sits, and being clear that it is a position rather than a certainty.

Article 17 of the Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive (2019/790)imposes direct obligations — licensing efforts, best-efforts preventive measures, and a stay-down duty after a notice — on an "online content-sharing service provider". That term is defined narrowly: a service whose main purpose is to store and give the public access to a large amount of copyright-protected content uploaded by its users, which it organises and promotes for profit-making purposes.

Studio does not appear to meet that definition. Uploads are visible only to the members of the project they were uploaded to; there is no public gallery, no discovery surface, no recommendation feed, and nothing is organised or promoted to an audience. The Directive's recitals expressly place business-to-business cloud services and services that let users upload content for their own use outside the definition. We therefore do not operate Article 17 licensing or upload-filtering measures.

What does apply to a hosting service in the EU is the notice-and-action regime: the hosting liability exemption now in Article 6 of the Digital Services Act, and the notice mechanism in its Article 16, which requires a hosting provider to act on a sufficiently precise and adequately substantiated notice. The process set out on this page is the mechanism we operate for that purpose too, and a European rights holder can use it without also invoking the DMCA. Exactly which of these regimes binds us depends on where our controlling entity is established, which is currently recorded as: to be confirmed — write to contact@cuesync.live.

If you believe Studio falls within Article 17 and we have this wrong, write to us and set out why. We would rather be told than be right by assumption.

For trademark complaints, publicity or privacy-rights complaints, or content that is unlawful for a reason other than copyright, write to copyright@cuesync.live describing the right you hold, the material concerned, and where it is. There is no statutory form for these; give us enough to identify the material and to understand the claim.

Notices, counter-notices and questions about this policy: copyright@cuesync.live.

Related documents: Studio Terms, the Terms of Service, and the Data Retention Schedule.