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 brand or product. Misuse of our name and logo is covered by our Trademark Policy.
• Content we do not host. If the material sits on a domain that is not ours, the notice 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 notice 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 notice, tell our customer what was removed and why, and pass any counter-notice back to you.

A notice has consequences for the person who sends it. In the United Kingdom, an unjustified threat of trade mark, patent or design infringement proceedings can itself give the person threatened a claim against you. 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.

UK law does not prescribe a form of notice. A host is protected from liability for material it stores at a customer’s request while it has no actual knowledge of unlawful activity, and loses that protection if, on obtaining such knowledge, it does not act expeditiously to remove or disable access to it (Electronic Commerce (EC Directive) Regulations 2002, reg. 19). What gives us knowledge is a notice we can act on, and a court deciding whether we had it will look at whether the notice included the details below (reg. 22). So please include:

• Your full name and address, and an email address we can reply to.
• The work you say has been infringed, and your right in it: that you are the owner, or are authorised to act for the owner.
• The exact location of the material: the full URL of each item.
• Why the use is unlawful: what has been copied, and that it was not licensed or otherwise permitted.

No sworn statement is required.

Copyright in the UK is governed by the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Our customer, as the business that published the material, is the person primarily responsible for it and the proper defendant to any claim. A court can also grant an injunction against a service provider that has actual knowledge that another person is using its service to infringe copyright (s. 97A); if a court makes such an order against us, we comply with it.

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: for protection in the United Kingdom, the UK register kept by the UK Intellectual Property Office, or an international registration designating the UK. An EU trade mark registered after 31 December 2020 gives no protection in the UK; one registered earlier will have a comparable UK registration with its own UK number.
• 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.

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.

Registered trade marks are protected under the Trade Marks Act 1994. An unregistered name or get-up can be protected by the law of passing off, where you can show goodwill, a misrepresentation and damage; if you rely on passing off rather than a registration, say so and explain the basis. Trade mark law is UK-wide, although court procedure in Scotland differs.

Counterfeit goods

If a storefront offers counterfeit goods, send us a notice through the route below so that we can disable the listing. Separately, HMRC and Border Force can detain suspected counterfeit goods at the UK border on an application for action by the rights holder, and local Trading Standards services investigate the sale of counterfeits, which can be a criminal offence (Trade Marks Act 1994, s. 92). Neither route depends on a notice to us.

Copyright and trade mark notices ask different things of us, but every notice reaches the same team, and every notice is handled by hand.

Our full company details are on our company information page. The Electronic Commerce Regulations require them to be easy to find, and they are also where a notice can be sent by post.

Our team handles every notice 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 not administrative tidiness: it is the evidence that the process was followed.

UK law sets no fixed number of days; it requires us to act expeditiously once we know. The periods above apply to every notice, wherever it comes from.

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.

A counter-notice needs the same seriousness as a notice, 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.
• Contact details, and agreement to accept service of proceedings from the person who sent the notice.

We validate it the same way, forward it to whoever sent the original notice, and wait 10 to 14 working days. If we are not told within that period that proceedings have been brought, the material may be restored. We do not decide who was right; the waiting period exists so that a court can.

UK law sets no waiting period, so the period above is our own; restoring material after it has been challenged is a decision we take on what both sides have told us, and a rights holder who disagrees can go to court. Where a notice sets out specific facts showing a clear infringement, we do not restore the material merely because the period has passed.

The Online Safety Act 2023 places duties on some online services to deal with illegal content and to handle complaints. Our position under it is set out in our Abuse Policy: in our assessment only Nest public share links fall within its scope, and we comply for them.

Offences concerning the infringement of intellectual property rights are excluded from what the Act treats as illegal content (section 59), so a copyright or trade mark notice on this page is not a notice under the Act. Counterfeit listings that are also fraudulent, and any other illegal content, should be reported through the Abuse Policy. A complaint about how we handled any report, including one made here, goes through the appeal route in the Abuse Policy.

We terminate the accounts of customers who repeatedly infringe. That is a condition of the hosting defence rather than a discretionary policy, and it has to be applied rather than only published.

• Every valid notice 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 notices 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.

Termination ends the service for that business, which is why it is a threshold rather than a judgement call made once per complaint. What happens to the customer’s records on suspension or termination is set out in our Abuse Policy.

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

In the United Kingdom, a threat to sue for infringement of a trade mark, patent or registered or unregistered design can be an unjustified threat, which the person aggrieved, including our customer, can sue over (Intellectual Property (Unjustified Threats) Act 2017). The Act permits some communications, such as notifying that a right exists; a notice that states the facts, rather than threatening proceedings, is the safer course.

Every notice we receive is recorded, including the ones we decline to act on. If a pattern of unfounded notices 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.