Repeat Infringement

Yahoo will terminate the accounts of repeat copyright infringers

As set forth here, you may not post any content (a song, a story, an article, a drawing, a photograph, etc.) owned by someone else in a manner that violates another’s copyright. When you do so, the copyright owner(s) of that content may notify us that you don’t have their permission to post their content on the site, and have violated their copyright. If we get repeated notices that you have posted others’ copyrighted content without permission, we may terminate your account.

Yahoo has a system for keeping track of repeat violators of copyright, and determining when to terminate your account:

  • Generally, when content is removed that you posted because the copyright owner of that content sent us a complete legal request to do so, it constitues a copyright strike. If you receive three copyright strikes within a one-year period, your account will be terminated. As described below, there are some exceptions to this rule.
  • Exception Number 1: If you submit a counter-notification in response to the copyright owner’s notice and that counter-notice is not answered by the copyright owner [or if the dispute leads to legal proceedings that result in a court finding that you have not infringed the owner’s copyright], we will take away the strike that you were given for posting that content. Likewise, if the copyright owner retracts his or her notice, we will take away the strike.
  • Exception Number 2: If a copyright owner submits a notice via Yahoo to the moderator(s) and/or owner(s) of a Yahoo Group regarding content placed within the Group, we will review the Group to determine if it should be terminated. We will base this decision on a number of factors: infringement history, reported content in question, the age, and number of members within the group.
  • Exception Number 3: Small Business Sites (Merchant Solutions, Web Hosting, Domains, etc.): We evaluate these notices based on the number of notices received, hosted stores and sites associated with a user, and reported pages (and location of those pages on Yahoo vs. other companies’ websites) to determine if a particular store or site qualifies as a recidivist under this policy.
  • Yahoo reserves the right to terminate accounts that act against the spirit of the Terms of Service, regardless of how many strikes are involved.