Legal Notices

Neither the Lumen website or the Lumen team can provide individual legal advice — we cannot analyze your particular website, or activity, or a takedown notice you have received, to assure you it is legal, or valid or correct. (This is for your protection and ours — we do not have the resources to analyze every site individually, and we don't want to give the impression that we have.) What we can do is help present the issues as lawyers think about them and answer general questions: Does the law really say that? What is the scope of copyright, trademark, or defamation law? What defenses exist for a given claim? We hope that the database as a whole will be a useful resource.

Because the information on Lumen is written for a general audience, without investigation into the facts of each particular case, it is not legal advice, and we form no attorney-client relationship with you.

Sending email to the Lumen project or entering information in web forms does not create a lawyer-client relationship, with the heightened confidentiality provisions of such a relationship.

Please note that the presence of a notice within Lumen's database does not mean that Lumen has made any judgment on the validity of the claims it makes, or in any way authenticated it or its provenance, other than who shared a copy of the notice with Lumen. All of the notices and requests in the Lumen database have been shared with us voluntarily by the companies or individuals responsible for either originally sending or receiving the notices. We therefore generally present the notices in the form with which they have been shared with us.

Finally, we do not host or remove notices or removal requests from our site predicated on the ultimate resolution of any given notice's underlying complaint. In some cases, at the request of the entity that shared a notice with Lumen, (usually but not always the original recipient of the notice, see "what's in the database" for more details) we may remove a notice from our public database — for example, if the complaint has been retracted or withdrawn by the original sender from the original recipient.

Report copyright infringements to Harvard's designated agent under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Lumen original materials are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License