Copyright and DMCA - Briarmont, CA

If something published on this site uses your copyrighted work without permission, write to copyright@briarmont-sl.com and we will take it down once your notice has the things the law asks for.

Effective date: August 4, 2026

If you think something here infringes your copyright

Briarmont is a Second Life® roleplay community run by a small team. Much of what you see on this site was written, drawn, or photographed by community members. Some of it is pulled in from the community wiki and from the Munibase community platform. We do not review all of it before it appears.

Some pictures on our pages are served from other companies’ computers rather than ours. Parcel photographs come from Second Life’s servers. Portraits and group crests come from Munibase, which is Briarmont’s own platform, but its image files are held in Google Cloud storage, so your browser fetches those from Google. We can stop showing a picture here even when the file itself lives somewhere else, and we will tell you if that is the situation.

If you own a copyright in something published here, or you are allowed to act for the person who does, write to copyright@briarmont-sl.com. Say what the material is and where it is. The rest of this page explains what a complete notice has to contain and what we do when we get one.

United States copyright law has a well known process for this, in section 512 of Title 17 of the United States Code. It is usually called notice and takedown. We work to that same process here because it is clear and even-handed, and because it is what most people sending a complaint already expect. Treat the rest of this page as a description of how Briarmont handles a copyright complaint, written out so you know what to expect from us and what we need from you. Following the steps below is the fastest way to get a result.

Where to send a complaint

Everything to do with copyright goes to one address: copyright@briarmont-sl.com. That address is read by the people who run Briarmont, and it reaches all of them rather than one person, so a complaint does not depend on one person being available.

Briarmont has no public office and no postal address to write to. Please use the email address above. If you need something in writing for a court or a lawyer, say so in your message and we will reply in a form you can keep.

How to send a takedown notice

Section 512(c)(3)(A) lists six things a notice needs. Please include all six. A notice that leaves things out slows everything down, because we have to write back and ask for the missing pieces before we can act on it.

A signature. Sign the notice, either by hand on a scanned document or electronically. We accept your full name typed at the end of an email as an electronic signature. The signature has to be from the copyright owner, or from someone the owner has authorized to act for them.
What work you say was copied. Name the copyrighted work. If you are complaining about several works at once, list them. If the list would be very long, describe the group of works instead.
What on our site you say infringes it, and where it is. Give us the full web address of every page involved. Say which part of the page you mean, such as a specific image, a paragraph, or a document. We need enough detail to find the material without guessing.
How to reach you. Your name, mailing address, telephone number, and email address.
A good-faith statement. A sentence saying you believe in good faith that the use you are complaining about is not authorized by the copyright owner, by an agent of the owner, or by law. “By law” matters here, because some uses are allowed without permission, fair use among them.
An accuracy and authority statement. A sentence saying the information in the notice is accurate, and that under penalty of perjury you are the copyright owner or are authorized to act for the owner. “Under penalty of perjury” means you can be prosecuted for lying in it.

What happens next

When we get a notice that contains the six items above, we normally remove the material or switch off access to it, and we do that promptly. Taking something down is not a finding that you are right, and it is not an admission by the person who posted it. Where a notice is plainly baseless we may write back rather than act on it.

Where the material came from the community wiki, we remove it there as well, because the website copies it from the wiki. Where it came from the Munibase community platform, we remove it there too. Munibase is Briarmont’s own platform, so that does not depend on anyone outside the community, but it is a separate system and the website drops the material on its next sync. This site also keeps finished pages on disk so they load faster, so we clear those stored copies when we act on a notice.

We then tell the person who posted the material what came down and why, and we pass on a copy of the notice, including the contact details in it. If you send us a notice, expect the other side to see your name and how to reach you. That is how the process works.

The person who posted it can reply with a counter-notice, described next. If they do, we forward it to you.

Counter-notice

If your material was taken down and you think that was a mistake, or that the material was misidentified, you can send a counter-notice to copyright@briarmont-sl.com. Section 512(g)(3) says it needs four things:

Your signature, by hand or electronic.
What was removed and where it used to be. Identify the material and give the web address it appeared at before it was taken down or switched off.
A statement under penalty of perjury that you believe in good faith the material was removed or disabled because of a mistake, or because someone misidentified it. Again, “under penalty of perjury” means you can be prosecuted for lying in it.
Your name, address, and telephone number, plus two statements. First, that you consent to the jurisdiction of the federal district court for the judicial district your address is in. If your address is outside the United States, you consent instead to the jurisdiction of any judicial district where we can be found. For Briarmont that is California, which is also the law these documents run under. Second, that you will accept service of process from the person who sent the takedown notice, or from that person’s agent. “Service of process” means being formally handed the papers that start a lawsuit. Consenting to a court’s jurisdiction means agreeing that court can decide a case about this against you.

Item four asks for your real name, a postal address and a telephone number, and it is fair to say why on a page that lists no address of its own. A counter-notice puts the dispute back between you and the person who complained, so they are entitled to know who is asking for the material back and where to reach them, and we have to pass those details on. If you are not willing for the complainant to see your name, address and telephone number, do not send a counter-notice. Write to us at the same address instead, say what you think went wrong, and we will look at it.

We forward the counter-notice to the person who sent the original notice, contact details included. That person then has 10 business days to tell us they have filed a court action to stop you posting the material. If they do not, we put the material back. We keep to the window section 512(g) sets for this: the material goes back up not less than 10 and not more than 14 business days after we receive your counter-notice, unless the person who complained files suit first. Ten business days is two calendar weeks, and the outside limit of fourteen is closer to three, so expect this to take weeks rather than an afternoon.

Repeat infringers

This is our repeat infringer policy. It applies to everyone holding an account in the systems Briarmont runs, and nobody should meet it for the first time on the day it is used, so here it is in plain terms.

If someone repeatedly posts material that belongs to other people, we can end their access to the account systems Briarmont runs. Very few people have accounts on this website itself. The accounts that matter here are wiki accounts on the community wiki, including bulletin writer accounts, and the character pages and directory records held on the Munibase community platform.

How it works: we keep a record of the valid takedown notices we receive, and of who posted the material each one concerns. A counter-notice that leads to the material going back up does not count against anyone. When the same person keeps drawing valid notices, their accounts can be closed and their material removed. There is no fixed number of strikes and no fixed sequence of steps, because the situations are not all alike. Losing wiki or account access can also mean losing access to work you wrote there, so this is not a step we take lightly.

We do not go looking for infringing material on our own. We are a volunteer group without the means to do it. We act on what is reported to us.

False claims carry consequences

Section 512(f) applies to both sides of this process. It covers two kinds of lie: knowingly claiming that something infringes a copyright when it does not, and knowingly claiming that material was removed by mistake when it was not. Either one can make you liable for damages, including costs and attorneys’ fees, to the person harmed by it.

“Material misrepresentation” is the legal term, and it means a false statement that mattered to the outcome. Do not send a takedown notice to win an argument, silence a critic, or remove a roleplay post you regret. Section 512(f) exists to punish exactly that.

This page is about copyright only

Some complaints look like copyright complaints but are governed by different rules, and this process does not handle them.

Removing your picture, your character page, or other personal details: write to privacy@briarmont-sl.com. The Privacy Policy explains what this site publishes about community members and how removal works.
Trademark and defamation complaints, and anything else legal: write to legal@briarmont-sl.com.
Conduct, harassment, and moderation: see the Briarmont Community Covenant, which sets out how to report and how appeals work.

Using Briarmont’s own material

Three separate things sit under this heading, and they have different answers.

The site as a whole. The footer of this site reserves all rights. Nothing here is offered for reuse by default: not the text, the page designs, the artwork, or the published in-fiction documents. That reservation is about reuse, not about ownership. Members keep the copyright in what they wrote and drew, apart from material produced on Briarmont’s behalf. The Terms of Use draws that line. If you want to use something, ask at legal@briarmont-sl.com. The Terms of Use covers what you may and may not do on the site.

The website’s own code. The theme that runs this site was designed and built for Briarmont. It is proprietary, all rights reserved, and it is not published, sold or offered for reuse. If you want to use part of it, ask at legal@briarmont-sl.com.

Lore and writing by community members. This splits two ways, and the Terms of Use sets out both. Material written on Briarmont’s behalf, meaning canon, handbooks, official records and setting material produced in a Briarmont role, belongs to Briarmont. Everything else a member writes stays theirs: their character pages, their own stories, their art. Briarmont publishes it here and on the community wiki with the author’s agreement. The license members give Briarmont, set out in the Terms of Use, covers publishing and archiving their work inside the community. It does not let Briarmont grant anyone outside the community the right to reuse it. A request to reuse member-written material has to reach the author, and legal@briarmont-sl.com is the place to start.

Two more things worth being plain about. The Briarmont Municipal Code is adapted from real California statutes. Under United States law the text of a statute itself is not protected by copyright, which is what lets us adapt it. If you want to rely on that for a project of your own, check it for yourself rather than taking our word for it. The way we selected, arranged, and rewrote it is our own work, and so are the local ordinances we invented for the town. And Briarmont is a fan-run roleplay community built on someone else’s platform. We hold no rights in Second Life itself.

Second Life, SL, and inSL are trademarks of Linden Research, Inc. Briarmont SL is not affiliated with or sponsored by Linden Research.

If you record video in-world, Linden Lab’s Snapshot and Machinima Policy applies as well as copyright. The Terms of Use sets out what it asks for.

Contact

Trademark questions, reuse requests, and anything else on this page: legal@briarmont-sl.com

Removing personal details or a picture of you: privacy@briarmont-sl.com