If you have reason to believe that a project on CurseForge is violating your Copyright on your own work, whether hosted on CurseForge or not, please carefully read below and only after understanding everything, proceed to fill out the form to submit a claim.
Important to read and understand first
We always recommend trying to resolve the matter personally with the 2nd party before submitting a claim.
Most project pages have the Owner's contact information by email, discord or other means. Even if not, you can contact them via personal message on the site. Most times claims can be settled much easier and faster in this manner first.
- Only the Owner or Author of a project may submit a claim. It is up to the creators of the content to protect their copyright if they so wish. In order to reduce false or low quality reports, we will not accept claims from users unrelated to the project.
- In case of a conflict between a license on CurseForge and a license for the same work made available on an outside source, we take the CurseForge license as the applicable one. Sometimes the owner of the project will publish his source on external hubs - such as GitHub - under an open source license, but on CurseForge the owner will decide to list his project as All Rights Reserved, or another more restrictive license than on the conflicting source. In those cases, we will take the license on CurseForge as the relevant one to consider for publishing content on CurseForge.
First, CurseForge will not always know if the works are exactly the same, such that there may not be a genuine licensing conflict. Second, while we understand this can cause conflicts in some cases, we believe it is not our place as the hosting platform to dictate the license to the creator.
- If you have more than one of your projects to report that you believe are being infringed on, please report each in a separate form.
- Only submit 1 claim for a specific project. Do not send duplicate claims for the same project.
- Reviewing and deciding on Copyright claims can be complicated and take longer than normal. Please allow up to 10 business days for initial response. The nature of code, and open source code at that makes proving infringement complicated.
You will need to prove that the code or assets that are being reported is unique and your own, and not a generic piece of code/asset used in other types of similar applications.
- Make sure you understand what your license allows or forbids. If your project is licensed under an open-source license that permits modification/distribution, you cannot report a project for not asking permission.
That being said, if your open source license has specific requirements (such as not allowing a sub-license) and you see a fork not following that, you can report to ask them to adjust their project accordingly. - Please make sure to carefully read the form and provide as much detailed information as possible, in order to clarify your claim and shorten the processing time. Claims that have little to no evidence or are hard to understand will be dismissed.
- We do our best to review the submitted claims and act accordingly to the benefit of the community. However, there may be cases where there is insufficient evidence to decide, or one of the parties disagrees. Such cases will need to be solved personally between the two parties via legal means, outside of CurseForge.
- Any account which is found to be abusing the reporting process and making intentional false claims, will be subject to a permanent ban from the platform.
- Similarly, any account which is found to be a repeat offender of uploading copyrighted content without approval, will be subject to a permanent ban from the platform.
What happens after I submit my claim?
After we review your initial claim, and if we decide that it is sufficient to suspect copyright infringement, we will:
- Contact the owner of the reported project with the provided information and ask for their comment.
- We will wait up to 7 days for a reply. In case no reply is received the reported project will be taken down.
- The owner of the reported project can submit a counter claim after their project is taken down. Which will be reviewed and decided on after taking everything into consideration.
- In some cases where we feel there is clear and immediate proof of copyright infringement we may take down the project first then contact the owner and wait for a reply. The owner of the reported project may still submit a counter-claim in that case.
How do I submit my claim or a counter-claim?
To submit a copyright claim, please make sure to read all the information stated above, then proceed to fill out the following form
To submit a counter-claim, please fill out the following form