Notice, takedown and counter-notice

What Lantern actually hosts

Knowing this saves everybody time, because the thing you want removed may not be on our servers at all.

• Member-written product pages: the title, description, verdict and categorisation on a product page are written by the member who submitted the listing, not by Lantern.
• Our own editorial writing: buying guides, category introductions and comparison copy, written by us.
• Product imagery: a product page shows one of three things, and says which. Generated artwork rendered from category, subcategory and colour metadata; photographs uploaded by members; or listing photographs resolved from the marketplace or from purchasing-agent search services. Where a listing photograph appears here and you hold the rights to it, the notice process on this page removes it.
• Community contributions: reviews, quality-control photographs and owner photographs uploaded by people who received the item, plus haul write-ups and collections.
• Structured listing metadata: the listing title, price, marketplace, seller name and a link to the marketplace page.

Lantern operates as a hosting service for these user submissions and removes or disables access to identified material expeditiously on receipt of a valid notice.

What we do not host: the marketplace listing itself, the seller's store, the goods, or any purchasing agent's pages. If the infringing item is a listing on Taobao, Tmall or 1688, the marketplace operator is the host and its own notice programme is the effective remedy. Tell us as well and we will de-index the listing here, but our removal does not take the listing down.

If your complaint is that a product copies your design rather than that a file copies your work, you probably want the design-rights route below, or the content policy. Both lead to removal from Lantern; the design route needs less paperwork.

Filing a copyright notice

We operate a notice-and-takedown process modelled on section 512(c) of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the equivalent hosting provisions of EU and UK law. A valid notice contains six things.

Where to send it

Email is the fastest and preferred route. Put Copyright notice in the subject line.

• Email: legal@lantern-finds.com
• Designated agent for notices: [Name of designated agent], Lantern
• Postal address: [Registered entity name], [Street address], [Postal code, city], [Country]

The postal and agent details are completed on incorporation and mirrored in the imprint. Until then, email is the address of record and is monitored every working day. Do not send notices to individual staff members or through social media; those routes are not monitored for legal purposes and the clock does not start.

What happens after we receive it

1. Acknowledgement within one working day, with a reference number.
2. Review for facial validity: do the six elements exist, do the URLs resolve, is the claimed work identifiable. We do not adjudicate the merits of a copyright claim; we are not a court and would be wrong to pretend otherwise.
3. Removal or disabling of access within two working days of a facially valid notice. Where the material is one element of a larger page, we remove that element and leave the page.
4. Notification to whoever posted it, including a copy of the notice with your postal address and phone number redacted, an explanation of the counter-notice route, and a note that a strike has been recorded.
5. An incomplete notice gets a reply telling you exactly which element is missing. We do not silently discard notices, and we do not use a missing element as an excuse to leave obvious infringement up.

A notice that is really a counterfeit report gets routed to the faster path in the content policy, where the content comes down pending review rather than waiting on formalities.

Counter-notice

If your content was removed and you believe the notice was mistaken or the use was lawful, you can file a counter-notice. It must contain:

• Your name, postal address, telephone number and email address, and your signature.
• Identification of the material that was removed and the Lantern URL where it appeared.
• A statement, under penalty of perjury where applicable, that you have a good-faith belief the material was removed as a result of mistake or misidentification.
• Your consent to the jurisdiction of the courts of your place of residence, or of the jurisdiction named in our terms of service, and your agreement to accept service of process from the person who filed the notice.

Send it to legal@lantern-finds.com with Counter-notice and the reference number in the subject. We forward it to the original complainant within two working days. If they do not tell us within 10 to 14 working days that they have filed an action seeking a court order, we restore the material and remove the associated strike.

A counter-notice is a legal statement that puts you in direct contact with the complainant and exposes you to a claim. It is the right move when you own the photograph or the use was plainly lawful. It is a bad move to make about somebody else's product photography.

Trademark complaints

Trademark is a separate process because the analysis is different: the question is whether use of a mark is likely to confuse, not whether a file was copied. Send trademark complaints to legal@lantern-finds.com with Trademark complaint in the subject and include:

• The mark as registered, the registration number, the register it sits on, and the classes and goods covered.
• Proof that you are the proprietor or an authorised representative.
• The Lantern URLs where the mark appears and what about the use you say is infringing: counterfeit goods, a confusing product title, a false claim of authorisation.
• Whether you are also notifying the marketplace operator, since that is where the listing lives.

Where the complaint is that a listing sells counterfeit goods bearing your mark, we will not wait for the formal analysis: it goes to the faster counterfeit path. Our content policy prohibits counterfeits outright, so this is the rare case where a rights holder and a platform want exactly the same outcome.

We will not remove references to a mark used purely to identify a product or to make an honest comparison, and we will not remove a seller's name because it resembles yours without seeing the registration. Nominative use is lawful and over-removal is its own harm.

Design rights and independent designers

The most common real infringement in this market is not a copied JPEG: it is a small studio's product being manufactured and sold by somebody else. Registered design rights are expensive and small studios often do not have them, so we do not require one.

Send us a link to your own product page or an archived post showing your design published first, plus the Lantern URLs of the copies. A credible complaint from an identifiable designer results in removal pending review, on the same 24-hour clock as a counterfeit report. If the seller can show independent creation or a licence, the listing is restored and you are told why. We would rather be occasionally wrong in the designer's favour than run a catalogue that quietly rewards copying.

Repeat infringer policy

Copyright and trademark strikes count toward the same twelve-month record as content-policy strikes, described in the content policy. Three live strikes result in a ban: access withdrawn, all contributions unpublished, and the source added to the permanent exclusion list checked on every future submission.

Sellers whose listings attract repeated valid notices are excluded at the shop level rather than the listing level, because de-indexing one product from a shop that copies for a living simply moves the problem to next week's title. Bans for counterfeit goods are not time-limited.

Response times

These are the commitments we hold ourselves to. Working days are Monday to Friday excluding public holidays where the operating entity is established.

Misrepresentation and abuse of this process

Filing a notice that knowingly misrepresents that material is infringing exposes you to liability for damages and costs, including under section 512(f) of the DMCA and equivalent provisions elsewhere. We take this seriously in both directions.

Notices used to suppress honest negative reviews, to remove a competitor's legitimate listing, or to claim rights in a generic product shape are refused, and we tell the other side that a notice was filed and refused. Complainants with a pattern of invalid notices keep access to the process but lose the accelerated removal that a credible track record earns.

We publish aggregate figures on notices received, content removed, counter-notices filed and material restored, alongside the moderation transparency figures in the content policy.