Copyright complaints

If you hold rights in a song and it appears in Fret without your permission, this page tells you exactly what to send and what we do with it. We act on every notice we receive.

Where the material in Fret comes from

Two places. A small part is written by the people who use the app: they add their own chord arrangements of songs and their own corrections to existing ones. The larger part — a little over 597,000 entries — was imported from publicly available sources on the internet, and neither the lyrics nor the arrangements in it were licensed by us. For every imported entry we keep a record of where it came from, and we will share that record with you as part of handling your complaint.

We do not host recordings, sheet music files or audio of any kind.

What to include in your notice

A complete notice lets us act on the same day. Please include:

1. The work. Title and performer or composer, and, if you have it, the ISWC or the catalogue number.
2. Where it is in Fret. The song title and artist as they appear in the app, and the link to the song if you can copy it. If you are reporting many songs, a list in the body of the email or an attached spreadsheet is fine.
3. Your rights. Who you are, and on what basis you act — author, publisher, collecting society, or an agent for one of them. If you act for someone else, say for whom.
4. Contact details. Name, postal address and an email address we can reply to.
5. A statement that you believe in good faith that the material is used without the permission of the rights holder, and that the information in your notice is accurate.
6. Your name at the end of the message, as a signature.

What we do, and how quickly

• We confirm that we received your notice.
• We remove or disable the material within 10 working days of a complete notice, and usually within one or two days. If your notice is unclear or incomplete, we come back to you with a question instead of letting it sit.
• We tell the user who added the material that it was removed, and why. We do not pass on your postal address or email address unless you ask us to, or unless we are legally required to.
• We keep a record of the notice and of what we removed.

If you ask us to remove an entire catalogue, or everything by a particular writer or publisher, we will do that too — send the list and we will block those titles from being added again.

If your material was removed by mistake

If something you added was removed and you believe you had the right to publish it — you wrote the arrangement yourself, the work is in the public domain, or you hold a licence — write to the same address with the subject Counter-notice. Explain why, and give your name and contact details. We will look at it again and, if the complaint does not hold, restore the material and tell you.

Repeat infringement

Accounts that repeatedly publish material they have no right to publish are suspended, and then deleted. This is set out in the Terms of Service.

Reporting from inside the app

Anyone can flag a song, an arrangement or a comment with the report button next to it. That queue is for content that breaks our rules. A copyright complaint is better sent by email, as described above, because we need the information listed there to act on it.