Copyright and Takedown

Rivul lets researchers upload PDFs to their own private library so the product can extract their text, ground citations in them, and answer questions about them. Those files are uploaded by users, and Rivul does not review them before they are stored. Many of them are published articles whose rights belong to a publisher or an author rather than to the person who uploaded them. If you hold rights in a work and believe it is stored in Rivul without authorization, this page is how you tell us, and how we respond.

Rivul acts on written notices of claimed infringement under the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. section 512, and on equivalent requests under other applicable law. We remove or disable access to material we have a reasonable basis to believe is infringing, and we do it promptly. You do not need a lawyer to send a notice, and you do not need to sue anyone first.

Until a designated agent is registered with the U.S. Copyright Office, send notices to support@rivul.ai. Include the six items listed below. We act on complete notices promptly.

A notice has to give us enough to act on without guessing. Section 512(c)(3) asks for six things, and an incomplete notice may not start the clock. First, a physical or electronic signature of the owner of the exclusive right, or of a person authorized to act for the owner. Second, identification of the copyrighted work you say has been infringed, or, if a single notice covers many works at one site, a representative list of them. Third, identification of the material you say is infringing and information reasonably sufficient for us to locate it, such as a DOI, an ISBN, a title with authors and year, or a URL. Fourth, your name, postal address, telephone number, and email address. Fifth, a statement that you have a good faith belief that the use is not authorized by the rights holder, its agent, or the law. Sixth, a statement, made under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notice is accurate and that you are the rights holder or are authorized to act on the rights holder's behalf.

Please be specific about the material. Rivul libraries are private to each user, so a notice that names only a publisher or a journal does not let us find anything. A DOI or an exact title, author list, and year does.

We remove or disable access to the identified material, delete the text Rivul extracted from it, and remove the search index built from that text. We notify the user whose library held the file, tell them what was removed, and give them a copy of the notice with your personal contact details left in, since the law requires us to forward it. We tell you when we have acted. We do not remove a user's own drafts because a source in their library was taken down; the citation metadata for a removed source stays, because a bibliographic reference to a work is not a copy of it.

A user whose material was removed may send a counter-notice. It must contain a physical or electronic signature; identification of the material that was removed and the location where it appeared before removal; a statement, under penalty of perjury, that you have a good faith belief the material was removed as a result of mistake or misidentification; and your name, postal address, and telephone number, together with your consent to the jurisdiction of a U.S. federal district court and your agreement to accept service of process from the party who sent the notice.

When we receive a complete counter-notice we forward it to the party who sent the original notice. If they do not tell us within ten to fourteen business days that they have filed an action seeking a court order, we may restore the material. Both a notice and a counter-notice are made under penalty of perjury, and a person who knowingly misrepresents that material is infringing, or was removed by mistake, can be liable for damages under section 512(f).

Rivul terminates, in appropriate circumstances, the accounts of users who repeatedly upload material they do not have the right to upload. We keep a record of the notices we act on and which account each concerned. An account that accumulates repeated, unrebutted notices is suspended and then closed. A notice that is withdrawn, successfully countered, or found to be mistaken does not count against an account.

Uploading an article to your Rivul library is not the same as sharing it. Your library is private to your account, and the text Rivul extracts is used to ground your own writing. Even so, your institutional subscription usually lets you keep a copy for your own scholarly use and does not let you upload the publisher's file to a service on someone else's behalf. Check the terms your library agreed to, prefer the open-access version of a paper when one exists, and do not upload files you obtained from a source that had no right to give them to you. The AI-Use Disclosure explains what happens to the text of the files you do upload.