DMCA & Copyright Policy
How we treat copyright, ours and yours
PLAY AT HOME FEST respects copyright, and we expect the same in return. The articles, photographs, graphics, and layout on this site are owned by us or used with permission. We also use other people’s material carefully, under licence or under the limited allowances the law makes for quotation, reporting, and comment. This page explains how to tell us if you think we have got that wrong, and how to tell us if someone has copied us.
We follow the notice-and-takedown approach set out in the United States Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and we apply the same fair process to complaints from anywhere, whatever the local name for the law. A valid complaint gets acted on. A vague or bad-faith one does not, and we say so.
If you believe we have infringed your work
If material on this site copies something you own, and you do not believe it is licensed or permitted, send a notice to support@playathomefest.com with DMCA at the front of the subject line. To let us act quickly, please include everything below, because a notice missing these parts cannot be acted on properly.
- Identification of the work you say has been infringed, with a link or a copy so we can see the original.
- The exact location on our site of the material you are complaining about, as a direct link, not just our home page.
- Your name and contact details, so we can reach you.
- A statement that you believe in good faith the use is not authorised by you, the owner, or the law.
- A statement that the information in your notice is accurate, and that you are the owner or are authorised to act for the owner.
- Your physical or electronic signature.
When we receive a complete notice, we review it promptly. Where the claim is well founded, we remove or disable the material and tell the person who posted it. Where a story is at stake, removing an image is not the same as removing the reporting, and the reporting stays unless the reporting itself infringes.
Counter-notice, if we removed your material wrongly
If your material was removed and you believe that was a mistake, or that the use was licensed or legally permitted, you may send a counter-notice to the same address. Include the material and its former location, your contact details, a statement under penalty of perjury that you believe it was removed in error, and your consent to the jurisdiction of the appropriate court along with your signature. If we receive a valid counter-notice and the complainant does not go to court within the period the law allows, we may restore the material.
Repeat infringers, and abuse of the process
We keep a record of complaints. Anyone who repeatedly posts infringing material in our comment or submission areas will lose the ability to do so. The takedown process also gets abused, most often as a way to remove accurate but unwelcome journalism. We watch for that. A copyright notice aimed at silencing reporting rather than protecting a work is not a copyright matter, and we treat it as what it is. If your real complaint is that a story is wrong about you, that is a correction, and our corrections policy is the right route.
If you want to use our work
You are welcome to quote a reasonable extract of our journalism with clear credit and a link back to the original. That is normal practice and we encourage it. What you may not do is republish whole articles, mirror our archive, sell our content, or feed it into a system that reproduces it as a substitute for coming here. Using our reporting to train a model without our agreement falls in the same place, and our terms of service say so.
If you want to license an article, syndicate a piece, or reuse a photograph, write to support@playathomefest.com and tell us what you want and where it will run. We would rather say yes to a clear request than find our work copied and have to send a notice of our own. Requests to reuse material we licensed from a third party may need that third party’s permission, and we will tell you when that is the case.
Last updated: August 2026
