Chad.. Just Throwing This Out There But...

Hypothetically speaking, lets say that a sponsor who used exclusive content went out of business, closed down their paysites, paid all affiliates what they were owed and told their affiliates to remove all the content they have for the sites that were closed down.

Fast forward 12+ months....

Now the people who closed those sites down are missing the money and decide they want to open another program but... they also want to use other sites and get new content shot.

hypothetically, since they notified affiliates to take their content down when they closed, would that sponsor then be able to go after all the sites that still had their content up for copyright breach?

My train of thought on this is yes they would, because even though they allowed affiliates to use it to promote the sites whilst opened, when they closed and told affiliates to remove all their content, that is in effect revoking the license on that content isnt it?

Just been talking to Brandon about this and figured it was an interesting hypothetical to pose for you hehe

Regards,

Lee

I'm not Chad, but it seems pretty open and shut to me.

Most affiliate agreements I've seen say that any content provided by the program to the affiliate is licensed conditionally, and the license can be terminated at any time or for any reason.

If that language is there, then presumably the program would, upon shutting down their program, terminate all licenses to use content they supplied.

Unless for some reason the program produced custom content for the affiliate, for which the affiliate gave the program some form of consideration in exchange for copyright or a nonrevocable license, the copyright would belong to the program, so there's no issue there either.

After that, it's a simple DMCA request to get the content removed.