Copyright & Takedown

Last updated: August 2026

Our position

ChordFocus is a chord chart teleprompter. We do not supply songs. There is no catalogue, no search index, and no library of charts to browse. Every chart in the app was typed, pasted or imported by the user whose device it is on.

We do not hold licences to any musical work, lyric or composition, and we do not purport to grant any. Users are told, in the app and in our Terms of Service, that they are responsible for holding the rights to anything they import or share.

We take copyright seriously and we act on valid notices promptly. If you are a rights holder and something on our servers concerns you, please tell us and we will deal with it.

Designated agent for copyright notices

We have designated an agent to receive notifications of claimed infringement under 17 U.S.C. §512(c)(2). Notices may be sent to:

Email is the fastest route and is monitored. Please put "Copyright Notice" in the subject line.

Sending a takedown notice

To be effective, a notice should be in writing and include all of the following:

1. A physical or electronic signature of the copyright owner, or a person authorised to act on their behalf.
2. Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed — or, if multiple works are covered by a single notice, a representative list of those works.
3. Identification of the material claimed to be infringing, with enough detail for us to locate it. For ChordFocus this means the share code (the 6-character code in a link such as chordfocus.com/app.html?s=ABC123) or the full share URL. Without a share code or URL we generally cannot identify the material, because we do not index user content.
4. Contact details for you: address, telephone number and email address.
5. A statement that you have a good faith belief that the use complained of is not authorised by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
6. A statement that the information in the notice is accurate, and — under penalty of perjury — that you are the copyright owner or authorised to act on the owner's behalf.

What happens next

1. We acknowledge your notice, normally within 2 business days.
2. We expeditiously remove or disable access to the identified material. Share links can be revoked immediately.
3. We record a strike against the licence responsible under our repeat infringer policy.
4. We notify the user, where we are able to, and tell them what was removed and why.
5. We keep a record of the notice and the action taken.

Because user libraries are stored per-user and are not indexed or searchable by us, we may need the share code to act. If you believe infringing material exists but cannot supply a share code, contact us anyway and we will do what we reasonably can.

Repeat infringers

We have adopted and reasonably implement a repeat infringer policy, set out in full in section 6 of our Terms of Service. In summary: a second strike disables sharing on that licence, and a third terminates the account and licence without refund. We may act sooner where infringement is flagrant.

Counter-notice

If your material was removed and you believe that was a mistake or misidentification, you may send a counter-notice to the agent above. It must include:

1. Your physical or electronic signature.
2. Identification of the material removed and the location it appeared before removal.
3. A statement under penalty of perjury that you have a good faith belief the material was removed as a result of mistake or misidentification.
4. Your name, address and telephone number.
5. A statement that you consent to the jurisdiction of the Federal District Court for the judicial district in which your address is located, or — if your address is outside the United States — of any judicial district in which we may be found, and that you will accept service of process from the person who submitted the notice or their agent.

If we receive a valid counter-notice we may restore the material after 10 business days unless the original complainant notifies us that they have filed an action seeking a court order.

A note for rights holders about how the app works

It may help to know the following when assessing what is and is not on our servers:

• Most content never reaches us. Song libraries are stored in the browser's local storage on the user's own device.
• Cloud sync is a personal backup. Where a paying user enables it, their own library is stored so they can restore it on their own devices. It is retrievable only with their own licence code. We do not deduplicate content across users — there is no single shared copy of any work.
• Sharing is band-scoped and time-limited. Share links require a paid licence, are recorded against that licence, expire automatically, and can only be redeemed a small number of times. They are not published, listed or discoverable anywhere.
• We never fetch content from third-party sites. Our servers do not crawl, scrape, proxy or retrieve material from Ultimate Guitar or any other chord or lyric site. Users paste their own material.

Licensing enquiries

If you are a publisher or rights administrator and would like to discuss licensing rather than removal, we would genuinely welcome that conversation. Please get in touch.

Other jurisdictions

ChordFocus is operated from Australia. We will consider and act on well-founded copyright complaints under Australian law and the law of the complainant's jurisdiction, whether or not they meet the formal requirements of 17 U.S.C. §512. Please use the same contact details above.