Copyright and image claims

What appears on this site, what we recorded before publishing each part of it, and how to get something taken down.

The images we use

MONOGRAPH publishes no third-party photograph. Every visual on a specimen or maker page is a YouTube video embedded from the channel that published it — played from YouTube, never re-uploaded, never re-cut, and captioned with the channel's name and the date. A page with no video shows no picture at all rather than a borrowed stand-in. Earlier versions of this site illustrated pages with photographs from Wikimedia Commons under their free licences; that practice ended on 22 September 2026 and no Commons file is served any more.

The one exception is a photograph supplied by the operator of the site — a picture they took or otherwise own. Those are held in the site's own asset folder and credited on the page as supplied by the site owner.

We do not use press photographs, manufacturer marketing or product-render images, promotional stills, scans of catalogues, or anything relied on as "fair use". A file whose licence we cannot establish is not published, however useful it would be.

What we record before publishing

Before an embedded video goes on a page, the record holds:

• the video's own identifier, so the exact video can be checked years later;
• the channel that published it, and the date the video carries;
• the date the embedding was first confirmed live, and a re-check that the video still serves an embed;
• a one-line note on what the clip shows, so a reader knows why it is on that page.

For an image the operator supplies, the record is simply the page it belongs to and the fact that it is the operator's own — there is no third-party licence to satisfy.

This is a chain we can produce on request, and it is why we can tell you exactly what we relied on when we published a particular video or picture.

What that record is, and is not

Embedding is a link, not a copy: the video stays on YouTube, under the uploader's control, and removing it there removes it here. We are relying on the uploader having had the right to publish it — the same basis every embedder relies on — and that can be wrong, and re-uploads of someone else's footage do exist. If that has happened here, we want to hear about it and we will fix it.

Separately: a public video being embeddable is not consent to be associated with this site. Videos may show a recognisable musician, and branded instruments or equipment. If you are the person in a video, or you own a mark that appears in one, the route below is open to you on the same terms — you do not need a copyright claim to ask us to remove something.

Making a claim

Write to rights@myguitarnotes.com.

We do not require a formal legal notice, a statutory form, or a signed declaration. A clear email is enough. To let us act quickly, tell us:

• Which image — the URL of the page it appears on, or the image URL itself.
• What you own — that you hold the copyright, or that you are the person depicted, or that you own the mark.
• Why the current licence is wrong, if you know — for example that the uploader was not the photographer.
• Anything that supports it — a link to the original, or to an earlier publication of the same photograph. Helpful, not required.
• How you would like us to respond.

If it is easier, send less than that. An email saying "this is my photograph and I never licensed it" is enough for us to act.

What we do next

• We take the image down first and ask questions afterwards. Removal is enforced at build time, so once an image is suppressed it cannot be re-published by a later rebuild — it is not dependent on anyone remembering.
• We aim to respond within 7 days. Where a claim is clear we act sooner.
• We keep the record. The claim, the licence we had relied on, the source file page, the uploader account and what we did are all retained, so the decision can be reviewed later.
• We will tell you what we did. If we remove the image we will say so; if we believe the licence is sound we will explain why, with the evidence, rather than simply refusing.
• Removal is reversible. If a claim is withdrawn or turns out to be mistaken, the image can be restored, and the register records both the removal and the restoration.

Corrections to text

Factual corrections to the written pages follow the same route: write to corrections@myguitarnotes.com. The correction policy is set out on the disclaimer page.