DMCA & Copyright Compliance Policy

OPA News is the multilingual international news agency operated by Optimum Public Affairs, an independent media and technology enterprise headquartered in the Greater Toronto Area (Richmond Hill), Ontario, Canada.

Editorial dispatches, wire analyses, and multimedia assets published under the OPA News banner are governed by the federal laws of Canada, the provincial laws of Ontario, and relevant multilateral copyright conventions, including the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works and the WIPO Copyright Treaty.

For readers, rights holders, and syndication partners residing in the United States, OPA News voluntarily adheres to the statutory Safe Harbor framework established under Title II of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. § 512).

If you are a copyright owner, photographer, news agency, or authorized representative and reasonably believe that any content, photograph, or multimedia work hosted on OPA News infringes your intellectual property, you may transmit a formal written Notification of Claimed Infringement to our Designated Copyright Agent.

To be legally effective under 17 U.S.C. § 512(c)(3)(A), notifications must be submitted in writing and contain all six statutory elements itemized in the checklist above.

Upon receipt of a valid and substantially compliant notice, OPA News follows strict expeditious takedown procedures: our engineering desk disables public access to the designated content and executes a permanent physical purge of the binary file from our Hetzner WebDAV storage cluster.

If content you submitted, published, or contributed was removed or disabled as a result of a mistake, erroneous identification, or misapplication of fair use/fair dealing doctrines, you may file a formal Counter-Notification pursuant to 17 U.S.C. § 512(g)(2)–(3).

A valid Counter-Notification must be delivered in writing to our Designated Agent and must include: (a) your physical or electronic signature; (b) identification of the material that was removed and the URL where it previously appeared; (c) a statement under penalty of perjury that you have a good faith belief the material was removed or disabled as a result of mistake or misidentification; and (d) your name, address, telephone number, and consent to the jurisdiction of the federal court in your district (or Ontario, Canada for international contributors).

Upon receipt of a valid Counter-Notification, OPA News will promptly forward a copy to the original complaining party. Unless the copyright owner notifies us within 10 to 14 business days that a court action seeking a restraining order has been filed, access to the material will be restored.

OPA News maintains a strict, zero-tolerance policy regarding willful intellectual property infringement. Pursuant to 17 U.S.C. § 512(i)(1)(A), OPA News has adopted and reasonably implements a policy providing for the prompt termination of access, CMS accounts, contributing reporter contracts, and automated wire syndication feeds that repeatedly infringe third-party copyrights.

Any external automated RSS source or contributing correspondent that accumulates two or more substantiated, un-contested infringement notices will be permanently severed from our content ingestion pipeline.

In full compliance with sections 41.25 and 41.26 of the Canadian Copyright Act, Optimum Public Affairs adheres to Canada's statutory Notice-and-Notice regime.

When OPA News receives a notice of claimed infringement from a rights holder in the prescribed form, we immediately: (a) forward the notice electronically to the person to whom the IP address, account, or feed belongs (where technologically identifiable); and (b) maintain formal electronic records of the notice, date, claimant identity, and related digital footprints for the statutory minimum period of six (6) months (or twelve months if legal proceedings are instituted).

OPA News respects the moral and economic rights of photographers, photojournalists, and wire agencies. In strict adherence to 17 U.S.C. § 1202, our automated media ingestion pipeline actively preserves embedded Copyright Management Information (CMI), including IPTC metadata, EXIF headers, photographer credits, and agency licensing tags.

Our editorial desks enforce explicit photographic attributions across all editions. We prohibit the unauthorized deletion, alteration, or concealment of CMI on editorial wire photographs.