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These terms are AI-assisted drafts undergoing review. Report concerns to sdhir26@gsb.columbia.edu.

MBA Memory — DMCA & Takedown Policy

Draft prepared with AI assistance. This is not legal advice and has not been reviewed by counsel. Consult an attorney before relying on it. Last revised: 2026-05-13.

MBA Memory ("we," "us") respects the intellectual-property rights of others and expects users of MBA Memory (the "Service") to do the same. We respond to notices of alleged copyright infringement consistent with the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA"), 17 U.S.C. § 512.

This policy explains:

  1. How to send us a DMCA takedown notice (Section 2).
  2. How to send a counter-notification (Section 3).
  3. Our repeat-infringer policy (Section 4).
  4. How removal actually works inside our systems (Section 5) — what we remove, in what order, and how fast.
  5. How we handle confidential or licensed teaching materials that aren't copyright claims in the strict sense (Section 6).

MBA Memory is not affiliated with Columbia University or Columbia Business School. See our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.

1. Designated Agent

We are in the process of registering a DMCA Designated Agent with the U.S. Copyright Office at https://www.copyright.gov/dmca-directory/ (current fee: $6 per designation/amendment/resubmission). Until that registration is live, please send notices to the interim contact below — we will respond operationally and in good faith. Note: until our Copyright Office designation is current and our agent information is published in the Directory, MBA Memory cannot rely on the DMCA § 512(c) safe harbor as a service provider. Operationally responding to interim notices in good faith is a courtesy practice while we complete registration; it is not a substitute for the formal designation.

Interim contact for DMCA notices: Sanat Dhir, MBA Memory · email: sdhir26@gsb.columbia.edu · mailing address: [address on file]

2. How to send a DMCA takedown notice

To be effective under 17 U.S.C. § 512(c)(3), your notice must be a written communication that includes substantially all of the following:

  1. A physical or electronic signature of a person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of the exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
  2. Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed (or, if multiple works at a single online site are covered by a single notification, a representative list of such works).
  3. Identification of the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity and that is to be removed or access to which is to be disabled, with information reasonably sufficient to permit us to locate the material (for example: course name, professor, file name, lecture session, a representative quoted passage, and/or the URL or query that surfaced it).
  4. Information reasonably sufficient to permit us to contact you, such as an address, telephone number, and email address.
  5. A statement that you have a good-faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
  6. A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that you are authorized to act on behalf of the owner of the exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

Send the notice to the contact in Section 1. Notices that do not substantially meet these requirements may not be effective. Knowingly making material misrepresentations in a DMCA notice can result in liability under 17 U.S.C. § 512(f).

3. Counter-notification

If you believe content you uploaded was removed by mistake or misidentification, you may send us a counter-notification under 17 U.S.C. § 512(g). Your counter-notice must include:

  1. Your physical or electronic signature.
  2. Identification of the material that has been removed or to which access has been disabled and the location at which the material appeared before it was removed or disabled.
  3. A statement under penalty of perjury that you have a good-faith belief that the material was removed or disabled as a result of mistake or misidentification of the material to be removed or disabled.
  4. Your name, address, and telephone number, and a statement that you consent to the jurisdiction of the federal district court for the judicial district in which you are located (or, if outside the United States, for any judicial district in which we may be found), and that you will accept service of process from the person who provided notification under Section 2 or an agent of that person.

We forward valid counter-notices to the original complainant. If the complainant does not file suit seeking a court order against you within 10 to 14 business days of our forwarding the counter-notice, we may, at our discretion, restore the material.

4. Repeat-infringer policy

It is our policy to terminate, in appropriate circumstances, the accounts of users we determine to be repeat infringers.

In practice this means:

  1. Two or more separate, substantiated DMCA notices against content uploaded under the same account, or against materials clearly attributable to the same user across accounts, will be treated as repeat-infringer activity.
  2. We will issue at least one warning after the first valid notice, explaining the policy and giving the user an opportunity to remove disputed content.
  3. Patently abusive uploads (e.g., bulk uploads of clearly publisher-licensed casebooks, knowing uploads of role-play counterparty sheets, attempts to reintroduce removed content) may result in immediate termination without a prior warning.
  4. We may apply this policy more strictly during the closed beta to keep the corpus clean.

Termination under this policy means the account is disabled, the user's personal-notes corpus is removed from the index, and we may decline to reinstate the user even on a different columbia.edu address.

5. How removal actually works — our operational process

Many DMCA-policy templates promise "we will expeditiously remove" infringing material without describing what "remove" means inside a retrieval-augmented system. Ours is meant to be operationally honest.

When we accept a notice (or otherwise decide to quarantine content under our Terms of Service, Section 5), we take the following actions, in this order, as quickly as practicable:

  1. Disable user-facing access first. Within a target of two (2) business days of confirming a valid notice, we mark the affected source(s) as quarantined: the retriever filters them out of every query, the citation surface no longer references them, and any cached responses that quoted them are invalidated. This is the user-visible removal.
  2. Purge derived artifacts. We remove vector embeddings, retrieval indexes, and any derived summaries or pre-computed answers tied to the affected source from the live database and any caches we operate.
  3. Remove raw source files. We delete the affected source files from our object-storage layer (s3://phoenix-bridge-ingest/mba-mind/ and any equivalent staging locations).
  4. Backups. Backups (RDS automated backups and S3 versioning) age out over the normal retention window; we do not routinely surgically purge backups, but they are not user-accessible and they cycle out.
  5. Logs and analytics. Operational logs that incidentally reference removed content age out under the retention windows in the Privacy Policy. We do not re-surface removed content from logs.
  6. No re-ingestion. We add the affected source(s) to a deny list so they are not re-ingested by future runs of our ingestion pipeline (scripts/ingest_mba.py).
  7. Notice to the uploader. Where the affected content was uploaded by an identified user, we notify that user, explain the basis, and (where the DMCA applies) inform them of the counter-notification process in Section 3.
  8. Record-keeping. We maintain an internal takedown register noting: date of notice, complainant, affected source(s), action taken, date of action, and outcome. The takedown register also tracks our repeat-infringer accounting (Section 4).

If you have requested removal and have not seen the affected content disappear within a reasonable time, email sdhir26@gsb.columbia.edu and reference the original notice. We will prioritize a response.

6. Confidential, licensed, or role-play teaching materials — non-DMCA takedowns

Some materials are not strictly DMCA-eligible but raise the same removal need — for example:

  • Publisher-licensed cases and articles (Harvard Business Publishing / HBR; casebook chapters; licensed datasets). The publisher (or their authorized agent) may not be the copyright holder of every component, but they hold an enforceable license and we will treat substantiated publisher takedown requests like DMCA notices and follow the Section 5 process.
  • Role-play counterparty materials and confidential teaching cases. These are often distributed with explicit instructions to keep certain information confidential between roles. Even where the copyright analysis is messier, our policy is to quarantine on credible request from the professor, course administrator, or publisher — surfacing "the seller's reservation price" inside a retrieval tool defeats the exercise and can breach the license. See MM-054 Corpus Provenance, "Tier B."
  • Professor request. A professor whose own materials are indexed can request removal for any reason. We will honor it.
  • Personal data. Removal requests for personal data follow Section 11 of the Privacy Policy.

For these non-DMCA requests, write to sdhir26@gsb.columbia.edu with enough detail to identify the material (course, session, file name or representative excerpt). You do not need to assert the DMCA's six elements, though anything you can give us speeds the review.

7. False or abusive notices

We will refuse to act on, and may publicly note, notices that we determine to be:

  • Materially false or misleading;
  • Submitted in bad faith;
  • Used to harass another user, professor, or third party;
  • Aimed at content where the alleged infringer has a clearly valid license, fair use, or other defense.

Senders of materially misleading DMCA notices may face liability under 17 U.S.C. § 512(f).

8. Modifications

We may update this policy. Material changes will be reflected in the "Last revised" date below and, where appropriate, announced on mbamemory.com or in-product.

Last revised: 2026-05-13.

Last revised: 2026-05-13