DMCA & takedown requests

watermellon hosts open-source games made by other people. Each one was copied from its public repository with its licence file left in place, and every game is credited by name, author, source repo and licence on the credits page. The one exception is PolyTrack, which is not open source but whose developer explicitly permits reuploads for unblocking on restricted networks — the conditions attached to that permission are documented and met. Beyond that we don't host commercial or proprietary games, and we don't rip games from other sites.

The fast way

Open an issue on the repository. It's public, it's tracked, and it's the quickest route to getting a file deleted.

open a takedown issue on GitHub

The formal way

To file a notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. § 512(c)), send a written notice to the site operator at the contact address below. To be effective, your notice needs to include all of the following:

1. A physical or electronic signature of the copyright owner, or someone authorised to act for them.
2. Identification of the copyrighted work you say has been infringed.
3. Identification of the material to be removed, with enough detail for us to find it — the game's page URL on this site (play.html?g=…) or its folder under /games/ is ideal.
4. Your contact details: name, address, telephone number and email address.
5. A statement that you have a good-faith belief that the use 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 their behalf.

What happens next

Valid notices are actioned on sight: the game folder is deleted from the repository, its entry is removed from the catalogue, and the change is pushed. Because this is a static site served straight from a git repo, removal is a single commit — expect it the same day, not in thirty.

Counter-notice

If your work was removed and you believe that was a mistake — for example, the material was licensed for reuse all along — you can send a counter-notice with your signature, identification of the removed material and where it was, your contact details, and a statement under penalty of perjury that the removal was the result of a mistake or misidentification.

A note on what we will and won't host

Everything in /games/ is either open source under a licence that permits redistribution — MIT, BSD, Apache-2.0, GPL, CC and similar — or, as with PolyTrack, carried under a written permission from the rights holder whose conditions we follow. We will not add commercial games, paid games, or files ripped out of someone's proprietary release, however easy they'd be to find. If you spot something in the catalogue that you believe doesn't meet that bar, tell us and we'll check it.