Fiverr Community Forum

Warning for copyright infringement

Your Fiverr Experience
#1

Hello,

A few days ago, I was surprised to receive a warning from Fiverr stating: “you may not offer or accept services that infringe upon a third party’s intellectual property rights and/or their terms of service” and that my account would be suspended if I did it again.

Has anyone ever received this too and knows what it’s exactly about? I only offer translations and voice overs, with no music or sounds, I only send the buyers a .wav file with my voice only, no video, nothing else than my voice. Therefore I was really surprised and contacted the CS thinking there was a mistake and they would check my profile and remove the warning, but instead they said “I’ve reviewed your account and It appears that you have accepted to provide a service in one of your orders that is not in line with our Guidelines and had nothing to do with the order in question.Kindly review your recent orders to find the one in question.” and closed the ticket leaving me with no option but to accept their decision.

Did anyone have a similar experience? The only things I can think of are:
a) Someone reported me for something I didn’t do and Fiverr automatically warned me without checking
b) I sometimes DM screenshots of websites or from online dictionaries to clients when they need more explanations about a translation, maybe this is forbidden?
c) When delivering a translation to a buyer, I enclosed the .doc translated document and a .wav audio file because he needed a voice over sample as he was thinking about hiring me to do a voice over for him, so maybe Fiverr thought the file I sent wasn’t from me as I was only supposed to deliver a translation?

The problem is if I don’t know what I did wrong, I’m afraid to do it again not knowing it’s forbidden and get banned from Fiverr but the CS just closed my ticket so I can’t get any explanation from them.

Thank you for your help :slight_smile:

2 Likes
#2

Maybe your translation was of a copyrighted text that was not to be translated without the author’s permission? :thinking:

4 Likes
#3

Fiverr is very smart to catch any type of copy wrting and specifically the gigs copy writing. be care full on it

1 Like
#4

And yet BR is full of people wanting clones of released songs made to avoid copyright. They are very open about it.

It wouldn’t be hard to find these with a few more keywords like the one that triggers for a president with an orange face and weed them out before freelancers get pinged for taking one of these objectionable jobs that appear safe to do seeing they proliferate.

I hope you get your situation sorted. Not naming the offense is very dubious under law. You can’t get taken to court for murder unless they name the person you apparently offed, when, where, and how. It may be worth politely reminding CS that you cannot “not do” unnamed things and a judgment against you must be named directly or it is invalid.

:slight_smile:

3 Likes
#5

Thank you, I’ll open a new ticket using this argument. I hope they’ll give me a real explanation this time…

#6

I hope not, if that’s the reason it will be a hassle if I have to check if every text I receive belongs to the buyer himself.

#7

That would be my guess, too. Maybe a buyer asked for something they didn’t own to be translated.

1 Like
#8

even if that’s the case… how’s the buyer supposed to know that the text is copyrighted … ? assuming that OP is telling the whole story of course…

#9

I’m not saying sellers should know what the buyer didn’t disclose. I’m just saying maybe that’s why this warning happened.

It wouldn’t be the first time Fiverr enforced something irrational and this seller can make the case that she didn’t know the buyer didn’t have the rights (assuming she didn’t).

#10

Where it says

and It appears that you have accepted to provide a service in one of your orders that is not in line with our Guidelines and had nothing to do with the order in question

It sounds most to me like c) where you delivered a .wav file in a (I think) a writing and translation. If you need to deliver a sample in future I’d deliver it through the inbox and not through a delivery (especially of a writing gig).

But the above isn’t infringing on a 3rd party’s property. Maybe CS checked the recent deliveries but didn’t have access to text or anything describing the full/actual reason. It could be translation of a text that already exists on the web (but that’s not necessarily infringing) or maybe the delivery of the .wav in the writing category might have automatically set off a flag. Or maybe it was a screenshot that you attached in a post that they matched to something online (though that’s probably fair use, and I assume it’s not attached in the delivery so it may not be it).

1 Like