Legal

Copyright & DMCA

Last updated: July 30, 2026.

Churches List is a directory of factual information about churches in the United States. Most of what appears on a church page is not copyrightable — an address, a phone number, a service time, a denominational affiliation. Some of it is: photographs, archival images, and quoted text. If we have published something you own, this page tells you exactly how to get it removed.

1. What this site publishes

A church entry is assembled from several kinds of material, and the right remedy depends on which kind you are writing about:

• Factual listing data — name, address, coordinates, phone, website, service times, denomination. Facts are not protected by copyright. If a fact is wrong, that is a correction, not a takedown: use Corrections.
• Public-domain and openly licensed images — archival photographs and measured drawings from the Historic American Buildings Survey and other Library of Congress collections, newspaper clippings from Chronicling America, and photographs from Wikimedia Commons under their original licenses.
• Quoted third-party text — short encyclopedia extracts, each shown with a link back to its source.
• Material submitted to us — photographs and details sent by churches claiming or correcting their own listing.
• Our own editorial writing — original text, curation, and layout, © Churches List.

If you believe an openly licensed image is misattributed, or that a license was misapplied, tell us — that is usually faster to fix than a formal notice, and we would rather correct the credit than remove the picture.

2. Reporting material you own

Send a written notice to legal@churcheslist.com. Under 17 U.S.C. § 512(c)(3), a notice must include substantially all of the following, or we may not be able to act on it:

1. A physical or electronic signature of the copyright owner, or of a person authorized to act on their behalf.
2. Identification of the copyrighted work you claim has been infringed. If several works on one page are covered, a representative list is sufficient.
3. Identification of the material you want removed, with the full URL of each page it appears on, specific enough for us to locate it.
4. Your contact information — address, telephone number, and email address.
5. A statement that you have a good-faith belief that the use is not authorized 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 are authorized to act on their behalf.

Please put "DMCA notice" in the subject line. A notice missing the URLs is the single most common reason we cannot act quickly.

3. Where to send a notice

By email to legal@churcheslist.com. We are a small editorial team and handle copyright correspondence by email; we do not publish a street address for general correspondence.

4. What we do when a notice arrives

We acknowledge receipt, usually within two business days. If the notice is complete and the claim is well founded, we remove or disable access to the material and record what was removed and why. Where the material was supplied by a church claiming its listing, we tell that submitter what was removed and pass on your notice, including your contact details — this is required so they can file a counter-notice.

Removing an image does not delete the church entry. The factual listing stays; the picture goes.

5. Counter-notice

If your material was removed and you believe that was a mistake or a misidentification, you may send a counter-notice to legal@churcheslist.com. Under 17 U.S.C. § 512(g)(3) it must include:

1. Your physical or electronic signature.
2. Identification of the material that was removed, and the location where it appeared before removal.
3. A statement under penalty of perjury that you have a good-faith belief the material was removed as a result of mistake or misidentification.
4. Your name, address, and telephone number, and a statement that you consent to the jurisdiction of the federal district court for the district in which you live — or, if you are outside the United States, of any district in which we may be found — and that you will accept service of process from the person who filed the notice.

We will forward a valid counter-notice to the original complainant. If they do not tell us within ten business days that they have filed a court action seeking to restrain the conduct, we may restore the material.

6. Misrepresentation

Under 17 U.S.C. § 512(f), a person who knowingly and materially misrepresents that material is infringing — or that it was removed by mistake — may be liable for damages, including costs and legal fees. We read notices carefully and we do not remove material simply because someone dislikes the entry.

7. Repeat infringers

We terminate the claim and submission privileges of accounts that repeatedly submit material they do not have the right to publish.

8. Trademarks

Church names, denominational names, and logos referred to on this site belong to their respective owners. We name them to identify the church a page is about. That is nominative use, not a claim of affiliation or endorsement — see Terms of Use, section 1.

9. Changes

We update this page when the process changes. The "Last updated" date above is definitive.