A Licensed Catalogue Is Not User Content. The IP Takedown Lands on You, Not the Licensor.

A licensed game catalogue is published content, not user uploads. DMCA safe harbour never applies, and an IP takedown on a clone title lands on your portal. Here is why the licensor's indemnity usually does not save you, and what to screen for before launch.

The email is short and it is not from a lawyer you have heard of. It names four games on your portal, gives their URLs, and says they use characters belonging to a studio you have definitely heard of. It gives you seven days. You forward it to your licensor and go back to work, because the games came from them and this is obviously their problem.

It is not their problem yet. It is yours, immediately, and depending on what you signed it may stay yours.

This is the least discussed hazard in bulk game licensing. Everyone doing due diligence on a catalogue checks file sizes, mobile performance, ad SDK versions, territory scope. Almost nobody sits down and asks which of these 1,200 titles is wearing somebody else's characters. The answer is rarely zero, and the exposure does not sit where operators assume it sits.

🚩 The Offending Titles Are Not Hard to Find

Bulk HTML5 and Android catalogues accrete over years, and the cheap end of the market has always run on genre borrowing that shades into character borrowing. You know the shapes:

• Named-franchise clones. A runner with a plumber in a red cap. A horror point-and-click with animatronics. A survival deathmatch with a chicken dinner.
• Trend-chasers. Every viral show and squid-based competition format spawns a wave of unlicensed browser games within a fortnight. They stay in catalogues long after the trend dies.
• Ripped assets. Sprite sheets, UI kits and music lifted from a commercial title, sometimes with the original file names still in the bundle.
• Trademark in the metadata. The game itself is generic, but the title, the thumbnail text or the search keywords name a brand to catch traffic. This is often the worst offender and the easiest to miss, because the gameplay is clean.

The last category matters more than it looks. A generic match-3 called Frozen Princess Puzzle is a trademark problem regardless of how original the code is, and it is sitting in your catalogue metadata where a brand's monitoring vendor will find it in a keyword sweep.

⚖️ Safe Harbour Is for Hosts. You Are a Publisher.

Here is the assumption that gets portal operators in trouble: we're a platform, we take stuff down when notified, we're covered.

The US safe harbour that people are thinking of is section 512(c) of the Copyright Act, and it protects a service provider against liability for infringing material stored at the direction of a user. That phrase is the whole ball game. A user-generated content site qualifies because its users choose what goes up. A licensed catalogue does not work that way. You chose the titles. You approved them, ordered them, curated the front page, and pushed them live. Nobody directed that storage but you.

Courts have already narrowed this in the direction that hurts. In Mavrix Photographs v. LiveJournal (Ninth Circuit, 2017), the court held that a site using moderators to screen and approve user submissions before posting raised genuine questions about whether the material was really stored at the direction of users at all — the analysis turned on whether moderator activity went beyond "automatic and limited manual activities". LiveJournal at least had users uploading. If curation by volunteer moderators is enough to put safe harbour in doubt, a portal that licensed and published every single title is not in the conversation.

The European position lines up. Article 6(1) of the EU Digital Services Act (2022) exempts hosting providers from liability for information provided by a recipient of the service, subject to the usual knowledge-and-expeditious-removal conditions. Content you licensed and published yourself is not provided by a recipient of your service. Article 6(3) reinforces the logic from the other end, removing the exemption where a platform presents information in a way that makes an average consumer believe it comes from the platform itself — which is precisely what your branded portal skin does to every game in it.

So the correct mental model is not YouTube. It is a magazine. A magazine that prints an infringing illustration does not get to point at the freelancer and call itself a neutral conduit.

™️ Copyright Has a Takedown Process. Trademark Has None.

Most of the clone problem in casual games is a trademark problem, not a copyright one. The code is original. The art is original-ish. What is borrowed is the name, the character silhouette, the recognisable getup — the things that make a player click.

And the DMCA is a copyright statute. Its notice-and-takedown machinery, its counter-notice procedure and its repeat-infringer framework simply do not extend to trademark claims. Analysis of platform practice published in the NYU Journal of Intellectual Property & Entertainment Law found that although many platforms voluntarily copied the DMCA's notice requirements into their trademark processes, the protective half — counter-notices and defined repeat-infringer policies — was publicly available for fewer than half of them.

Practically, that means three things:

1. There is no statutory clock that buys you time. A trademark owner can go from letter to filing whenever they like.
2. There is no statutory shield you earn by removing the game fast. Removal is good practice and mitigates damages; it is not a safe harbour.
3. Your registered DMCA agent, which you should still have, does nothing for you here.

🎯 Nintendo's Game Jolt Notice Named the Ad Banners

The clearest illustration of how rights holders think about hosts is a few years old now and still the right reference point. In December 2020, Nintendo of America sent takedown notices to Game Jolt that resulted in 379 fan-made games being pulled, as reported by Nintendo Life in January 2021.

The interesting part was not the games. It was the notice's framing. Per that reporting, Nintendo's notice stated that "the web site at gamejolt.com generates revenue from advertising banners displayed on the site and advertisements played while users wait for the games to load." Nintendo asked for the pages to be disabled and did not seek money.

Read that as a rights holder telling you exactly what triggers escalation: the host monetising the traffic. Some developers reposted their games afterwards with ads switched off on those pages. Every commercial games portal is, by construction, in the category that notice was aimed at — the whole business model is monetised traffic. You are not an incidental host. You are the one selling the impressions.

🚪 Your Distribution Partners Enforce This Before Any Lawyer Does

Even if nobody ever sends you a letter, the platforms you depend on will act on your behalf, against you.

Poki's published quality guidelines are blunt about it: "We do not work with, or feature direct copies or clones of original titles", and the bar is not just one-to-one copying — "even if a game isn't a direct copy, we may still not be able to work with your game if its visual style, themes, game modes, and overall concept resembles well-known existing IPs." They also warn that a game walking the parody line may be taken down "upon legal request", and that games misusing IP are rejected immediately.

On Android the gate is policy enforcement with strikes attached. Google Play's Impersonation policy states plainly: "We don't allow apps that mislead users by impersonating someone else (for example, another developer, company, entity) or another app." It covers developers who falsely imply a relationship to another company or organisation, and app icons and titles so similar to existing products that users may be misled. Enforcement is suspension and a policy strike against the account — not against the individual title.

That account-level consequence is what makes this an operational risk rather than a legal footnote. One infringing reskin, out of a catalogue you bought in bulk and shipped as APKs, can put the developer account carrying your entire Android business at risk. The economics of a source-code or reskin deal look very different once you price that in. If you are buying at that layer, the diligence belongs in the same conversation as the source code terms, not after signature.

📝 The Indemnity You Have Is Probably Capped Below the Risk

Every catalogue licence contains a non-infringement warranty and an indemnity. Most operators read the headline, see that the licensor indemnifies them, and stop. The value of that clause lives entirely in the details underneath.

Standard commercial practice, as set out in IP licensing guidance from firms including Venable, is that liability caps are customarily tied to fees paid, and that IP indemnities should be carved out of the general cap or set high enough to cover realistic exposure — because an indemnity capped at fees paid under a low-value contract is inadequate against enterprise-wide IP risk. Apply that to catalogue licensing and the arithmetic is uncomfortable. You paid a four- or five-figure annual fee for a thousand games. A cap at fees paid means a major rights holder's claim is indemnified up to roughly the price of a used car.

The clauses actually worth negotiating on a catalogue deal:

• Carve the IP indemnity out of the general liability cap, or set a separate, higher cap for it. This is the single highest-value change and it is standard enough that asking is not aggressive.
• Duty to defend, not just reimburse. Reimbursement means you hire counsel, run the matter, and argue about invoices later. Defence means they take it.
• A takedown SLA with a replacement obligation. Pulling a title on notice should be measured in hours, and if you licensed 1,000 games you should end up with 1,000 games.
• Warranty covering metadata and marketing assets, not just the game build. The trademark exposure is frequently in the title and thumbnail.
• Chain-of-title representations that survive sub-licensing. Ask whether the licensor developed the title, commissioned it, or sub-licensed it in, and how far back their own warranties run.
• Governing law and forum you can realistically use. An uncapped indemnity from an entity in a jurisdiction where you will never litigate is a comfort blanket, not a remedy.

None of this is exotic. It is the same diligence any buyer applies to enterprise software, applied to a purchase most people treat as a content order. If you are comparing offers, read the risk allocation in the licence terms as carefully as the price per title.

🔍 A Screen You Can Actually Run in a Day

You do not need a law firm to do the first pass. You need someone with an afternoon and a spreadsheet.

Before you sign

• Ask for the full title list with thumbnails as a precondition of the deal, not after. A licensor unwilling to share it before signature is telling you something.
• Run the title list against a keyword set: major franchise names, character names, studio names, film and show titles, sports leagues, car marques, football clubs. Sort the hits. This catches the metadata category almost completely.
• Eyeball every thumbnail at a glance. Recognisable silhouettes and colour schemes jump out faster than any text search.
• Ask directly, in writing, whether any title in the catalogue is a licensed use of third-party IP, and if so, ask to see the underlying grant. Get the answer in email. It is evidence later.

Before you launch

• Quarantine anything flagged rather than shipping it and waiting. A title you never published costs you nothing.
• Check the assets inside the flagged builds — file names inside a web bundle are frequently more honest than the game itself.
• Publish a takedown contact and register a DMCA agent. It does not create safe harbour for you, but it routes complaints to a person instead of to your CEO's LinkedIn.
• Set the internal rule before you need it: on receipt of a credible notice, the title goes dark first and gets discussed second. Then notify your licensor in writing the same day, because most indemnities have prompt-notice conditions that you can breach by sitting on the email.

Ongoing

• Re-run the keyword screen on every catalogue update. New titles arrive with the same habits.
• Watch for trend-chasers after any large entertainment launch. That is when unlicensed material enters catalogues fastest.

🌲 Licensed Characters Are the Opposite of This

It is worth separating the two things, because "games with famous characters in them" describes both the risk above and an entirely legitimate business. Forestry Games has operated since 2017 and works with branded IP, with brand partnerships including Disney, Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network and Warner Bros. That work runs through the rights holder's approval pipeline — the licence is granted, the scope is written down, and the build is reviewed before it ships.

That is the distinction to hold onto. A properly licensed character game arrives with a paper trail you can hand to a compliance team. A clone arrives with a file name. Both look similar in a catalogue listing, which is exactly why the listing is not enough to buy from. If you are evaluating a catalogue for a portal launch, the provenance question belongs on the same page as genre mix and file size.

✅ What to Do This Week

If you already run a portal on licensed content, pull your title list and run the keyword screen today. It takes an afternoon and it will find something. Then go back to your licence agreement and find two numbers: the liability cap, and whether the IP indemnity sits inside it. If it does, you are carrying risk you almost certainly did not price.

If you are still choosing a catalogue, make the title list and the indemnity structure part of the evaluation rather than the paperwork. Vendors who have cleaned their catalogue will answer both questions in a day. Vendors who have not will discover, in the course of answering, exactly why you asked.

The reason to do this now rather than after the first letter is that every option available to you gets worse under a deadline. A game quarantined before launch is a line in a spreadsheet. The same game, live and monetised for eight months, is a damages calculation.