Legal Center

Intellectual Property Notice

This notice sets out what Atlas & Crown claims rights in, what you may do with our material, and what we do not claim.

Effective
Last updated
Version
1.0

These documents have been prepared for the Atlas & Crown platform but have not yet been reviewed by qualified legal counsel. They are published for transparency, and several provisions — governing law, dispute resolution, liability caps, and statutory privacy rights — are expressly left unstated rather than asserted before that review. We would rather tell you that than imply a certainty we do not have.

1. What belongs to Atlas & Crown

The following are ours or are licensed to us, and are protected by copyright, trademark, database, and related rights:

  • The Atlas & Crown name, logos, crown device, and visual identity.
  • Our authentication methodology, inspection standards, and written procedures.
  • Authentication reports and certificates, including their layout and identifiers.
  • Our original research: reference catalog entries, production and serial-scheme research, movement and component data, factory-variation records, and their organization as a database.
  • Counterfeit-indicator research and comparative material.
  • Knowledge Center articles, glossary entries, and editorial content.
  • Original photography, illustration, and diagrams we produce.
  • The Platform’s software, interface design, and written content.

The selection, arrangement, and verification of our reference data is itself the product of substantial work, and we claim rights in the compilation as well as in the individual entries we authored.

2. What you may do

  • Use the Platform for its intended purposes under the Terms of Service.
  • View, print, and keep copies of your own certificates and reports.
  • Present a complete, unaltered certificate or report in connection with the watch it describes.
  • Share Registry verification links.
  • Quote a short passage of published Knowledge Center material with clear attribution to Atlas & Crown and a link to the source.

3. What you may not do

  • Copy, republish, or redistribute our research, catalog, or Knowledge Center content beyond short attributed quotation.
  • Scrape, crawl, or bulk-extract the Registry, the reference catalog, or the Knowledge Center, or build a competing database from them.
  • Use our content or records to train, fine-tune, or evaluate machine-learning models without our written permission.
  • Use the Atlas & Crown name, logo, or marks as your own, in your branding, or in a way that suggests affiliation, endorsement, or accreditation we have not granted.
  • Reproduce or imitate our certificates, reports, certificate numbers, or Registry presentation.
  • Reverse-engineer the Platform, or circumvent its technical protections.
  • Use our methodology or counterfeit research to produce, improve, or market counterfeit watches or counterfeit documentation.

4. Methodology and counterfeit research

Some of our research describes how counterfeits are identified. Publishing all of it would help the people it exists to defeat.

We therefore publish counterfeit intelligence selectively, and hold operational detail of our inspection methodology as confidential business information available only to staff and to authorized professional users. Nothing in this notice, and nothing on the Platform, obliges us to disclose it, and unauthorized access to or disclosure of it is a breach of these terms.

5. Manufacturer trademarks and third-party rights

We refer to manufacturers, models, and references because it is necessary to identify and describe the watches we examine and research. That is descriptive, referential use. It does not imply sponsorship, endorsement, affiliation, or authorization by any manufacturer, and it is not a claim to their intellectual property. See the Manufacturer & Third-Party Notice.

Our own rights in our research extend to our authored descriptions, analysis, verification, and arrangement — not to the underlying manufacturer marks or specifications they describe.

6. Your material

Nothing in this notice affects your ownership of what you upload. See the User-Submitted Content Terms.

7. Raising an infringement claim

If you believe material on the Platform infringes your rights, contact us with: what you say is infringing and where it appears; what right you hold and how you hold it; your contact details; and a statement that you believe the use is not authorized.

We will review and, where a claim is well founded, remove or restrict the material. We will tell the person who submitted it unless we are prevented from doing so.

If anything here is unclear, or you believe a record about you or your watch is wrong, get in touch. We would rather answer a question than have you rely on a guess.