DMCA & takedown requests

Almost nothing on watermellon is hosted here. The great majority of the catalogue is streamed live from Famobi, an HTML5 game distributor — those files sit on their servers, not ours. Two games are served from this site: HexGL, an open-source project carried with its original licence, and PolyTrack, which is not open source but whose developer permits reuploads for unblocking on restricted networks. Every game is credited by name and author on the credits page.

The fast way

Email the address below and say which game. You do not need a formal notice, a lawyer, or a reason — name the game and it comes down. This reaches the site operator directly and is the quickest route.

email a takedown request

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. For a streamed game the catalogue entry is deleted, which removes the only link to it from this site; for a self-hosted one the files go too. This is a static site deployed from a single commit, so removal takes minutes rather than thirty days.

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

Streamed games are served by their distributor from the distributor's own servers — nothing is copied here and nothing is re-hosted. Of the non-Flash games in /games/, Stellar Drift is ours, HexGL is open source under its own licence, and PolyTrack is carried under the developer's written permission for unblocking reuploads. We will not rip files 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 belong, tell us and we'll check it.

The archived Flash games, stated plainly

Sixteen games in /games/ are Flash titles, and those are copies. Adobe switched Flash off in 2020 and the sites that ran these games shut down with it; the .swf files here come from the Internet Archive's Flash preservation collection, which exists to keep them playable. They are played by Ruffle, an open-source Flash player, also hosted here under its MIT / Apache-2.0 licence.

Preservation is not a licence, and this page does not claim it is. Each game names its original developer and links to the archive item it came from. If you made one of these and want it gone, say so and it is deleted the same day — no notice format required, no argument about whether the game is still commercially available.

Advertising, and what that means for PolyTrack

This site carries advertising. PolyTrack's terms permit reuploads only on a non-commercial site, so running ads puts this copy outside that permission. It is here because the site operator chose to keep it, and it will be removed the moment Kodub asks — or sooner, on request. Nothing else in the catalogue depends on a non-commercial condition.