Your work, your call
Every story here belongs to the person who wrote it. If a work on ao3.life is yours and you want it gone, it goes. There is nothing to argue and nothing to fill in beyond an email.
1. Email us
Write to legal@ao3.life with:
- The works: their links on ao3.life, their AO3 links, or their AO3 ids (the number in
archiveofourown.org/works/12345). One email can list as many as you like. - Something that shows they are yours: write from the email on your AO3 account, or add a short note to your AO3 profile or the work that we can check.
- If you act for a rights holder, who you represent.
2. What happens next
- Acknowledgement When we process your email, we write back to confirm which works we are removing.
- Delisted within the hour Within an hour of that acknowledgement the works disappear from search, tag pages, their own pages, downloads, the reader and audio. Their addresses answer “Removed”, so search engines drop them too.
- Removed for good within 48 hours Within 48 hours the stored copies are deleted permanently. We keep only a short note of the work’s id and the removal, so it is never added back.
- Out of every backup within 7 days Database backups and other copies that roll over on their own are cleared within 7 days at most.
Other legal questions
The same address: legal@ao3.life. More for authors, including credit and attribution, is on For authors. Audiobook earnings from your work stay yours to collect: Authors get paid here.