We process personal data in accordance with our privacy policy. As part of this agreement you consent to our doing so. You should read the policy carefully, especially if you have any concerns about your privacy.
All use of our web services are subject to our terms for web users. There are further terms if you have signed up for an account with one of our services and, if you have agreed to pay us for a service, please see the additional terms for paid-for services. At the end are some general terms and definitions.
If you believe there may be illegal content hosted on our web services please let us know at [email protected]
Terms for use of our web services
Web services include our APIs as well as any of our websites.
Disclaimer
While we are proud of the services we provide to the world for free and try to make them reliable and useful, we make no promises about them. All web services are certain to fail some of the time. We adapt and change our services from time to time, so you may find that something that worked for you may cease to work. We may also stop supplying any service, temporarily or permanently or block access to our services to anyone for any reason.
If you need some guarantee of a particular service level, then please do not hesitate to contact us to discuss whether we could offer you a commercial version of any of our services (assuming one is not already available).
We are not a law firm and nothing we do is intended to be taken as legal advice. In particular:
- We encourage the use of our open data commons licences but we cannot give any warranty that they will work in the way expected or should be used for any specific purpose. If in doubt, you should take your own legal advice.
- The API supplied with our project is not guaranteed to provide an answer with 100% certainty. Copyright law is complex and there may be obscure cases that are not handled correctly. It is intended to be a starting point, not the word of God.
What you agree
You agree not to use our websites to do any of the following:
- Anything which is illegal either where you are in the world, or where we are.
- Cause nuisance to other users of our services.
- Interfere with the normal running of our services.
- Try to access our systems in a way other than those advertised by us and, in particular, to use a web crawler that does not respect the robots exclusion policy.
Community members
By registering as a community member, you are acknowledging your connection to us. You are subject to any rules for community members we may publish and we may send you email messages we think appropriate for members, for example in order to poll you on some important issue.
Community membership is not membership in the formal sense of membership of a company limited by guarantee.
Content and intellectual property
What we do with your content
If you contribute content to any of our services, for example by commenting on a blog, or uploading data, then as a general rule you agree to licence that content to us under the same licence as prevails for that service or website.
For example: any comment you make on the blog , which is licensed under a CC-BY licence, will be licensed to us under the same licence.
The only exception to this policy is where a service we supply to you expressly allows a different licence, for example a private CKAN instance would contain your data under whatever licence — including no licence — you choose.
Our content
Unless otherwise stated all our services are offered under open content or data licences and you should refer to the provisions of the licence in question to find out what you are allowed to do. Some of our content belongs to third parties. Most third party data is subject to an open licence, but we cannot guarantee it. You should refer to the third party if you are in doubt.
Ownership does not change
As a general rule, this agreement will not change the ownership of any intellectual property belonging to either party. Where your content is used by us or vice versa both you and we would do so under a licence (see above).
Liability
Indemnities — where you may owe us
If you breach any of your obligations under this agreement and, as a result, cause us to be sued by anyone else, you will have to compensate us for any loss we have suffered as a result, which includes any costs, such as paying lawyers, or for our own time, we incur defending a claim as well as any damages awarded.
If your breach causes you to be sued by someone else, you will not sue us for any loss you suffer as a result.
Exclusion — what we do not owe you
We limit our liability in several different ways — all of which we believe to be fair. In case any one of them is found to be unenforceable by a court, each of the following limitations of liability is separate and our liability to you is limited by all of them.
All exclusions of liability are only in so far as we are allowed to do so by whatever law applies to the situation. For example, the law of England and Wales prevents us from excluding our liability for any personal injury or death caused by our negligence. We do not exclude such liability.
We will not be liable for any damage that was not reasonably foreseeable at the time we made this agreement.
- Any liability to you is limited by the amount you have paid us for a service, where:
- Our liability is zero for a free service.
Where you make periodic payments, our liability is limited to the value of the last payment you paid us.
We are not liable for any loss which is indirect or consequential. That includes any loss of business or profit.
We exclude, in so far as we are allowed, any warranties that would be implied by law.
General conditions
This agreement
We may update these terms and conditions at any time. If we do so, we will announce the change on our blog. Any changes will be binding on you from the moment we announce them.
Boilerplate
These final “boilerplate” terms of should go without saying, but we are saying them anyway just to be clear.
If any part of this agreement is ineffective (for example because it is unlawful) then the rest of the agreement should be read without it.
This agreement is between you and us and is not intended to give anyone else any rights.
We may sometimes fail to enforce our rights under this agreement (for example because we decide not to, or we did not realise you were in breach of contract). Just because we have not enforced any of our rights, does not stop us from doing so in the future.