Terms of use

1. What the service is

ReclaimConsent is a searchable index of consumer agreements, together with plain-English explanations of what those documents say. It reproduces and describes documents that businesses have made public. It is an information service.

2. Not legal advice

Nothing here is legal advice, and using the service creates no lawyer–client relationship. Explanations are generated by software, are hedged for a reason, and can be wrong. Where an explanation and an original document differ, the document governs. Decisions that matter — signing, cancelling, disputing — deserve a lawyer who knows your situation and the law of your state. The full disclaimer sets this out at length.

3. Accuracy

Records are collected from published sources and carry the date they were captured. Documents change, sources move, and captures fail. We do not warrant that any record is current, complete, or the version you were asked to sign. Check the capture date on the record, and the source link beside it.

4. Copyright and republishing

The documents in the index were written by the businesses that publish them, and the copyright in that wording stays where it is. Nothing here moves it. What the index does with a document is report on it: a contract is a factual thing that a business asks the public to agree to, and quoting the clause that does the asking, then explaining it, is reporting and commentary on the terms of that deal.

That is a limit as much as it is a basis. In practice it means:

• Excerpts, not copies. A record quotes the passages the analysis is actually about, at the length the point needs, and stops there.
• Attributed and linked, every time. A quotation names the business whose document it came from, links to the source it was captured from, and carries the date of capture.
• Whole documents only where they are public filings. Forms filed with a state agency, exhibits on a court docket — records the public already has a right to read — are reproduced in full. A company’s own membership agreement is not.

Our writing is a separate thing from the wording it quotes, and the two carry different permissions. The plain-English explanations, the summaries, the clause tags and attention scoring, the comparisons, and the arrangement of the index are ReclaimConsent’s own work, and we license them under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 — quote them, translate them, build on them, and say where they came from. That licence covers our words only. It does not reach the document wording sitting beside them, because that wording is not ours to license, and anyone planning to republish a document at length should treat it as a question for the rights-holder rather than for us.

5. Using the index

You may read it, search it, and link to it — deep links to a record, or to a single clause inside one, are the point of the thing and will not be broken casually. What you may republish depends on whose words they are, which section 4 divides up: ours are licensed, the quoted document wording is the rights-holder’s and we cannot grant permission over it. You agree not to:

• scrape the service in a way that degrades it for other people;
• present our explanations as legal advice, or as the original wording of a document;
• use the index to harass a business or an individual;
• submit documents you have no right to share, or that contain someone else’s personal information.

6. If you hold rights in a document

A business that would rather its document were not here has a route, and it does not run through the submission form. Write to the operator of the service and say so. A notice is read by a person.

A notice needs enough in it to act on:

• the address of the record, and which part of it you object to — the whole record, one quotation, an image;
• the work you hold rights in, and how you hold them: as the rights-holder, or as somebody authorised to act for one;
• what you want done — removal, a shorter excerpt, or a correction to the attribution;
• a statement that you believe in good faith the use is not authorised by the rights-holder, its agent, or the law, and that what you have told us is accurate;
• a name, a signature — electronic is fine — and a way to reach you.

What happens next: the material comes down, or is cut back to a short attributed excerpt, while the notice is considered. We do not wait for the argument to be settled first. The page keeps its address and says that a record was removed after a rights-holder’s notice, and on what date — a site that exists because documents change quietly should not make its own records disappear quietly. If the document arrived as a submission, we tell the person who sent it.

Counter-notice

If you sent us the document and think the removal was wrong — the document is a public filing, the excerpt was short and attributed, the notice came from somebody with no rights in it — write back to the same address. Say which record, why the removal was mistaken, how to reach you, and that you accept the jurisdiction in which a dispute about it would be heard. We pass a counter-notice on to whoever complained. If they do not take the matter further within a reasonable period — the statutory window, where one applies — the record goes back up, and the page says that too.

7. Submissions

If you send us a document, you confirm it is published or you are otherwise entitled to share it, and that you have removed personal details. You grant us the right to store it, analyse it, and publish the record built from it. You keep whatever rights you already had; we claim no ownership of the underlying document, which belongs to whoever wrote it.

8. Businesses

A company may claim its profile and maintain its own documents. Claiming does not confer editorial control over analysis, and does not entitle a business to have accurate records removed. For businesses describes the arrangement.

9. Availability

The service is provided as-is, without warranty. It may be interrupted, changed, or discontinued. To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for loss arising from use of, or reliance on, anything published here.

10. Changes

These terms will change as the service is built. Material changes will be dated on this page — a site about documents that change quietly should not change its own terms quietly.