Terms of Service

Thank you for using Art Ecology. The project places historic landscape paintings at the real places they show, and publishes the resulting pairs of paintings and present-day photographs as a dataset. These Terms of Service (“Terms”) set out what you agree to when you use it.

When we say “Art Ecology”, “we”, “our” or “us”, we mean the noncommercial project of that name and the people who run it, who are listed under Contact us at the foot of the landing page. When we say “the Service”, we mean the website at artecology.org and everything on it. When we say “you”, we mean the person using the Service.

Reading the catalog, the map and the paired dataset needs no account. These Terms apply to everyone who uses the Service, and the sections on accounts and contributions apply once you create an account.

We may update these Terms. When we make a significant change, we publish it on this page as a new version with a new effective date, and we take reasonable steps to let account holders know. When you use the Service, you are agreeing to the version in effect at the time. If we do not exercise or enforce a right or provision of these Terms, that does not mean we have waived it. These Terms contain a limitation of our liability.

Account terms

• You must be at least 13 years old to create an account. If you are under the age of majority where you live, you may use the Service only with the involvement of a parent or guardian.
• You must be a human. Accounts registered by bots or other automated methods are not permitted.
• You must give an email address you control. Contributing opens once you have verified it.
• You are responsible for keeping your account and password secure. We cannot and will not be liable for any loss or damage from your failure to do so. Accounts that hold an administrative role must use a second sign-in step.
• You are responsible for everything posted and done under your account.

Contributions

• A contribution is a clue, a comment, an agreement with a clue, a photograph or a proposed painting.
• Contributions are published under the display name and username on your account, because attribution is the point of the record. Clues, comments and agreements appear as soon as you add them. Photographs and proposed paintings appear once a reviewer approves them.
• Contribute only what is yours to give. A photograph must be one you took. A painting image must be one you have the right to share, with its source stated truthfully. A clue’s reasoning and a comment should be your own words.
• You keep the copyright in what you contribute. By contributing, you grant Art Ecology a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual and irrevocable license to host, store, reproduce, display, adapt (for example, by resizing or compressing an image), publish and distribute your contributions as part of the Service and of the paired dataset, including to researchers and others who use that dataset. The license continues after your account is deleted, because the record is not rewritten to remove its contributors. Your contributions are then credited to a deleted contributor.
• We review photographs and proposed paintings before they are published, and we may decline any of them. Clues are not reviewed before they appear, but we may take down a clue or remove a comment that breaks these Terms. We are not obliged to monitor what is posted.
• The locations, clues and confidence levels on the Service are arguments and judgments about where a painting was made, not guarantees. Do not rely on them for navigation, property or safety.
• Photographing a place is at your own risk. Respect private property, closures and local laws. Nothing on the Service gives you permission to enter any place.

Use restrictions

You may not use the Service to:

• post anything that infringes another person’s copyright or other rights;
• harass, threaten, abuse or impersonate anyone;
• post anything unlawful, hateful or sexually explicit, or anything that reveals another person’s private information;
• post spam, or contributions you know to be false;
• get around the Service’s limits, reviews or security, or reach an account or data that is not yours;
• scrape, overload or otherwise interfere with the Service, or create accounts or contributions by automated means.

Suspension and deletion

• You can delete your account at any time from Settings. What happens to your data when you do is described in the Privacy Policy.
• We may suspend or delete an account that breaks these Terms, and we may refuse the Service to anyone, at our discretion. A suspended account can no longer contribute. Its past contributions stand, except any we remove for breaking these Terms.
• Abuse of the people who run the project, including threats of abuse or retribution, will result in immediate deletion of the account.

Copyright and content ownership

• All content posted to the Service must comply with United States copyright law. If you believe something on the Service infringes your copyright, email us at jawvt04@gmail.com with a description of the work, where it appears on the Service, your contact information, and a statement that you own the work or are authorized to act for its owner. We will remove material that infringes.
• The images of paintings in the catalog are credited to their sources. Rights in them remain with their holders, and their reuse is governed by those holders’ terms.
• Art Ecology or its licensors own all rights in the Service itself, including its design and software, and you obtain no ownership rights in it by using it.

Changes to the Service

The Service is free, and we do not charge for any part of it. We may change or discontinue any part of it, temporarily or permanently, with or without notice.

Availability, security and privacy

• Your use of the Service is at your sole risk. We provide it on an “as is” and “as available” basis, and we offer no service levels.
• We take measures to protect your data, including encryption in transit and at rest. You agree that we may process your data as described in the Privacy Policy, and for no other purpose.
• We use third-party providers for hosting, storage, email, maps and place search. The Privacy Policy lists them and what each one receives.

Features and bugs

We build the Service with care, but we make no guarantee that it will meet your requirements or expectations. As with any software, it has bugs. We track the ones reported to us and work through the important ones first, especially any related to security or privacy, but we do not guarantee that the Service is free of errors.

Liability

You expressly understand and agree that Art Ecology shall not be liable, in law or in equity, to you or to any third party for any direct, indirect, incidental, lost profits, special, consequential, punitive or exemplary damages, including, but not limited to, damages for loss of profits, goodwill, use, data or other intangible losses (even if Art Ecology has been advised of the possibility of such damages), resulting from: (i) the use or the inability to use the Service; (ii) unauthorized access to or alteration of your transmissions or data; (iii) statements or conduct of any third party on the Service; or (iv) any other matter relating to these Terms or the Service, whether as a breach of contract, tort (including negligence whether active or passive), or any other theory of liability.

If you have a question about any of these Terms, email us at jawvt04@gmail.com.