Disqus Terms of Service

20130704_rev01 · COMPARED WITH 20120901_rev01 · ARCHIVE SNAPSHOT, DATE APPROXIMATE

Full text changes — 20120901_rev01 to 20130704_rev01

77**Description of Our Service**. The Service provides a comment platform that helps you build an active community from your website's audience. In addition to other functionalities, the Service provides: (i) a real-time comment system which allows real-time posting and updating; (ii) a notification and reply system that alerts users to responses and allows users to continue a conversation through email; (iii) inline media embedding that allows full integration with media services as well as being able to attach media such as photos and videos within comments; and (iv) mobile commenting to be able to comment on the go.
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99**Eligibility**. You may use the Service only if you can form a binding contract with Disqus, and only in compliance with this Agreement and all applicable local, state, national, and international laws, rules and regulations. Any use or access to the Service by anyone under 13 is strictly prohibited and in violation of this Agreement. The Service is not available to any Users previously removed from the Service by Disqus.
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1111**Disqus Account**. Your Disqus account gives you access to the services and functionality that we may establish and maintain from time to time and in our sole discretion. We may maintain different types of accounts for different types of Users. If you open a Disqus account on behalf of a company, organization, or other entity, then (a) "you" includes you and that entity, and (b) you represent and warrant that you are an authorized representative of the entity with the authority to bind the entity to these Terms, and that you agree to these Terms on the entity's behalf. You may never use another User's account without permission. When creating your account, you must provide accurate and complete information. You are solely responsible for the activity that occurs on your account, and you must keep your account password secure. We encourage you to use "strong" passwords (passwords that use a combination of upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols) with your account. You must notify Disqus immediately of any breach of security or unauthorized use of your account. Disqus will not be liable for any losses caused by any unauthorized use of your account. You may control your User profile and how you interact with the Service by changing the settings in your [profile settings](http://disqus.com/account). By providing Disqus your email address, you consent to our using the email address to send you Service-related notices, including any notices required by law, in lieu of communication by postal mail. We may also use your email address to send you other messages, such as changes to features of the Service and special offers. If you do not want to receive such email messages, you may opt out or change your preferences in your [settings page](http://disqus.com/account). Opting out may prevent you from receiving email messages regarding updates, improvements, or offers.
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13**Services Rules**. You agree not to engage in any of the following prohibited activities: (i) copying, distributing, or disclosing any part of the Service in any medium, including without limitation by any automated or non-automated "scraping" except for uses allowed under the "Feed and API" section below; (ii) using any automated system, including without limitation "robots," "spiders," "offline readers," etc., to access the Service in a manner that sends more request messages to the Disqus servers than a human can reasonably produce in the same period of time by using a conventional on-line web browser (except that Disqus grants the operators of public search engines revocable permission to use spiders to copy materials from disqus.com for the sole purpose of and solely to the extent necessary for creating publicly available searchable indices of the materials, but not caches or archives of such materials); (iii) transmitting spam, chain letters, or other unsolicited email; (iv) attempting to interfere with, to compromise the system integrity or security or to decipher any transmissions to or from the servers running the Service; (v) taking any action that imposes, or may impose at our sole discretion an unreasonable or disproportionately large load on our infrastructure; (vi) uploading invalid data, viruses, worms, or other software agents through the Service; (vii) collecting or harvesting any personally identifiable information, including account names, from the Service; (viii) using the Service for any commercial solicitation purposes; (ix) impersonating another person or otherwise misrepresenting your affiliation with a person or entity or conducting fraud; (x) interfering with the proper working of the Service; (xi) accessing any content on the Service through any technology or means other than those provided or authorized by the Service or Disqus' written permission; or (xii) bypassing the measures we may use to prevent or restrict access to the Service, including without limitation features that prevent or restrict use or copying of any content or enforce limitations on use of the Service or the content therein.
13**Services Rules**. You agree not to engage in any of the following prohibited activities: (i) copying, distributing, or disclosing any part of the Service in any medium, including without limitation by any automated or non-automated "scraping" except for uses allowed under the "Feed and API" section below; (ii) using any automated system, including without limitation "robots," "spiders," "offline readers," etc., to access the Service in a manner that sends more request messages to the Disqus servers than a human can reasonably produce in the same period of time by using a conventional on-line web browser (except that Disqus grants the operators of public search engines revocable permission to use spiders to copy materials from disqus.com for the sole purpose of and solely to the extent necessary for creating publicly available searchable indices of the materials, but not caches or archives of such materials); (iii) transmitting spam, chain letters, or other unsolicited email; (iv) attempting to interfere with, to compromise the system integrity or security or to decipher any transmissions to or from the servers running the Service; (v) taking any action that imposes, or may impose at our sole discretion an unreasonable or disproportionately large load on our infrastructure; (vi) uploading invalid data, viruses, worms, or other software agents through the Service; (vii) collecting or harvesting any personally identifiable information, including account names, from the Service; (viii) uploading, posting, transmitting, sharing, storing or otherwise making publicly available on the site, or other channels, any private, personally identifiable information of any third party, including, but not limited to: addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, Social Security numbers and credit card numbers; (ix) using the Service for any commercial solicitation purposes; (x) impersonating another person or otherwise misrepresenting your affiliation with a person or entity or conducting fraud; (xi) interfering with the proper working of the Service; (xii) accessing any content on the Service through any technology or means other than those provided or authorized by the Service or Disqus' written permission; or (xiii) bypassing the measures we may use to prevent or restrict access to the Service, including without limitation features that prevent or restrict use or copying of any content or enforce limitations on use of the Service or the content therein.
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1515- Accessing the audiovisual content available on the Service for any purpose or in any manner other than Streaming (as defined below) is expressly prohibited. "Streaming" means a contemporaneous digital transmission of an audiovisual work via the Internet from the Disqus Service to a User's device in such a manner that the data is intended for real-time viewing and not intended to be copied, stored, permanently downloaded, or redistributed by the User.
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1717- We may, without prior notice, change the Service; stop providing the Service or features of the Service, to you or to users generally; or create usage limits for the Service. We may permanently or temporarily terminate or suspend your access to the Service without notice and liability for any reason, including if in our sole determination you violate any provision of these Terms, or for any or no reason. Upon termination for any reason or no reason, you continue to be bound by these Terms.
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1919- You are solely responsible for your interactions with other Disqus Users. We reserve the right, but have no obligation, to monitor disputes between you and other Users. Disqus shall have no liability for your interactions with other Users, or for any User's action or inaction.
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2121**Advertisements**. You agree that Disqus may include advertisements and/or content provided by Disqus and/or a third party (collectively "Ads") as part of the implementation of the Service. You agree to comply with any specifications that may be provided by Disqus from time to time to enable proper delivery, display, tracking and/or reporting of Ads. You will receive a payment related to the number of valid clicks on Ads, the number of valid impressions of Ads and/or other events performed in connection with the display of Ads on the Permitted Sites (as defined below), in each case as determined by Disqus in its sole discretion in accordance to the then applicable revenue share percentage. "Permitted Sites" means web sites owned, operated or controlled by you on which you have integrated the Service. Your payments will be sent by Disqus within approximately ninety (90) days after the end of each calendar quarter that Ads are running on the Permitted Sites if your earned balance is $100 or more. If you terminate this Agreement (and you have not breached this Agreement), Disqus will pay you your earned balance within approximately ninety (90) days after the end of the calendar quarter in which the Agreement is terminated by you (following Disqus' receipt of your written request, including by email, to terminate this Agreement). In no event, however, will Disqus make payments for any earned balance less than $10.
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23Notwithstanding the foregoing, Disqus willl not be liable for any payment based on: (a) any amounts which result from invalid clicks or impressions on Ads generated by any person, bot, automated program or similar device, as reasonably determined by Licensor, including without limitation through any clicks or impressions solicited by payment of money, false representation, or request for end users to click on Ads; (b) Ads delivered to end users whose browsers have JavaScript disabled; (c) Ads benefiting charitable organizations and other placeholder or transparent Ads that Disqus may deliver; or (d) clicks co-mingled with a significant number of invalid clicks described in (a) above, or as a result of any breach of this Agreement by you for any applicable pay period. We reserve the right to withhold payment due to any of the foregoing or any breach of the Agreement by you, pending our reasonable investigation of any of the foregoing or any breach of the Agreement by you, or in the event that an advertiser whose Ads are displayed in connection with the Permitted Sites defaults on payment for such Ads to us. You agree to pay all applicable taxes or charges imposed by any government entity in connection with any payments received hereunder. You acknowledge and agree that Licensor may change its pricing and/or payment structure at any time. If you dispute any payment made hereunder, you must notify Disqus in writing within fifteen (15) days of any such payment; failure to so notify Disqus will result in the waiver by You of any claim relating to any such disputed payment.
23Notwithstanding the foregoing, Disqus will not be liable for any payment based on: (a) any amounts which result from invalid clicks or impressions on Ads generated by any person, bot, automated program or similar device, as reasonably determined by Licensor, including without limitation through any clicks or impressions solicited by payment of money, false representation, or request for end users to click on Ads; (b) Ads delivered to end users whose browsers have JavaScript disabled; (c) Ads benefiting charitable organizations and other placeholder or transparent Ads that Disqus may deliver; or (d) clicks co-mingled with a significant number of invalid clicks described in (a) above, or as a result of any breach of this Agreement by you for any applicable pay period. We reserve the right to withhold payment due to any of the foregoing or any breach of the Agreement by you, pending our reasonable investigation of any of the foregoing or any breach of the Agreement by you, or in the event that an advertiser whose Ads are displayed in connection with the Permitted Sites defaults on payment for such Ads to us. You agree to pay all applicable taxes or charges imposed by any government entity in connection with any payments received hereunder. You acknowledge and agree that Licensor may change its pricing and/or payment structure at any time. If you dispute any payment made hereunder, you must notify Disqus in writing within fifteen (15) days of any such payment; failure to so notify Disqus will result in the waiver by You of any claim relating to any such disputed payment.
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2525Payment will be calculated solely based on records maintained by Disqus and no other measurements or statistics of any kind will be accepted or have any effect under this Agreement. We make no guarantee regarding the level of impressions of Ads or clicks on any Ad, the timing of delivery of such impressions and/or clicks, or the amount of any payment to be made to you under this Agreement. You acknowledge and agree to claim any payments provided by Disqus to you within six (6) months of the issuance of that payment otherwise Disqus shall have the right to recapture all payments that are held by Disqus and that are due to you (if any), but which Disqus is unable to pay or deliver to you because of an Inactive Status (as defined below). "Inactive Status" means that, based on our records: (a) for a period of six (6) months or more you have not logged onto your account and have not accepted payments that we have attempted to pay or deliver to you, and (b) We have been unable to reach you, or have not received adequate payment instructions from you, after contacting you at the address shown in our records.
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27Disqus reserves the right, in its sole discretion, to not run Ads on sites based on quality criteria important to our advertisers, including but not limited to: site language, brand safety of content, and user engagement.
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2729## Usage License
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2931Subject to the terms and conditions of these Terms, Disqus grants you a non-exclusive, limited, non-transferable, freely revocable license to use the Service for your personal, noncommercial (i.e. you may not use the Service to provide ads) use only and as permitted by the features of the Service. Disqus reserves all rights not expressly granted herein in the Service and the Disqus Content (as defined below). Disqus reserves the right to terminate your license to use the Service at any time and for any reason or in the future to charge for commercial usage.
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3133## User Responsibility and User-Posted Content
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4547By posting any User Content on the Service, you expressly grant, and you represent and warrant that you have all rights necessary to grant, to Disqus a royalty-free, sublicensable, transferable, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, worldwide license to use, reproduce, modify, publish, list information regarding, edit, translate, distribute, syndicate, publicly perform, publicly display, and make derivative works of all such User Content and your name, voice, and/or likeness as contained in your User Content, in whole or in part, and in any form, media or technology, whether now known or hereafter developed, for use in connection with the Service and Disqus' (and its successors' and affiliates') business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the Service (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels. You also hereby grant each User of the Service a non-exclusive license to access your User Content through the Service, and to use, reproduce, distribute, display and perform such User Content as permitted through the functionality of the Service and under these Terms.
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4749## Feeds and API
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4951Disqus provides access to portions of its Service via RSS feeds and an API; for the purposes of these Terms, such access constitutes use of the Service. Disqus asks that you use these features respectfully, and as may be outlined in any documentation that we provide. You may not use these or any other features of the Service itself to allow the display of a substantial portion of the Disqus database or reproduce, duplicate or copy any or all of the Disqus Service. Disqus reserves the right to change these features at any time and to disable access to the feeds and the API at any time for any reason or no reason.
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51## Disqus Property
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5353Disqus, the Disqus logo and the Disqus design are trademarks or trade dress of Disqus, and may not be used without express written permission from Disqus, other than for attribution, which is required via the display of the Disqus logo and marks and usage of the universal Disqus login option and commenter profiles as presented in the default themes, unless otherwise agreed in writing by Disqus. All other trademarks not owned by Disqus that appear on this Site are the property of their respective owners, who may or may not be affiliated with, connected to, or sponsored by Disqus. Except for your User Content, the Service and all materials therein or transferred thereby, including, without limitation, software, images, text, graphics, illustrations, logos, APIs, software, patents, trademarks, service marks, copyrights, photographs, audio, videos, music, and User Content belonging to other Users (the "Disqus Content"), and all Intellectual Property Rights related thereto, are the exclusive property of Disqus and its licensors (including other Users who post User Content to the Service). Except as explicitly provided herein, nothing in these Terms shall be deemed to create a license in or under any such Intellectual Property Rights, and you agree not to sell, license, rent, modify, distribute, copy, reproduce, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, publish, adapt, edit or create derivative works from any Disqus Content. Use of the Disqus Content for any purpose not expressly permitted by these Terms is strictly prohibited.
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5555## Paid Services
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5757Certain aspects of the Service may be provided for a fee or other charge. If you elect to use paid aspects of the Service, you agree to the pricing and payment terms http://docs.disqus.com/help/51/, as we may update them from time to time. Disqus may add new services for additional fees and charges, or amend fees and charges for existing services, at any time in its sole discretion. Any change to our pricing or payment terms shall become effective in the billing cycle following notice of such change to you as provided in these Terms.
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