TERMS OF SERVICE

Effective January 26, 2019 Download PDF

What’s covered in these terms

We know it’s tempting to skip these Terms of Service, but it’s important to establish what you can expect from us as you use Metaconex services, and what we expect from you.

These Terms of Service reflect the way Metaconex’s business works, the laws that apply to our company, and certain things we’ve always believed to be true. As a result, these Terms of Service help define Metaconex’s relationship with you as you interact with our services. For example, these terms include the following topic headings:

What you can expect from us, which describes how we provide and develop our services
What we expect from you, which establishes certain rules for using our services
Content in Metaconex services, which describes the intellectual property rights to the content you find in our services — whether that content belongs to you, Metaconex, or others
In case of problems or disagreements, which describes other legal rights you have, and what to expect in case someone violates these terms
Understanding these terms is important because, by using our services, you’re agreeing to these terms.

Besides these terms, we also publish a Privacy Policy. Although it’s not part of these terms, we encourage you to read it to better understand how you can update, manage, export, and delete your information.

Terms

Service provider

Metaconex services are provided by, and you’re contracting with:

Metaconex Ltd

Organized under the laws of the Hong Kong, and operating under the laws of the Hong Kong

CL 147, 133-134 Connaught Road West, Sai Ying Pun, Hong Kong

Age requirements

If you’re under the age required to manage your own Metaconex Account, you must have your parent or legal guardian’s permission to use a Metaconex Account. Please have your parent or legal guardian read these terms with you.

If you’re a parent or legal guardian, and you allow your child to use the services, then these terms apply to you and you’re responsible for your child’s activity on the services.

Some Metaconex services have additional age requirements as described in their service-specific additional terms and policies.

What we expect from you

Follow these terms and service-specific additional terms

The permission we give you to use our services continues as long as you comply with:

  • These terms

  • Service-specific additional terms, which could, for example, include things like additional age requirements

We also make various policies, help centers, and other resources available to you to answer common questions and to set expectations about using our services. These resources include our Privacy Policy, Copyright Help Center, Safety Center, and other pages accessible from our policies site.

Although we give you permission to use our services, we retain any intellectual property rights we have in the services.

Respect others

We want to maintain a respectful environment for everyone, which means you must follow these basic rules of conduct:

  • Comply with applicable laws, including export control, sanctions, and human trafficking laws

  • Respect the rights of others, including privacy and intellectual property rights

  • Don’t abuse or harm others or yourself (or threaten or encourage such abuse or harm) — for example, by misleading, defrauding, illegally impersonating, defaming, bullying, harassing, or stalking others

  • Don’t abuse, harm, interfere with, or disrupt the services — for example, by accessing or using them in fraudulent or deceptive ways, introducing malware, or spamming, hacking, or bypassing our systems or protective measures. When we index the web to bring you search results, we respect standard usage restrictions that website owners specify in their websites’ code, so we require the same when others use our services

Our service-specific additional terms and policies provide additional details about appropriate conduct that everyone using those services must follow. If you find that others aren’t following these rules, many of our services allow you to report abuse. If we act on a report of abuse, we also provide the process described in the Taking action in case of problems section.

Permission to use your content

Some of our services are designed to let you upload, submit, store, send, receive, or share your content. You have no obligation to provide any content to our services and you’re free to choose the content that you want to provide. If you choose to upload or share content, please make sure you have the necessary rights to do so and that the content is lawful.

License

Your content remains yours, which means that you retain any intellectual property rights that you have in your content. For example, you have intellectual property rights in the creative content you make, such as reviews you write. Or you may have the right to share someone else’s creative content if they’ve given you their permission.

We need your permission if your intellectual property rights restrict our use of your content. You provide Metaconex with that permission through this license.

What’s covered

This license covers your content if that content is protected by intellectual property rights.

What’s not covere

  • This license doesn’t affect your privacy rights — it’s only about your intellectual property rights

  • This license doesn’t cover these types of content:

  1. Publicly-available factual information that you provide, such as a review piece shared publicly on a forum. That information doesn’t require a license because it’s considered common knowledge that everyone’s free to use.

  2. Feedback that you offer, such as suggestions to improve our services. Feedback is covered in the Service-related communications section below.

Scope

This license is:

  • Worldwide, which means it’s valid anywhere in the world

  • Non-exclusive, which means you can license your content to others

  • Royalty-free, which means there are no monetary fees for this license

Rights

This license allows Metaconex to:

  • Host, reproduce, distribute, communicate, and use your content — for example, to save your content on our systems and make it accessible from anywhere you go

  • Publish, publicly perform, or publicly display your content, if you’ve made it visible to others

  • Modify and create derivative works based on your content, such as reformatting or translating it

  • Sublicense these rights to:

  1. Other users to allow the services to work as designed, such as enabling you to share photos with people you choose

  2. Our contractors who’ve signed agreements with us that are consistent with these terms, only for the limited purposes described in the purpose section below

Purpose

This license is for the limited purpose of:

  • operating and improving the services, which means allowing the services to work as designed and creating new features and functionalities. This includes using automated systems and algorithms to analyze your content:

  1. For spam, malware, and illegal content

  2. To find patterns in the data, for example in identifying cases, it is advisable to recommend an appropriate ad category for similar content.

  3. To customize our services for you, such as providing recommendations and personalized search results, content, and ads (which you can change or turn off in Ads Settings)

This analysis occurs as the content is sent, received, and when it is stored.

  • Use content you have shared publicly to promote services. Example: To promote a product from an advertising partner, we may quote a review you wrote. Or to promote Metaconex products and services, we may use screenshots of statistics about the data you have obtained or that you are collecting.

  • Developing new technologies and services for Metaconex consistent with these terms

Duration

This license lasts for as long as your content is protected by intellectual property rights.

If you remove from our services any content that’s covered by this license, then our systems will stop making that content publicly available in a reasonable amount of time. There are two exceptions:

  • If you shared your content with others before deleting. For example: If you shared a photo or review with a friend who then copies that photo or shares the photo/review with others, that content may continue continues to appear on Metaconex products/services even after you remove such content from your Metaconex Account.

  • If you make your content available through the services of other companies, it is possible that your content will also be reused across Metaconex products/services even though you have previously removed it on Metaconex.

Using Metaconex services

Your Metaconex Account

If you meet these age requirements you can create a Metaconex Account for your convenience. Some services require that you have a Metaconex Account in order to work — for example, to create a website, you need an account to start creating a website on the Metaconex platform.

You’re responsible for what you do with your Metaconex Account, including taking reasonable steps to keep your Metaconex Account secure, and we encourage you to regularly use the Security Checkup.

Using Metaconex services on behalf of an organization or business

Many organizations, such as businesses, non-profits, and schools, take advantage of our services. To use our services on behalf of an organization:

  • An authorized representative of that organization must agree to these terms

  • Your organization’s administrator may assign a Metaconex Account to you. That administrator might require you to follow additional rules and may be able to access or disable your Metaconex Account.

Service-related communications

To provide you with our services, we sometimes send you service announcements and other information. To learn more about how we communicate with you, see Metaconex’s Privacy Policy.

If you choose to give us feedback, such as suggestions to improve our services, we may act on your feedback without obligation to you.

Content in Metaconex services

Your content

Some of our services give you the opportunity to make your content publicly available — for example, you might post a product or restaurant review that you wrote, or you might upload a blog post that you created.

  • See the Permission to use your content section for more about your rights in your content, and how your content is used in our services

  • See the Content policy section to learn why and how we might remove user-generated content from our services

If you think someone is infringing your intellectual property rights, you can send us notice of the infringement and we’ll take appropriate action. For example, we suspend or close the Metaconex Accounts of repeat copyright infringers as described in our Copyright Help Center - for products and services on Metaconex.

Metaconex content

Some of our services include content that belongs to Metaconex — for example, many of the visual illustrations you see in Metaconex blog. You may use Metaconex's content as allowed by these terms and any service-specific additional terms, but we retain any intellectual property rights that we have in our content. Don’t remove, obscure, or alter any of our branding, logos, or legal notices. If you want to use our branding or logos, please see the Metaconex Brand Permissions page.

Other content

Finally, some of our services give you access to content that belongs to other people or organizations — for example, a store owner’s description of their own business, or a newspaper article displayed in list of partner sites on Metaconex. You may not use this content without that person or organization’s permission, or as otherwise allowed by law. The views expressed in other people or organizations’ content are theirs, and don’t necessarily reflect Metaconex’s views.

Software in Metaconex services

Some of our services include downloadable software. We give you permission to use that software as part of the services.

The license we give you is:

  • Worldwide, which means it’s valid anywhere in the world

  • Non-exclusive, which means that we can license the software to others

  • Royalty-free, which means there are no monetary fees for this license

  • Personal, which means it doesn’t extend to anyone else

  • Non-assignable, which means you’re not allowed to assign the license to anyone else

Some of our services include software that’s offered under open source license terms that we make available to you. Sometimes there are provisions in the open source license that explicitly override parts of these terms, so please be sure to read those licenses.

You may not copy, modify, distribute, sell, or lease any part of our services or software.

In case of problems or disagreements

Both the law and these terms give you the right to a certain quality of service, and ways to fix problems if things go wrong.

Warranty

We provide our services using reasonable skill and care. If we don’t meet the quality level described in this warranty, you agree to tell us and we’ll work with you to try to resolve the issue.

Disclaimers

The only commitments we make about our services (including the content in the services, the specific functions of our services, or their reliability, availability, or ability to meet your needs) are provided in the Warranty section; the service-specific additional terms; and laws that can’t be limited by these terms.

Liabilities

For all users

Both the law and these terms try to strike a balance as to what you or Metaconex can claim from the other in case of problems. That’s why the law allows us to limit certain liabilities — but not others — under these terms.

These terms only limit our responsibilities as allowed by applicable law. These terms don’t limit liability for fraud, fraudulent misrepresentation, or death or personal injury caused by negligence or willful misconduct.

Other than the liabilities described above, Metaconex is liable only for its breaches of these terms or applicable service-specific additional terms, subject to applicable law.

For business users and organizations only

If you’re a business user or organization:

  • To the extent allowed by applicable law, you’ll indemnify Metaconex and its directors, officers, employees, and contractors for any third-party legal proceedings (including actions by government authorities) arising out of or relating to your unlawful use of the services or violation of these terms or service-specific additional terms. This indemnity covers any liability or expense arising from claims, losses, damages, judgments, fines, litigation costs, and legal fees.

  • If you’re legally exempt from certain responsibilities, including indemnification, then those responsibilities don’t apply to you under these terms.

  • Metaconex won’t be responsible for the following liabilities:

  1. Loss of profits, revenues, business opportunities, goodwill, or anticipated savings

  2. Indirect or consequential loss

  3. Punitive damages

  • Metaconex’s total liability arising out of or relating to these terms is limited to the greater of (1) US$500 or (2) 125% of the fees that you paid to use the relevant services in the 12 months before the breach

Taking action in case of problems

Before taking action as described below, we’ll provide you with advance notice when reasonably possible, describe the reason for our action, and give you an opportunity to fix the problem, unless we reasonably believe that doing so would:

  • cause harm or liability to a user, third party, or Metaconex

  • Violate the law or a legal enforcement authority’s order

  • Compromise an investigation

  • Compromise the operation, integrity, or security of our services

Removing your content

If we reasonably believe that any of your content breaches these terms, service-specific additional terms or policies, violates applicable law, or could harm our users, third parties, or Metaconex, then we reserve the right to take down some or all of that content in accordance with applicable law. Examples include child pornography, content that facilitates human trafficking or harassment, terrorist content, and content that infringes someone else’s intellectual property rights.
You can review the Metaconex Content Policy to understand how we remove some or all of your content.

Suspending or terminating your access to Metaconex services

Metaconex reserves the right to suspend or terminate your access to the services or delete your Metaconex Account if any of these things happen:

  • You materially or repeatedly breach these terms, service-specific additional terms or policies

  • We’re required to do so to comply with a legal requirement or a court order

  • We reasonably believe that your conduct causes harm or liability to a user, third party, or Metaconex — for example, by hacking, cheating, phishing, harassing, spamming, misleading others, or scraping content that doesn’t belong to you

For more information about why we disable accounts and what happens when we do, see this Help Center page. If you believe your Metaconex Account has been suspended or terminated in error, you can appeal.

Of course, you’re always free to stop using our services at any time. If you do stop using a service, we’d appreciate knowing why so that we can continue improving our services.

Settling disputes, governing law, and courts

For information about how to contact Metaconex, please visit our contact page.

Hong Kong law will govern all disputes arising out of or relating to these terms, service-specific additional terms, or any related services, regardless of conflict of laws rules. 

To the extent that applicable local law prevents certain disputes from being resolved in a Hong Kong court, then you can file those disputes in your local courts. Likewise, if applicable local law prevents your local court from applying Hong Kong law to resolve these disputes, then these disputes will be governed by the applicable local laws of your country, state, or other place of residence.

About these terms

By law, you have certain rights that can’t be limited by a contract like these terms of service. These terms are in no way intended to restrict those rights.

These terms describe the relationship between you and Metaconex. They don’t create any legal rights for other people or organizations, even if others benefit from that relationship under these terms.

We want to make these terms easy to understand, so we’ve used examples from our services. But not all services mentioned may be available in your country.

If these terms conflict with the service-specific additional terms, the additional terms will govern for that service.

If it turns out that a particular term is not valid or enforceable, this will not affect any other terms.

If you don’t follow these terms or the service-specific additional terms, and we don’t take action right away, that doesn’t mean we’re giving up any rights that we may have, such as taking action in the future.

We may update these terms and service-specific additional terms to reflect changes in our services or how we do business — for example, when we add new services, features, technologies, pricing, or benefits (or remove old ones), for legal, regulatory, or security reasons, or to prevent abuse or harm.

We may change the terms and conditions of service at any time without prior notice. You will receive an email notifying you of this change. Please check your inbox or spam mailbox for timely updates on the latest policies for the services you are using on Metaconex. If you don’t agree to the new terms, you should remove your content and stop using the services. You can also end your relationship with us at any time by closing your Metaconex Account.