Terms of Service

01

What Culture-Watch does

Culture-Watch studies consequential judgments that markets, institutions, technologies and people are already making without adequate instruments for understanding them. We publish Intelligence and essays, carry out Research, and, through Practice, examine real decisions for organizations using methods, evidence standards and interpretive principles we can already defend.

Intelligence records and Research on the site are open to everyone. Research is a state of our work, not a product sold on the site. Essays are open to subscribers. Organizations can bring us a question through the request form.

We may change, suspend or stop any part of the site, the subscription or our published work at any time.

02

Who may use the site

You must be at least 18 years old to subscribe or to send us a request.

03

The essay subscription

Subscribing is free. When you subscribe, you agree to give accurate information about yourself and to subscribe only with an email address that belongs to you.

Your access is personal to you. It works through a cookie on your device, and you can open it on another device by signing in with a code we email to you. Please do not share your access or help anyone get around it.

We may end or suspend a subscription if these Terms are broken, or if we stop offering subscriptions. If we ever introduce a paid option, we will tell you the price and terms first, and nothing will be charged unless you expressly agree to it.

04

Requests and engagements

Sending a request does not create an engagement and does not oblige either of us to work together. A person at Culture-Watch reads every request and decides whether it is a question we can examine. We may decline a request for any reason.

Practice applies methods, evidence standards and interpretive principles we can already defend. If your question depends on something our existing evidence or methods cannot adequately establish, it is a Research question, and we will say so. Research questions are not sold as a capability we already have. A Research question that reaches us through a request is handled like any other request.

Practice work examines a business, not a person. We read businesses from the public record, and we do not read a named private person for anyone.

If we agree to work together, on Practice or on Research, the engagement will be governed by a separate written agreement. That agreement will set out the scope, the fee and the terms that apply to the work, including confidentiality, who receives the work, and how any material you supply is handled. Where that agreement and these Terms differ, the agreement controls for that work.

05

What you send us

When you send us a request or write to us, you confirm that you are entitled to share what you send, and that sharing it does not break any obligation you owe to someone else. Please do not send information that you have promised someone else to keep secret, or sensitive personal information about other people.

We use what you send in a request to decide whether and how we can help, to respond to you, and, if we agree to work together, to prepare the engagement. We share it only with the people at Culture-Watch and the service providers who need it to handle your request, as described in our Privacy Policy. We do not publish your request, or identify you or your organization in anything we publish, without your permission.

If you send us comments or suggestions about the site or our published work, as distinct from a request, we may use them without any obligation to you.

06

Our published work

Our Intelligence, essays and Research are analysis and opinion. They are based on the evidence available when we publish, and we separate what we observed from what we inferred and say what remains uncertain.

They are not financial, investment, legal or other professional advice, and they are not a recommendation to take or avoid any particular decision. Calls and forecasts are judgments. They can be wrong, and we grade them in public. Please do not rely on our published work as the only basis for a decision.

We keep our published record as filed. When we find an error, we correct it openly and say what changed; we do not quietly rewrite what we published.

07

Intellectual property

The text, graphics, design, the Culture-Watch name and wordmark, and the other material on the site belong to us or to the people who license them to us. Photographs and other third-party material belong to their rights holders. We use them under license or because they are in the public domain, and we credit them where they appear and at culture-watch.com/about#credits. These Terms give you no rights in any of that material except those set out here.

You may read our work, link to any page, and quote short passages for commentary, criticism, news reporting, teaching or research, provided you credit Culture-Watch and link to the source. You may not republish whole essays, Intelligence records or substantial parts of them, remove credits or notices, or use our name or wordmark in a way that suggests we endorse you, your organization or your product.

We expressly reserve all rights to use our content for text and data mining, including the training of artificial intelligence models. This is a reservation of rights for the purposes of Article 4(3) of Directive (EU) 2019/790. Nothing in these Terms limits any use the law allows without permission, such as fair use.

08

Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• copy, scrape or download the site or its content in bulk, or access it with automated tools, except for search engine indexing that follows our robots.txt file;
• use our content to train artificial intelligence models or to build datasets or competing products, without our written permission;
• get around the subscription, share your access, or use another person's details or an email address that is not yours;
• send false information, or send a request in someone else's name;
• interfere with the site, probe or test its security, or try to reach parts of it or data that are not meant for you;
• use the site to break the law, to harass anyone, or to infringe anyone's rights; or
• present yourself as connected to Culture-Watch, or present our work as endorsing you, your organization or your product, when it does not.

If you break these rules, we may suspend or end your access.

09

Links to other sites

Our work links to sources and other websites. We do not control them and are not responsible for their content or their practices.

10

Disclaimers

We work to get things right, but we provide the site and our published work "as is" and "as available". To the fullest extent the law allows, we make no warranties, express or implied, about accuracy, completeness, availability, or fitness for a particular purpose. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain warranties to be excluded, so some of these exclusions may not apply to you.

11

Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, Culture-Watch is not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits, revenue, data or goodwill, arising from your use of the site or our published work.

To the fullest extent the law allows, our total liability to you for all claims arising from your use of the site is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us for use of the site in the twelve months before the claim, and one hundred US dollars.

Nothing in these Terms limits liability for fraud, gross negligence or willful misconduct, or any other liability that cannot be limited by law. Liability for any engagement is governed by the engagement agreement.

12

Responsibility for misuse

To the extent the law allows, if you use the site in breach of section 8 and someone brings a claim against Culture-Watch as a result, you are responsible for the losses and reasonable costs that follow from your breach.

13

Ending your use

You can stop using the site at any time, and you can ask us to end your subscription and delete your details as described in our Privacy Policy. We may suspend or end your access if you break these Terms, or if we stop offering the site or the subscription. Sections 5 to 7 and 10 to 16 continue to apply after your use ends.

14

Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of New York, without regard to its conflict of law rules. If a dispute arises, please write to us first at hello@culture-watch.com; we will try to resolve it with you informally within 30 days. Any dispute that is not resolved will be decided exclusively by the state and federal courts located in New York County, New York, and you and we agree to their jurisdiction.

If you are a consumer living in the European Union or the United Kingdom, you keep the protection of the mandatory laws of the country where you live, and you may bring proceedings in the courts there.

15

Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms. We will post the updated version on this page and change the effective date. If a change is material, we will say so on this page at least 14 days before it takes effect. If you keep using the site after a change takes effect, the updated Terms apply to you from that date. Changes do not apply to disputes that arose before they took effect.

16

General

These Terms and, for any engagement, the engagement agreement are the whole agreement between you and us about the site. If any part of these Terms cannot be enforced, the rest remains in effect. If we do not enforce a term straight away, we have not given up the right to enforce it later. We may transfer these Terms as part of a reorganization, merger or sale of our business; you may not transfer them without our written agreement. Nothing in these Terms creates a partnership, agency or employment relationship.

17

Contact

Questions about these Terms, and legal notices: hello@culture-watch.com