Terms of Service

1. Agreement to these terms

These Terms of Service (“Terms”) govern your access to and use of the Script Meridian website at www.scriptmeridian.org, the Script Meridian community list, the resource catalogue, and any other service we make available that links to this page (together, the “Services”).

By accessing or using the Services you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, please do not use the Services. If you are agreeing on behalf of an organisation, you confirm that you have authority to bind that organisation, and “you” then means that organisation.

Consulting engagements are governed by a separate signed agreement. Where that agreement conflicts with these Terms, the signed agreement prevails for the work it covers. These Terms continue to govern your use of the website and the community list.

2. Definitions

• Content — text, images, code, data and other material made available through the Services, whether by us or by users.
• User Content — Content you submit, including community posts, catalogue submissions and messages sent through our forms.
• Community list — the discussion list described on the community page, including its web archive.
• Engagement — paid consulting work performed under a separate signed agreement.
• Intellectual Property Rights — copyright, database rights, trade marks, design rights, patents and all equivalent rights anywhere in the world.

3. Who may use the Services

You may use the Services if you are at least 16 years old and are not barred from doing so under applicable law. If you are using the Services on behalf of an organisation, you must be authorised to accept these Terms for it.

Community membership is granted at our discretion and may be declined or withdrawn. We will give a reason where we are able to, and a member whose access is withdrawn may request an export of their own posts.

4. Acceptable use

You agree not to do any of the following, and not to help or permit anyone else to:

1. Break any applicable law, or infringe anyone's rights, including Intellectual Property Rights and rights of privacy.
2. Post content that is unlawful, defamatory, harassing, abusive, deceptive, or that promotes discrimination or violence.
3. Impersonate another person or organisation, or misrepresent your affiliation with one.
4. Upload malware, or post code whose purpose is to damage, disable or gain unauthorised access to any system.
5. Probe, scan or test the vulnerability of our systems, or breach any security measure, except under the responsible-disclosure terms in section 11.
6. Send unsolicited bulk messages, advertising or recruitment material through the community list outside the monthly open thread.
7. Scrape, crawl or harvest the Services at a rate that degrades them for others, or circumvent any rate limit. Reasonable, well-identified crawling that respects robots.txt is fine.
8. Collect personal data of other users, including email addresses, for any purpose not obviously connected with the discussion in which it appeared.
9. Use the Services to develop a competing product by copying their structure or content wholesale.
10. Remove, obscure or alter any proprietary notice.

We may remove content or suspend access where we reasonably believe these Terms have been breached. Where the breach is not serious we will usually contact you first; where it is serious or ongoing we may act immediately and explain afterwards.

5. User Content and the licence you grant

You keep ownership of your User Content. You are responsible for it, including having the rights necessary to post it.

By submitting User Content to the community list or the catalogue, you grant Script Meridian a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual and irrevocable licence to host, store, reproduce, display, adapt for formatting purposes, and distribute that User Content as part of the Services and their archive. This licence exists so that we can run the list, keep the archive readable and searchable, and keep old threads from breaking. It does not permit us to sell your content or to use it in advertising.

The licence is irrevocable in respect of material already published, because removing one message from a threaded archive damages the record for everyone else. If you ask us to delete your account we will anonymise your posts — replacing your display name and address — rather than deleting the text, unless the text itself must be removed for legal reasons.

You may submit corrections, and you may ask for a post to be removed where it contains information published in error. We consider such requests in good faith and act on them promptly where the harm is real.

6. Our intellectual property, and what you may do with it

The Services, including the site design, text, illustrations, code and the structure of the resource catalogue, are owned by Script Meridian or its licensors and are protected by Intellectual Property Rights. The original 2002 visual design is by James Spahr and is used with permission.

Subject to these Terms, we grant you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to access and use the Services for your own personal or internal business purposes.

You may, without asking: read, print and share links to anything published here; quote reasonable extracts from our articles with attribution and a link; and use any code sample published in an article in your own projects, including commercially, with no attribution required.

You may not, without written permission: republish an entire article; use our name, logo or visual identity in a way that suggests endorsement or affiliation; or use the Services or their content to train a machine-learning model intended for commercial distribution.

“Script Meridian” and the meridian globe mark are trade marks of Script Meridian. Other names used on this site — including Frontier, Radio UserLand, Manila and Conversant — belong to their respective owners and are used descriptively. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by or acting on behalf of those owners.

7. Engagements, quotations and payment

Prices shown on the services page are indicative bands, are exclusive of value added tax and other applicable taxes, and do not constitute an offer capable of acceptance. A binding engagement arises only when we have issued a written scope and you have accepted it in writing.

• Invoicing. Fixed-fee work is invoiced 50% on commencement and 50% on delivery. Monthly services are invoiced in advance. Time-and-materials work is invoiced monthly in arrears.
• Payment terms. 21 days from the invoice date, unless the signed agreement says otherwise.
• Late payment. We may charge statutory interest and reasonable recovery costs, and may suspend work after giving 14 days' written notice.
• Expenses. Travel and third-party costs are charged at cost and only where agreed in advance in writing.
• Change requests. Work outside the agreed scope is quoted separately before it starts. We do not perform unscoped work and invoice for it afterwards.
• Cancellation. Either party may terminate an engagement on 14 days' written notice. You pay for work performed and for non-cancellable commitments made in reliance on the engagement; we refund anything paid for work not performed.

Where you are a consumer entering an engagement at a distance, you may have a statutory right to cancel within 14 days. Where you ask us to begin within that period, you accept that the right to cancel is lost once the work is complete, and that you must pay for work performed if you cancel part-way.

8. Deliverables and ownership of work product

On payment in full for an engagement, you own the deliverables created specifically for you, including source code, documentation and reports. We assign those rights to you outright.

We retain ownership of our pre-existing materials, general know-how, and any tools, libraries or techniques of general application developed before or during the engagement. We grant you a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive licence to use those materials to the extent they are embedded in your deliverables.

Nothing in an engagement restricts our right to work for other clients, including in the same sector, or to use the skills and experience gained. We treat your confidential information as confidential indefinitely.

We may describe an engagement in general terms as a reference — the sector, the nature of the problem and the outcome — only with your prior written consent, and never including confidential detail.

9. Disclaimers

The Services and all Content are provided “as is” and “as available”. To the fullest extent permitted by law, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title and non-infringement.

Specifically, we do not warrant that: the Services will be uninterrupted, timely or error-free; defects will be corrected; the Services are free of harmful components; or that any Content is accurate, complete or current.

Articles and code samples are published for information. They describe systems that vary between versions, platforms and configurations. Test everything in an environment you can afford to break before applying it to a production system. Nothing on this site is legal, financial, tax or professional advice, and nothing creates a professional relationship between us.

Links to third-party sites and descriptions of third-party software are provided for convenience. We do not control them, do not endorse them, and are not responsible for their content, availability or practices.

10. Limitation of liability

Nothing in these Terms limits or excludes liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or any other liability that cannot lawfully be limited. If you are a consumer, your statutory rights are unaffected and the limitations below apply only to the extent permitted by consumer law.

Subject to that, and to the fullest extent permitted by law:

1. We are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, punitive or exemplary loss, nor for loss of profit, revenue, business, anticipated savings, goodwill or reputation, however caused and whether or not foreseeable.
2. We are not liable for loss or corruption of data, except where it results from our failure to exercise reasonable skill and care under a paid engagement, and then only to the extent the data could not have been restored from a backup you were responsible for maintaining.
3. Our total aggregate liability arising out of or in connection with your use of the free Services is limited to one hundred pounds sterling (£100).
4. Our total aggregate liability arising out of or in connection with a paid engagement is limited to the total fees actually paid by you under that engagement in the twelve months preceding the event giving rise to the claim.

These limitations apply regardless of the form of action, whether in contract, tort (including negligence), breach of statutory duty or otherwise, and survive termination.

11. Security research

We welcome good-faith security research. If you follow the terms below, we will not pursue legal action against you and will treat your report as authorised:

• Report promptly to [email protected] and give us reasonable time to fix the issue before disclosing it publicly — 90 days is our default expectation, and we will usually be faster.
• Do not access, modify or delete data belonging to anyone else, and stop as soon as you have established that a vulnerability exists.
• Do not degrade the Services: no denial-of-service testing, no automated scanning at damaging volume, no social engineering of our staff or suppliers.
• Do not demand payment in exchange for withholding disclosure.

We acknowledge every report within 48 hours, keep you informed, and credit you when a fix ships unless you prefer otherwise.

12. Suspension, termination and survival

You may stop using the Services at any time. You may leave the community list with a single email, and you may ask us to close your account.

We may suspend or terminate your access immediately, without notice, if we reasonably believe you have materially breached these Terms, or if we are required to by law. For less serious breaches we will give notice and an opportunity to put things right.

We may discontinue any part of the Services, or the Services as a whole. Where we do so, we will give at least 90 days' notice for anything you rely on, and we will make an export of your own content available.

Sections 5 (licence in User Content, for material already published), 6, 8, 9, 10, 13 and 14 survive termination, together with any provision that by its nature should survive.

13. Governing law and disputes

These Terms and any dispute arising out of or in connection with them — including non-contractual disputes — are governed by the laws of the State of Maryland, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules.

The courts of the State of Maryland have exclusive jurisdiction, except that: if you are a consumer resident in the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area, you may bring proceedings in the courts of your country of residence and benefit from any mandatory protections of its law; and either party may seek injunctive relief in any court of competent jurisdiction to protect Intellectual Property Rights or confidential information.

Before commencing proceedings, both parties agree to attempt to resolve the dispute in good faith by writing to the other with a clear statement of the issue and allowing 30 days for a response. Most disagreements are resolved at this stage and we would rather they were.

14. General

• Entire agreement. These Terms, together with the privacy and cookie policies and any signed engagement agreement, are the entire agreement between us on their subject matter and replace all previous discussions.
• Severability. If any provision is found unenforceable, it is modified to the minimum extent necessary or severed, and the remainder continues in force.
• No waiver. A failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it.
• Assignment. You may not assign these Terms without our written consent. We may assign them to an affiliate or in connection with a merger or sale of assets, on notice to you.
• Force majeure. Neither party is liable for failure to perform caused by events beyond its reasonable control, provided it notifies the other promptly and mitigates.
• Third parties. No one other than the parties has any right to enforce these Terms.
• Notices. Notices to us go to [email protected] and to the postal address in the sidebar. Notices to you go to the email address on your record.
• Changes. We may update these Terms. Material changes take effect 30 days after we publish them and notify list members and clients; continued use after that date is acceptance. The version and date at the top of this page are authoritative.