Terms of Service

1. Acceptance of Terms

By accessing or using ThePhilosopher.AI, you agree to these Terms and confirm that:

• You are at least 18 years old or the age of majority in your jurisdiction, whichever is higher.
• You will use the platform only for lawful philosophical learning, research, writing, and discourse.
• You will not use the platform to infringe intellectual-property, privacy, publicity, contractual, or other rights.
• You understand that some features require separate consent or rights attestations before use.

2. Nature of the Service

ThePhilosopher.AI provides tools for philosophical reading, discussion, extraction, argument analysis, citation, note-taking, and AI-assisted research. The platform is not a law firm, university, library, publisher, or archive. Outputs may be incomplete, inaccurate, or inappropriate for your purpose, and you remain responsible for reviewing all outputs before relying on them.

3. Accounts, Eligibility, and Regional Availability

We may allow, restrict, suspend, or disable features based on your signup IP region, active/session IP region, declared country, billing country if available, user role, account history, legal requirements, or compliance risk. Private Library, Vault Connector, and upload-to-access features may be unavailable in some jurisdictions until counsel approves local rollout.

Administrative or test access may be used for maintenance, security, legal verification, and quality assurance. Administrative access does not authorize production use by users in restricted jurisdictions.

4. Your Content

You retain whatever rights you hold in content you create or upload. You grant ThePhilosopher.AI a limited, non-exclusive license to host, store, process, display, transmit, index, retrieve, embed, transform for technical operation, and otherwise use your content only as needed to provide, secure, debug, improve, and support the platform features you use, subject to your account settings and feature-specific consents.

You represent that you have all rights, permissions, licenses, consents, and legal bases required for content you submit, including the rights necessary for ThePhilosopher.AI to process that content under these Terms.

5. Private Library, Vaults, and Uploaded Works

Private Library and Vault features let you upload or sync works for your own private research, study, criticism, scholarship, commentary, writing, and citation workflows. Uploaded full text is stored in a per-user-isolated library. It is not shared with other users, not added to the public corpus, and not used to train models that serve other users.

Private author/persona doppelgangers use prompt orchestration and retrieval over works available in your own Private Library. They are private reading companion features, not model fine-tuning, pretraining, or model-weight training.

For each upload, sync, or upload-to-access action, you must have a legal basis to upload the material and permit ThePhilosopher.AI to store, index, retrieve, and process it for your private use. A legal basis may include copyright ownership, an enforceable license, public-domain status, or an applicable research, fair-use, fair-dealing, text-and-data-mining, data-analysis, or other permitted-use exception in your jurisdiction.

Owning or lawfully accessing a copy does not always give you permission to upload it to a third-party SaaS platform or process it with AI tools.

University, library, employer, publisher, platform, or database access is not automatically disqualifying. Many institutions allow use of approved AI research tools, and some publishers or database providers permit text-and-data mining or private research processing under specific terms. You are responsible for checking the terms that apply to your copy or access path. You must not upload or sync material when those terms or policies prohibit third-party SaaS upload, cloud storage, indexing, retrieval-augmented AI processing, text-and-data mining, or redistribution.

ThePhilosopher.AI relies on your rights attestations and does not independently verify the copyright, license, public-domain, or permitted-use status of uploaded works.

6. AI Providers, Model Training, and Subprocessors

Some features may send prompts, excerpts, embeddings, metadata, or generated outputs to AI or infrastructure providers so the feature can work. We will not knowingly route Private Library or Vault content to a provider whose then-current terms allow that provider to use submitted content to train or improve general models without our explicit opt-in.

A future separate user-owned-work model-training feature may allow you to fine-tune or customize your own AI on works you created or otherwise fully control. That feature is not part of the current Private Library / Vault MVP and would require a separate opt-in and a separate rights attestation confirming that the training materials are not third-party copyrighted or access-restricted materials unless you have express model-training rights for that use.

Provider-side security, abuse-monitoring, legal-hold, support, and limited operational retention may still occur under a provider's API or enterprise terms. We maintain a provider review process for training use, retention, deletion, and confidentiality terms. If a provider's terms become incompatible with this posture, we may disable affected features or route them to another provider.

7. Copyright Notices, Counter-Notices, and Repeat Infringers

ThePhilosopher.AI maintains a copyright compliance program, including a Designated Agent registered with the U.S. Copyright Office, a public Copyright/DMCA page at /legal/copyright, a counter-notice process, an audit trail, and immediate disabling of retrieval and AI processing for content identified in a compliant takedown notice pending review.

We use a three-strike baseline for repeat copyright infringement: three valid, non-withdrawn, unrebutted copyright strikes within a rolling 12-month period may result in account termination. We may terminate earlier if required by law, if infringement is knowing or egregious, or if an account attempts to evade takedown or access controls. Notices withdrawn by the claimant, rejected after review, or defeated by successful counter-notice are not counted as strikes.

8. Deletion, Retention, and Attestation Revocation

If you revoke a Private Library or Vault attestation, we will immediately disable the affected content from retrieval and AI processing, retain it in inaccessible soft-delete for 7-14 days for correction or reconnection, then delete it from active systems. Backup copies expire on normal backup rotation. Legal, security, abuse-prevention, billing, and audit records may be retained as required or permitted by law.

If content is disabled because of a copyright notice, restoration is governed by the applicable counter-notice process, claimant withdrawal, or legal resolution.

9. Prohibited Uses

You may not:

• Upload or sync content without a legal basis for the uses described in these Terms.
• Circumvent technological protection measures, access controls, paywalls, license restrictions, or regional restrictions.
• Share accounts to let others access copyrighted material through your account.
• Use the platform for harassment, abuse, impersonation, fraud, scraping, spam, malware, or unlawful surveillance.
• Attempt to compromise platform security, rate limits, authorization, or per-user data isolation.
• Use outputs as a substitute for professional advice where professional judgment is required.

10. Research and Publication

We may use aggregated or anonymized platform telemetry and non-identifying research metrics to understand and improve philosophical learning workflows. We will not publish your private uploaded full text, personal notes, or identifiable private-library content without your explicit consent or a legal obligation.

11. No Warranties

THE PLATFORM IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE" WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED.

We disclaim warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, accuracy, reliability, security, availability, and error-free operation to the maximum extent permitted by law.

12. Limitation of Liability

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, THEPHILOSOPHER.AI AND ITS TEAM WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR FOR LOSS OF DATA, PROFITS, GOODWILL, OPPORTUNITY, OR USE.

13. Indemnification

You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless ThePhilosopher.AI and its team from claims, damages, liabilities, costs, and expenses arising from your content, uploads, rights attestations, use of the platform, violation of these Terms, or violation of another party's rights.

14. Suspension and Termination

We may suspend, restrict, or terminate access to any account or feature if we believe it is necessary for security, legal compliance, rights enforcement, abuse prevention, platform integrity, or research operations.

15. Changes to Terms

We may update these Terms as the platform evolves. Continued use after changes become effective constitutes acceptance of the updated Terms. Material changes may require renewed acceptance.

16. Governing Law

These Terms are drafted for a U.S.-operated research platform and will be finalized by counsel before public launch. Local mandatory law may apply regardless of this clause.

17. Contact

For questions about these Terms, contact the research team through the platform's contact page. Copyright notices should use the Copyright/DMCA page at /legal/copyright.