Terms of Use

PLEASE READ THESE TERMS OF USE CAREFULLY BEFORE USING THIS WEBSITE

Effective date: 1st October 2024

These terms of use (“Terms”) tell you the rules for using our website at https://koto.studio/ (“our site”). If you are a German resident and/or you are accessing our site from Germany, these Terms do not apply to you.

1.0 Who we are and how to contact us

Our site is operated by Koto Studio Ltd (“we” and “our”). We are registered in England and Wales under company number 09297454 and have our registered office at 1st Floor, The Works, 127-131 Great Suffolk Street, London, SE1 1PP, United Kingdom.

To contact us, please email website@koto.studio

2.0 By using our site, you accept these Terms

By using our site, you confirm that you have read and accept these Terms, that you are the age of legal majority or older and that you agree to comply with these Terms.

If you do not agree to these Terms, you must not use our site.

We recommend that you retain a copy of these Terms for future reference.

3.0 There are other terms that apply to you

Additional terms and conditions may apply to certain features of our site. When presented to you, you must agree to the additional terms before using the features to which they apply. These Terms and the additional terms will apply equally unless an additional term is irrevocably inconsistent with these Terms, in which case the additional term will prevail but solely to the extent of the inconsistency. By using our site, you confirm that you have read and considered the terms of our Privacy Policy and agree to the collection, use and disclosure of your information in accordance with those policies, subject to our compliance with law generally.

These Terms refer to our Privacy Policy (https://koto.studio/privacy-policy/) which explains how we collect, use and store your personal data. Our Privacy Policy also applies to your use of our site.

4.0 We may make changes to these Terms

The Effective Date of these Terms is set forth at the top of this webpage. We may amend these Terms from time to time as we add new features or other changes to our site. When we modify these Terms, we will update the Effective Date and, when possible, we also will provide you with advance written notice of our changes. Your continued use of our site after the Effective Date constitutes your acceptance of the amended Terms. The amended Terms supersede all previous versions of or agreements, notices or statements about our site.

Every time you wish to use our site, please check these Terms to ensure you understand the terms that apply.

5.0 We may make changes to our site

We may update and change our site from time to time to reflect changes to our services, our users’ needs and our business priorities.

6.0 We may suspend or withdraw access to our site

Our site is made available free of charge.

We do not guarantee that our site, or any content on it, will always be available or be uninterrupted. We may suspend or withdraw or restrict the availability of all or any part of our site at any time and without notice to you.

You are also responsible for ensuring that all persons who access our site through your internet connection are aware of these Terms and other applicable terms, and that they comply with them.

7.0 We may transfer this agreement to someone else

We may transfer or assign any of our rights and obligations under this agreement, in whole or in part, by operation of law or otherwise, without notice to or consent from you.

8.0 How you may use material on our site

We are the owner or the licensee of all intellectual property rights in our site, and in the information, graphic, artwork, text, video clip, audio clip, trade mark, logo and other material published on it. Those works are protected by copyright, trade mark and other intellectual property laws and treaties around the world.

You may print off one copy, and may download extracts, of any page(s) from our site for your personal use subject to these Terms. All other rights are reserved by us. Nothing contained in these Terms grants by implication, estoppel or otherwise, any licence or right in or to our trade marks, logos or service marks (“our Marks”), patents, trade secrets or other intellectual property embodied in our site. Unauthorised use of any of our Marks or our other intellectual property may breach law.

You must not modify the paper or digital copies of any of our site’s content that you have printed off or downloaded in any way. You must not use any illustrations, photographs, video or audio sequences or any graphics separately from any accompanying text.

Our status (and that of any identified contributors) as the authors of content on our site must always be acknowledged.

You must not use any part of the content on our site for commercial purposes without obtaining a written licence to do so from us and our licensors.
If you print off, copy, download, share or repost any part of our site in breach of these Terms, your right to use our site will cease immediately and you must, at our option, return or destroy any copies of the materials you have made (except that you are permitted to retain a copy of these Terms).

9.0 No text or data mining or web scraping

You must not conduct, facilitate, authorise or permit any text or data mining or web scraping in relation to our site or any services provided via, or in relation to, our site for any purpose, including but not limited to the development, training, fine-tuning or validation of any machine-based system that is designed to operate with varying levels of autonomy and that may exhibit adaptiveness after deployment, and that, for explicit or implicit objectives, infers, from the input it receives, how to generate outputs such as predictions, content, recommendations, or decisions that can influence physical or virtual environments (“AI System”). This includes using (or permitting, authorising or attempting the use of):

• any “robot”, “bot”, “spider”, “scraper” or other automated device, program, tool, algorithm, code, process or methodology to access, obtain, copy, monitor or republish any portion of our site or any data, content, information or services accessed via the site; and
• any automated analytical technique aimed at analysing text and data in digital form to generate information or develop, train, fine-tune or validate any AI System, which includes but is not limited to patterns, trends and correlations.

The provisions in this clause should be treated as an express reservation of our rights in this regard, including for the purposes of Article 4(3) of the Digital Copyright Directive ((EU) 2019/790).

You must not use, and we do not consent to the use of, our site, or any data published by, or contained in, or accessible via, our site or any services provided via, or in relation to, our site for the purposes of developing, training, fine-tuning or validating any AI System.

This clause will not apply insofar as (but only to the extent that) we are unable to exclude or limit text or data mining or web scraping activity by contract under the laws that are applicable to us.

10.0 Acceptable use standards

You agree to not use our site:

• in any way that breaches any applicable local, national or international law or regulation;
• in any way that is unlawful or fraudulent, or has any unlawful or fraudulent purpose or effect;
• to attempt to gain unauthorised access to the our site or our systems or networks through hacking, password mining or any other means;
• to bully, insult, intimidate or humiliate any person or for the purposes of harming or attempting to harm any person in any way;
• in any way that is defamatory or obscene or is discriminatory on the basis of race, gender, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender reassignment, disability, religion (including lack of religion) or faith;
• to collect or store personal data about any other user without their express prior written consent or otherwise breach the privacy or other rights of any other person or other third party;
• to transmit, or procure the sending of, any unsolicited or unauthorised advertising or commercial or promotional material or any other form of solicitation;
• to remove any copyright, trade mark or other proprietary rights notice contained in our site or its contents;
• to reverse engineer, decompile, dissemble, decipher, decode or otherwise attempt to derive or gain access to the source or object code used on our site;
• to damage, disable, overburden or impair our servers or networks or interfere with any other party’s use and enjoyment of our site;
• to reformat or frame any portion of the web pages that are part of our site;
• to rent, lease, lend, sell, assign, publish, transfer or otherwise make available our site or any feature or functionality of our site to any third party for any reason; or
• to reproduce, duplicate, copy, modify, adapt, translate, sub-license, broadcast, distribute, sell, re-brand or re-sell all or any part of our site.

You must comply with these standards in spirit as well as to the letter. We have the discretion to terminate your access to our site without notice for any breach of the above rules.

You are solely responsible for all charges, fees and other costs related to use of our site. If you access and use our site on your smartphone, tablet or other mobile device, you agree that you are solely responsible for all charges that you incur from your mobile service provider.

11.0 Rules about linking to our site

You may link to our home page, provided you do so in a way that is fair and legal and does not damage our reputation or take advantage of it.

You must not establish a link in such a way as to suggest any form of association, approval or endorsement on our part where none exists.

You must not establish a link to our site in any website that is not owned by you.

Our site must not be framed on any other website, nor may you create a link to any part of our site other than the home page.

We reserve the right to withdraw linking permission without notice.

The website in which you are linking must comply in all respects with the standards set out in ‘Acceptable use standards’ above.

12.0 Our trade marks are registered

The word mark and figurative mark for “KOTO” are registered trade marks of Koto. You are not permitted to use them without our approval, unless they are part of material you are using as permitted under ‘How you may use material on our site’.

13.0 Communications via our site

Whenever you make any form of communication with Koto via our site (including to any of the email addresses provided on our site), you must comply with the standards set out in ‘Acceptable use standards’ above.

You warrant that the content of any such communication complies with those standards, that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content (including without limitation all copyrights) and that the content does not breach the rights of any other person or entity, such as rights of privacy and publicity. You are liable to us and indemnify us for any breach of these warranties. This means you will be responsible for any loss or damage we suffer as a result of your breach of warranties.

We will consider any content that you communicate to us via our site (including to any email address provided on our site) to be non-confidential. You warrant that you own all intellectual property rights (including without limitation all copyrights) in any content that you communicate to us via our site (including to any email address provided on our site) and you grant to us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable (through multiple tiers), irrevocable licence to use, store, reproduce, perform, import, prepare derivative works of and display that content and to distribute and make it available to others, across all media now known or hereafter developed, for any purpose whatsoever, commercial or otherwise, without compensation to you, forever.

We also have the right to disclose your identity to anyone who is claiming that any content communicated by you to us via our site (including to any email addresses provided on our site) breaches their intellectual property rights or data rights or their right to privacy or confidentiality.

We have the right to remove or delete any content you have shared with us via our site (including to any email address provided on our site) if, in our opinion, such content does not comply with the standards set out in ‘Acceptable use standards’ above.

If you wish to contact us in relation to content you have shared with us via our site, please contact website@koto.studio

14.0 Do not rely on information on this site

The content on our site is provided for general information only. It is not intended to amount to advice on which you should rely. You must obtain professional or specialist advice before taking, or refraining from, any action on the basis of the content on our site.

Although we make reasonable efforts to update the information on our site, we make no representations, warranties or guarantees, whether express or implied, that the content on our site is accurate, complete or up to date.

15.0 We are not responsible for websites we link to

Our site contains links to other websites and resources provided by third parties, including social media. These links are provided for your information only and you access them at your own risk. We do not investigate, verify or monitor linked websites or resources and links should not be interpreted as approval by us of those linked websites or resources or the information you may obtain from them. We have no control over the contents of those websites or resources.

16.0 We are not responsible for viruses

We do not guarantee that our site will be secure or free from bugs or viruses.

You are responsible for configuring your information technology, computer programs and platform to access our site. We do not and cannot guarantee the privacy or security of information provided by you through our site. You should use your own virus protection software. You are responsible for using the precautions and security measures best suited for your situation and intended use of our site.

17.0 You must not introduce viruses

You must not misuse our site by knowingly introducing viruses, trojans, worms, logic bombs or other material that is malicious or technologically harmful, or otherwise harmfully interacting with our site or any part of it. You must not attempt to gain unauthorised access to our site, the server on which our site is stored or any server, computer or database connected to our site or any other equipment or network connected with our site. You must not interfere with, damage or disrupt any software used in the provision of our site or any equipment or network or software owned or used by any third party on which this site relies in any way. You must not attack our site via a denial-of-service attack or a distributed denial-of-service attack. By breaching this provision, you breach applicable law, including the commission of a criminal offence under the Computer Misuse Act 1990 and similar laws throughout the world. We will report any such breach to the relevant law enforcement authorities and we will co-operate with those authorities by disclosing your identity to them. In the event of such a breach, your right to use our site will cease immediately.

18.0 Our responsibility for loss or damage suffered by you

For the avoidance of doubt, nothing in these Terms is intended to exclude, restrict or modify any guarantee, condition, warranty, right or remedy implied or imposed by legislation which cannot be excluded, restricted or modified (“Non-Excludable Term”).

We do not exclude or limit in any way our liability to you where it would be unlawful to do so. This includes liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence or the negligence of our employees, agents or subcontractors and for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation.

To the extent permitted by applicable law, we exclude all implied conditions, warranties, representations or other terms that may apply to our site or any content on it (other than the Non-Excludable Terms).

To the extent permitted by applicable law, we will not be liable to you for any loss or damage, whether in contract, tort (including negligence), breach of statutory duty, or otherwise, even if foreseeable, arising under or in connection with:

• use of, or inability to use, our site; or
• use of or reliance on any content displayed on our site.

To the extent permitted by appliable law, we will not be liable for:

• loss of profits, sales, business, or revenue;
• business interruption;
• loss of anticipated savings;
• loss of business opportunity, goodwill or reputation; or
  any indirect or consequential loss or damage and, where permitted by law, incidental, special and punitive damages.

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, our total liability to you for all other losses arising under or in connection with your access to and use of our site or inability to use our site, whether in contract, tort (including negligence), breach of statutory duty, or otherwise, shall be limited to £500.

OUR SITE AND OTHER CONTENT AVAILABLE THROUGH OUR SITE ARE PROVIDED “AS IS” AND ON AN “AS AVAILABLE” BASIS. EACH PROVISION OF THESE TERMS THAT PROVIDES FOR A LIMITATION OF LIABILITY, DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTIES, OR EXCLUSION OF DAMAGES IS INTENDED TO AND DOES ALLOCATE THE RISKS BETWEEN US UNDER THESE TERMS BUT WILL NOT BE APPLICABLE IF AND WHERE PROHIBITED BY APPLICABLE LAW. THIS ALLOCATION IS AN ESSENTIAL ELEMENT OF THE BASIS OF THE BARGAIN BETWEEN US. EACH OF THESE PROVISIONS IS SEVERABLE AND INDEPENDENT OF ALL OTHER PROVISIONS OF THESE TERMS. THE LIMITATIONS IN THIS SECTION WILL APPLY EVEN IF ANY LIMITED REMEDY FAILS OF ITS ESSENTIAL PURPOSE.

IF YOU ARE A CALIFORNIA RESIDENT, YOU WAIVE YOUR RIGHTS WITH RESPECT TO CALIFORNIA CIVIL CODE SECTION 1542, WHICH SAYS “A GENERAL RELEASE DOES NOT EXTEND TO CLAIMS WHICH THE CREDITOR DOES NOT KNOW OR SUSPECT TO EXIST IN HIS FAVOR AT THE TIME OF EXECUTING THE RELEASE, WHICH, IF KNOWN BY HIM MUST HAVE MATERIALLY AFFECTED HIS SETTLEMENT WITH THE DEBTOR”.

19.0 Which laws apply to disputes arising under these Terms?

These Terms, their subject matter and their formation (and any non-contractual disputes or claims) are governed by English law. We both agree to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of England and Wales.

If you are a resident of the U.S., these Terms are governed by the laws of the State of New York without regard to conflict of law principles. You submit to the personal and exclusive jurisdiction of the state courts and federal courts located within the Borough of Manhattan, New York, for resolution of any lawsuit or court proceeding permitted under these Terms. Any claim or cause of action arising out of or related to use of these Terms must be filed within one year after such claim or cause of action arose or be forever barred. Any claim by you that may arise in connection with these Terms will be compensable by monetary damages and you will in no event be entitled to injunctive or other equitable relief.

WHERE PERMITTED, YOU AGREE THAT WE MAY BRING CLAIMS AGAINST EACH OTHER ONLY ON AN INDIVIDUAL BASIS AND NOT AS A PLAINTIFF OR CLASS MEMBER IN ANY PURPORTED CLASS OR REPRESENTATIVE ACTION OR PROCEEDING.

20.0 Other general provisions that apply to these Terms

These Terms and our Privacy Policy contain the entire understanding by and between us and you with respect to our site and matters contained herein. These Terms inure to the benefit of and are binding on our and your successors and assigns, respectively. If any provision of these Terms is or becomes unenforceable or invalid, the remaining provisions will continue with the same effect as if such unenforceable or invalid provision was not used. If we or you fail to perform any obligation under these Terms and the other party does not enforce such obligation, the failure to enforce on any occasion will not constitute a waiver of any obligation and will not prevent enforcement on any other occasion. Nothing contained in these Terms creates a relationship or partnership, joint venture, or agency between us. If we or you are prevented from performing or unable to perform any obligation under these Terms due to any cause beyond the reasonable control of the party invoking this provision, the affected party’s performance will be extended for the period of delay or inability to perform due to such cause. Headings and captions are for convenience only.