Terms of Service

1. The service

Pithos ("we", "us") is currently provided by its founder, ahead of formal incorporation as a registered company — we'll name that entity here once it exists. Pithos lets an Institution ("you", "your") record, organise and manage information about the objects, documents and other items in its collection, and manage staff and volunteer access to that information. Each Institution's data is kept separate from every other Institution's.

2. Accounts and your responsibilities

• You're responsible for the accuracy of the data you put into Pithos, and for who you give access to it.
• Your admin users control who on your staff can sign in and what they can do — assigning roles correctly (viewer, contributor, manager, admin) is your responsibility.
• You must keep account credentials confidential, and tell us promptly if you believe an account has been compromised.
• You're responsible for complying with any law that applies to the data you store in Pithos, including data protection law covering the staff, volunteer or third-party personal data you choose to record.

3. Your data, and our licence to use it

You own the data you put into Pithos. We don't claim any ownership over your collection records, images, or any other content you upload. You grant us only the limited licence needed to store, process, back up and display that data back to you and your authorised users, for the purpose of providing the service — nothing more.

Where we act as your data processor for personal data within your collection or staff records, that's governed by our Data Processing Agreement, which we are finalising and which will take precedence over these terms for that data once it's in place.

4. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• Use Pithos for anything unlawful, or to store content you don't have the right to store
• Attempt to access another Institution's data, or any part of the system you haven't been given access to
• Attempt to disrupt, overload, or reverse-engineer the service
• Resell or provide the service to a third party as your own product without our agreement

5. Fees

Pithos is currently provided free of charge, during this early phase. If we introduce fees in future, we'll update this section and give existing Institutions reasonable advance notice before any charge applies to them.

6. Availability and support

We aim to keep Pithos available and performant, but we don't promise uninterrupted, error-free service. We'll give reasonable notice of planned maintenance where practical. We don't currently offer a formal service-level agreement.

7. Intellectual property

Pithos — the software, its design, and everything about how it works — is our property (or our licensors'). These terms don't give you any rights to it beyond using the service as intended. Nothing here affects your ownership of your own data, as set out in Section 3.

8. Confidentiality

Each party will keep the other's confidential information confidential, and use it only as needed to perform this agreement. This doesn't apply to information that's already public, or that a party already lawfully held before receiving it from the other.

9. Disclaimers and limitation of liability

Pithos is a record-keeping aid for your collection — a tool to help you organise and track information you're responsible for, not a legal system of record and not a substitute for your own professional judgement, insurance, or governance procedures. In particular, fields recording provenance, transfer of title, or governing-body approval reflect what your own staff entered; we don't verify their accuracy, and you remain responsible for your Institution's own legal and accreditation obligations around collection title and provenance.

To the maximum extent the law allows: the service is provided "as is", without warranties of any kind; we are not liable for indirect, incidental, or consequential losses (including loss of data, loss of profit, or reputational harm); and our total liability for any claim arising from these terms or the service is capped at the greater of the fees you paid us in the 12 months before the claim arose, or AUD $100. Nothing in these terms limits liability that can't lawfully be limited, such as liability for our own fraud or, where applicable, death or personal injury caused by our negligence.

10. Indemnification

You agree to indemnify us against claims arising from data you upload without the right to do so, or from your breach of Section 2 or 4 above.

11. Term, termination, and getting your data back

• Either party may terminate with 30 days' written notice.
• We may suspend or terminate an account immediately for a serious breach of these terms, including any attempt to access another Institution's data.
• After termination, you'll have 90 days to export your data, after which we'll delete it in line with our Privacy Policy — except records we're required to keep for our own accountability, as described there.

12. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms from time to time. We'll tell your admin users about material changes before they take effect; continuing to use Pithos after that means you accept the updated terms.

13. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of New South Wales, Australia, and any dispute will be handled by the courts there, unless the law requires otherwise.

14. General

If any part of these terms is found unenforceable, the rest still stands. These terms, together with our Privacy Policy and any Data Processing Agreement, are the entire agreement between us about the service. You may not assign this agreement without our consent; we may assign it as part of a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets.

15. Contact us

Questions about these terms: alicw8@gmail.com.