Acceptable Use Policy

1. Scope

This AUP applies to all users of READA (the “Service”), to all content you upload, submit, generate, share, or transmit through the Service (“User Content” and “Generated Output”), and to every interaction you have with the Service and with third parties through it. You are responsible for your own conduct and, where applicable, for the conduct of anyone using the Service under your account or on your behalf.

2. Prohibited — Illegal Activity

You must not use the Service to engage in, facilitate, promote, or assist any activity that is unlawful under applicable law. This includes, without limitation:

• Violating any criminal, civil, regulatory, tax, export-control, sanctions, or anti-money-laundering law.
• Infringing or misappropriating any copyright, trademark, patent, trade secret, moral right, right of publicity, right of privacy, or other proprietary right.
• Defamation, libel, slander, fraud, deception, false advertising, or dissemination of knowingly false information intended to harm a person or entity.
• Harassment, stalking, threatening, bullying, or intimidating any person; incitement to violence or to unlawful discrimination; hate speech targeting protected characteristics.
• Child sexual abuse material (CSAM); non-consensual intimate imagery; content that sexualizes minors in any way.
• Unauthorized collection, scraping, or aggregation of personal data about individuals.

3. Prohibited — Infringing or Unauthorized Content

You must not upload, import, paste, or otherwise submit to READA any content that you do not have the legal right to use, reproduce, translate, process, store, transmit, and otherwise handle through the Service. This includes:

• Copyrighted articles, books, papers, or other works where your use exceeds fair use / fair dealing or the relevant license terms.
• Content obtained in violation of a publisher’s terms of service, paywall, subscription agreement, institutional license, or robots exclusion rules.
• Content subject to a non-disclosure agreement, professional privilege, trade-secret protection, or government classification that you are not authorized to disclose to us or to our third-party AI and document-processing providers.
• Personal data about other people that you are not authorized to process under applicable data-protection law.
• Export-controlled technical data, regulated health information, payment card data, or similar regulated categories you are not authorized to handle this way.

READA does not verify ownership or licensing rights for any User Content you submit. You bear full legal responsibility for confirming that you have the right to submit and process the material before doing so.

4. Prohibited — Harmful and Deceptive Content

You must not use the Service to create, distribute, or facilitate:

• Malware, ransomware, spyware, keyloggers, exploits, phishing kits, credential-harvesting pages, or any other malicious code.
• Spam, unsolicited bulk communications, chain messages, or “SEO” content designed to deceive search engines.
• Content that impersonates any person or entity, or that materially misrepresents your affiliation with a person or entity.
• Deepfakes, synthetic media, or other AI-generated content designed to deceive viewers about a real person’s words, conduct, or identity without clear disclosure and lawful consent.
• Instructions for making weapons, explosives, chemical or biological agents; instructions for self-harm or suicide; content promoting eating disorders or other serious self-harm.
• Targeted manipulation of democratic processes — including disinformation campaigns, coordinated inauthentic behavior, or voter-suppression content.

5. Prohibited — Misuse of AI Output

Generated Output is a productivity aid, not a source of authoritative information. You must not:

• Submit Generated Output as your own original scholarship or writing in violation of academic-integrity, plagiarism, research-ethics, or AI-use policies imposed by your institution, publisher, funder, journal, employer, or professional body.
• Use Generated Output to produce medical, legal, financial, psychological, safety-critical, or similarly consequential decisions or advice without qualified human review.
• Represent Generated Output — including translations, summaries, rewrites, citations, or audio — as independently verified, peer-reviewed, or authoritative when it is not.
• Publish Generated Output, including translations and paraphrases, without first verifying accuracy against the original source and ensuring it does not infringe third-party rights.
• Use the Service to generate fake citations, invented quotations, fabricated authors, or other forms of research fraud.
• Ignore the limitations described in our Disclaimer when using Generated Output in consequential contexts.

6. Prohibited — System Abuse, Scraping, and Interference

You must not, and must not permit anyone acting on your behalf to:

• Access or attempt to access parts of the Service you are not authorized to use, including another user’s content, admin interfaces, internal APIs, or infrastructure.
• Reverse-engineer, decompile, disassemble, translate, or otherwise attempt to derive the source code or the proprietary algorithms of the Service, except to the limited extent applicable law allows.
• Scrape, crawl, harvest, index, or otherwise extract data from the Service by automated means, except through officially documented public endpoints and within any published rate limits.
• Circumvent, disable, or interfere with authentication, rate limits, bot-protection, paywalls, quotas, content filters, or other security and abuse-prevention measures.
• Create multiple accounts, fake accounts, or automated accounts to bypass limits, evade bans, or inflate usage.
• Share, sell, rent, or lease your access credentials, account, or quota to any third party.
• Probe, scan, or test the vulnerability of the Service, launch denial-of-service attacks, flood or overload the Service, inject malicious input, or otherwise interfere with the operation, security, or availability of the Service for other users.
• Use the Service to host, proxy, or relay traffic that does not originate from legitimate product use.
• Use the Service as a tool to scrape, extract, or aggregate content from other websites in violation of those websites’ terms.

7. Prohibited — Training or Benchmarking Competing AI Systems

You must not use the Service, its outputs, or its interfaces to develop, train, fine-tune, evaluate, benchmark, or reverse-engineer any AI model, large language model, translation model, OCR model, or other machine-learning system that competes with the Service or with the underlying Third-Party Services, except as expressly authorized by us in writing.

8. Prohibited — Excessive or Disruptive Use

Even activities that are otherwise permitted may be restricted if they consume a disproportionate share of resources, degrade the quality of service for other users, or interfere with our ability to operate the Service. We may throttle, suspend, or cancel access to AI Features or to the Service as a whole in response to such use, without prior notice.

9. Third-Party Service Rules

READA relies on third-party services — including cloud hosting, authentication, document-intelligence, translation, large-language-model, and text-to-speech providers. Your use of these services through READA is also subject to their own acceptable-use policies, terms of service, and content restrictions. You must not use the Service in any way that would cause us or our users to violate a Third-Party Service’s rules. You are responsible for reviewing and complying with those rules; we may refuse to process requests that we reasonably believe would violate them.

10. Reporting Abuse

If you become aware of a violation of this AUP — including copyright infringement, impersonation, harassment, malicious content, or a security vulnerability — please report it via the contact page. Include enough information for us to investigate (URLs, screenshots, timestamps, and your relationship to the affected content).

11. Enforcement

We decide, in our sole reasonable judgment, whether conduct violates this AUP. When we identify a violation or suspected violation we may, without prior notice and at our discretion:

• Warn you and ask you to stop the conduct;
• Remove, quarantine, or refuse to process specific User Content or Generated Output;
• Throttle, suspend, restrict, or revoke your access to specific features or to the Service as a whole;
• Terminate your account and delete associated User Content, subject to operational backups as described in our Privacy Policy;
• Report the conduct to law enforcement, to the affected Third-Party Service, or to other authorities where we are required or authorized to do so;
• Pursue any legal remedies available to us.

Our decision to take or not take action in one case does not waive our right to take action in any other case.

12. Changes to This Policy

We may update this AUP from time to time as the Service and our risk landscape evolve. The “Last updated” date at the top of this page reflects the most recent revision. Your continued use of the Service after a revision constitutes your acceptance of the updated AUP.