Use of our services entails that the user has accepted these terms and conditions:
1. Preamble
This document contains the Terms of Use for anyone who is accessing the services (hereinafter referred to as “you”, “your”, or “users”). By using the services, you agree to be bound by the following Terms of Use. Academic Computing may amend the Terms of Use at any time by updating this page. In the event of modification to these terms and conditions, all registered users will be notified via email.
Academic Computing welcomes all visitors, without prerequisites, to its services, www.AcademicComputing.co.za, and/or the services program for mobile devices which access the same database. (hereinafter referred to as “the services”).
2. Definitions
- “Visitor” or “User” means a legal person who accesses a web site, service, services program, or other computer program produced or offered by us.
- “You” means you, the visitor or user.
- “We” and “Academic Computing” means the company providing these services.
- “services” or “site” means this website or computer program in its entirety including all modules, parts, sub-sites, and solutions provided by us, but excluding “Foreign sites”. “Services” also includes other sites (websites) that we have made for you (the customer), or such services or sites or mobile applications that we have provided or coded for you.
- “Foreign sites” means any link or embedded content of this website which is not hosted by Academic Computing.
3. Copyrights and Content
- The service is owned and operated by Academic Computing and is protected by copyright both locally and internationally in all major countries and trade treaty areas.
- Any resemblance between this product or services and any other competing or similar products or servicess is coincidental and is clearly an obvious feature or design which is necessitated by the very nature of IT solutions in general. Academic Computing will therefore also not entertain copyright infringement claims or patent infringement claims made by third parties, since the design and features of solutions capturing academic or education information is public domain knowledge.
- You are prohibited from reproducing, distributing, retransmitting, or using in a commercial manner any of the information or materials provided via the services without the prior written consent of Academic Computing except public-facing data whose copyright status(es) may be subject to different terms imposed on the person viewing the data on a case-by-case basis.
- You are authorized to download or print a copy of information or materials provided on the services for personal, non-commercial home or research use as long as you do not remove or obscure the copyright or other proprietary notices.
- All content on this service (except where iframed, or where created by persons in their private capacity), but including the templates, designs, logos or layout of the services, are copyright to Academic Computing, except where otherwise indicated.
- All content uploaded to this service by users and shared via this service by users immediately falls under the Creative Commons License, Attribution, NonCommercial, Sharealike (CC-BY-NC-SA) license, except where otherwise indicated in your contract with us, or where the property of Academic Computing as envisaged in the clauses above. This clause assumes that the user understands the CC-BY-NC-SA license and if not, that the user will read it first before agreeing to these terms and conditions.
- Commercial content shared via this service will be marked as such and its copyright stated clearly within it. All commercial content is copyrighted to its respective copyright holders and may not be downloaded or shared without explicit permission in writing by the copyright holders. All copyrighted commercial content presented in this services is presented by Academic Computing as a courtesy to users. Records of downloads are maintained. Copyrighted materials are copyrighted under the copyright regime of their home country(ies).
- Commercial content that is downloaded from this service may only be used for academic purposes by the person who downloaded it, and may not be printed in its entirety (i.e. per document), nor may it be shared, placed online elsewhere, copied, emailed, or made available to other persons electronically or in hard copy form, using any means or technology whatsoever.
- Users may not upload content, statements or communications via this service which are offensive or in violation of the terms of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, as amended, 1996. In particular, all content that is racist, offensive, depicting or advocating violence, or content which is pornographic, may not be stored, placed upon, or transmitted via this services. Such content will be removed without warning and result in the removal of the offending user.
- Content created by Academic Computing staff may not necessarily represent the official views, stance or policies of Academic Computing. The official policies of Academic Computing are available encapsulated in this Terms and Conditions document/agreement. All statements outside of this document should be considered unofficial.
4. Privacy
- All data given to Academic Computing by the user is given with the user’s express permission and the user may not hold Academic Computing liable for the user’s access to it, or any putative violation of data privacy, as such access is necessary for the functioning of Academic Computing. For example, administrative action pursuant to a legal investigation of a user.
- Academic Computing will ensure that all content not explicitly selected as public content by you, the user, will remain private, so far as is reasonably possible.
Password data will be encrypted, however, other data will not be encrypted “on disk” due to the need of users to be able to search for content. Data in transit will be encrypted by the standard https protocol. - In the event that a user does not wish Academic Computing to have access to the user’s data any longer, or no longer wishes to make use of Academic Computing’s services, the user should notify Academic Computing in writing at accounts@Academic Computing.co.za.
- In the case where a user’s private data is deemed to have been exposed publicly due to poor security behaviours on the part of the user, e.g. due to a poor password choice or due to the need to publicly declare the authenticity of an upload or content provided by the user, the onus will be on the user to remedy such breach.
- Academic Computing will not be held liable for any data privacy breach due to poor security on the user’s part.
- In particular, if a user registers a company or organisation on the Academic Computing services, and/or uploads that company/organisation’s logo, and, the user subsequently creates content whilst purporting to represent that company/organisation, the user’s contact details will be made public so that in the event of false representation, misrepresentation, slander or defamation, that the user is directly contactable by the aggrieved party.
- It is therefore imperative that all users are aware that they should not represent as a company/organisation if they are not in fact so authorised to represent such company/organisation.
- You, the user, recognise that Academic Computing may from time to time access search caches in order to acquire statistics about general usage and content needs. In accessing search caches, Academic Computing will to the best of its ability not attempt to correlate your search records with your name, even if such records exist.
- You, the user, understand that Academic Computing has in principle full access to all your private records stored in this system including and not limited to your contact details, address details, and any other details voluntarily submitted by you, except for your password, and that in using this system, you accept that Academic Computing may in cases of criminal investigation, access your data and deliver it to the relevant law enforcement authorities.
- Academic Computing will use any social media information or authorisation services Programming Interfaces (APIs) only for authentication purposes and will never withdraw information regarding users from their social media, in particular, it will never request their friend list, contact details, or posts or “likes” from social media. In plain terms, we do not perform data mining.
- Academic Computing guarantees that we will respect all user data and will not on-sell it or surrender it to third parties without legal writ so instructing us and only in a case of a court summons or subpoena. We will notify all users in advance in all cases, so as to request permission, in the event of any need to access data by third parties.
5. Content Backups and Guarantees
- Academic Computing makes no representation hereby that content placed on the services will remain on the services for any period of time.
- Whilst all good and reasonable measures will be taken to ensure the integrity of the services data, all data may at any time be erased at the discretion of Academic Computing.
- Backups are taken daily and deleted annually. We do not keep your files longer than one year.
- Whilst all good and reasonable measures will be taken to ensure the integrity of the services data, Academic Computing does not warrant in any way that backups taken of the services will be successful and that lost data can be retrieved. In particular, no incremental backups will be guaranteed of individuals’ data. The onus is on the individual user to back up their own data.
- In the event that a user deletes a piece of data, there is no obligation on Academic Computing’s part to recover the data from backups. Any request for data recovery will attract a fee charged per-hour on how long it takes to recover from backups.
6. Bugs and Feature Requests
- All bugs, errors, feature requests or malfunctions in the software may be reported to bugs@AcademicComputing.co.za, however, Academic Computing reserves the right to not respond to any such communications, including and not limited to determining whether it is necessary to engage you (the user) on eliminating any bugs or adding any features.
- All feature requests or design suggestions sent to Academic Computing become the property of Academic Computing from the moment the email is sent to Academic Computing unless we have a pre-existing contract with you (the customer) which stipulates otherwise. No claims of intellectual property, copyright, or ownership of unsolicited feature suggestions or design suggestions will be entertained, even if email sent contains such assertions of copyright. In plain language, we will not entertain giving you a “share” if you suggest a feature that we subsequently implement.
7. Community Behaviour Terms and Conditions
- Membership of Academic Computing and usage of our products as a member is at the discretion of Academic Computing and is subject to the user membership being in good standing, particularly compliance with community terms and conditions identified in this section (Community Behaviour Terms and Conditions).
- Objectionable content includes viruses or other malware, aggressive or insulting communications towards any person including staff members of Academic Computing, the displaying or upload of pornographic, racist, sexist, or ableist content, incitement to harm, visual or aural depictions of violence, advocacy towards violence, hate, sexism or racism, or discrimination on any grounds whatsoever.
- No objectionable content as defined above may be uploaded to Academic Computing or sent to its email addresses.
- The use of our services is subject to Section 9 of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa (as amended in 1996) which defines the modes of discrimination and the prohibition of all forms thereof. No law national, local, geographical or international shall supersede this clause.
- Any violation of these terms of use will result in irrevocable retraction of access to the services and delivery of such material evidence as necessary to law enforcement agencies.
- Academic Computing hereby disclaims any responsibility for the content of foreign sites linked to or iframed within this services. Any views, content or other representations made on foreign sites, whether linked to or iframed within this services, are not the responsibility of Academic Computing and do not purport to represent the views, content or legislation promulgated by Academic Computing.
- Any foreign site linked to within this services is linked to as a courtesy and may be removed at the sole discretion of Academic Computing.
- Service users may from time to time provide hyperlinks to sites maintained by third parties. Academic Computing has no control over third-party sites or content and does not necessarily endorse the content of linked sites. In addition, Academic Computing may allow users to post information or otherwise use interactive services such as Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, but Academic Computing does not necessarily endorse the opinions expressed by users.
- Any foreign site embedded in our services which is found to contain materials which are objectionable in terms of the relevant clause above, will be removed without warning.
- Academic Computing hereby disclaims any responsibility for the content of solutions offered on our service platform/s regardless of whether or not the said content was generated within our systems. Any views, content or other representations made on systems controlled by individual users, whether linked to or iframed within this systems, are not the responsibility of Academic Computing and do not purport to represent the views, content or legislation promulgated by Academic Computing.
- Academic Computing accepts responsibility only for systems, content and materials sanctioned by Academic Computing and marked as official Academic Computing material. The user or visitor should assume that materials which are not clearly marked as Academic Computing material, are not Academic Computing material, and may contain errors or other incorrect or offensive content uploaded by third parties.
- The services provided by us usually also provide a complaint reporting button to report complaints about content. Complaints about content should be submitted via email or via such buttons if they are present.
- Any individual site or page linked to within our systems is linked to as a courtesy and may be removed at the sole discretion of Academic Computing.
- Users of our services may not solicit any form of unprofessional, personal, romantic or non-academic relationship with any other user of the services. Users may only communicate with each other by mutual consent and only if such services are provided which are fit for such purposes. Users who sexually harass other users will be permanently removed and banned from our systems without any appeals process.
- Users may not attempt to gain access to resources which grant higher level privileges on the services without written authorisation. Any such activity will be deemed an attempt at “hacking” and reported to state security agencie/s that are relevant.
- Users may not give their password to anyone, including Academic Computing staff or employees.
8. Return / Refund Policy
- In the event that a user does not wish Academic Computing to have access to the user’s data any longer, or no longer wishes to make use of Academic Computing’s services, the user should notify Academic Computing, in writing, at the email address accounts@AcademicComputing.co.za.
- Any repeat payments which are to be deducted from the user’s account or credit card may still occur even if the user’s account is deleted. The onus is on the user to directly and explicitly cancel all product purchases prior to account deletion and to formally inform Academic Computing of the same in writing at accounts@Academic Computing.co.za.
9. Delivery and Intellectual Property Policy
- Items, features, functions or additional capabilities which are ordered from Academic Computing will be delivered to the customer digitally only and Academic Computing may at its discretion send an email reflecting such purchase. The onus is on the end-user to check their “spam” or junk folder to locate such mails in the event that they are missing.
- Academic Computing retains ownership of all products and services even when delivered as they are digital products.
- Customers (you) only own the intellectual property of custom designed interfaces that we build for you on a custom basis if the contract stipulates that the ownership inheres in you, AND the interface is “non-obvious” or unconventional. In plain language, this means that you do not own copyrights of commonplace designs such as contact forms, complaint forms, and similar commonplace user interfaces. In all cases the customer (you) should assume first that the code provided is on a lease-basis (Software as a Service).
- Custom code must be paid for 50% in advance unless stipulated otherwise on the contract.
- Custom code built for you will be re-used in creating future products as you own at most the user interface or design of your requested custom product. You do not own the back-end algorithms.
- We will endeavour to not re-use code built for you, to create products for your competitors, however, some code is so commonplace that duplication is inevitable. For example, almost all code includes an algorithm that counts from one number to another, or searches a database. Such algorithms cannot be copyrighted. If you wish to stipulate a non-competitive clause we may at our discretion increase our quotation to you, to compensate for future revenue loss.
10. Waiver of Warranties
- The information and materials on the services are provided “as is” without warranty of any kind, either express or implied, to the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, including, but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement.
- Information or materials on the services or any linked site may contain technical inaccuracies or typographical errors. Academic Computing does not make any representations or warranties regarding the accuracy, completeness, timeliness, or appropriateness for a particular purpose of any information or materials provided on the services or any linked sites which may be embedded in other surveys.
- Academic Computing does not warrant or represent that the services or any linked sites will operate error-free or that such the servicess or their servers are free of computer viruses or other items of a destructive nature. You assume the risk in using the services or any linked site.
11. Limitation of Liability
In no event will Academic Computing be liable to any party for any direct, indirect, special, or other consequential damages for any use of the services or any linked site including, without limitation, any lost profits, business interruption, loss of programs or other data on your information handling system, or otherwise regardless of whether Academic Computing is advised of the possibility of such damages.
12. Indemnification
You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless Academic Computing, its affiliated entities, and directors, officers, employees and agents of Academic Computing and its affiliated entities from and against any and all liabilities and costs, including, but not limited to, reasonable attorney’s fees, resulting from your use or misuse of the services or your breach of any of the terms of these Terms and Conditions.
13. International Use
Academic Computing makes no representations or warranties that the information or materials in the services are appropriate or available for use in locations outside the Republic of South Africa. You assume the risks in accessing the services from outside South Africa and are solely responsible for compliance with all applicable laws.
14. Governing Law
These Terms and Conditions shall be governed by the laws of the Republic of South Africa without regard to the conflicts of law rules thereof. Any legal action, suit, or proceeding with respect to this Agreement shall be brought exclusively in a court of competent jurisdiction in Republic of South Africa
15. Entire Agreement
- These Terms and Conditions constitute the entire agreement between you and Academic Computing with respect to your use of the services.
- In the event that a separate contract is drawn up between you (the customer) and Academic Computing, then that contract shall supersede these agreements.
- In the event that no separate contract has been drawn up between you (the customer) and Academic Computing, then this set of Terms and Conditions asll constitute the entire agreement.
16. Termination
Academic Computing reserves the right to terminate the services or any of its services at any time. In addition, Academic Computing may terminate your right to access the services or any of its services for any violation of these Terms and Conditions.