Terms of Service

Okusoko is a research harness. You bring in documents and links; it reads them, extracts claims, checks every quote against the bytes of the source it came from, tracks which accounts descend from which, and keeps a record you can interrogate. You direct it. It does the reading.

Okusoko helps you assemble and examine a record. It does not certify that anything in that record is true. A verified quote means the words are really in the document — not that the document is honest, accurate or reliable. Judging that remains yours.

You need an account to run investigations. Keep your credentials to yourself; you are responsible for what happens under your account. Tell us promptly if you think someone else has got into it. You must be old enough to enter a contract where you live, and at least 13 in any case.

You may close your account at any time from your settings. Closing it deletes the investigations you own.

Some features are paid, on the plans described on the pricing page, billed in advance for the period you choose and renewing until you cancel. Cancel any time; the cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for, and we do not pro-rate part-periods unless the law where you live says otherwise.

Plans carry usage allowances. Running past an allowance may pause work on your investigations until the next period or until you move to a larger plan. We may change prices, but not part-way through a period you have paid for, and we will tell you before a change takes effect.

You are responsible for the material you upload, link to, or have Okusoko fetch. You agree not to use Okusoko to:

• upload or publish material you have no right to — copyrighted work that is not yours and that no exception covers, leaked personal data, material under a confidentiality obligation;
• harass, threaten, defame or endanger anyone, or assemble material about a private individual in order to intimidate or expose them;
• publish sexual material involving children, or material that promotes or instructs in violence, terrorism, or serious self-harm;
• build a case you know to be false and present it as evidence-backed — the point of this tool is the opposite;
• break the law, or break the terms of any site or archive Okusoko fetches on your behalf, including by evading paywalls, rate limits or access controls;
• attack, overload, probe or reverse-engineer the service, or use it to train a competing system on our outputs at scale.

Okusoko fetches material from the open web at your direction. You are the one directing it, and the responsibility for what you ask it to retrieve is yours.

You keep every right you already had in what you bring in and what you produce here. Your investigations, your notes, your writing: yours.

To run the service, we need permission to do the obvious mechanical things with it — store it, copy it between our systems, process it, and show it back to you and to whoever you have shared it with. You grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to do exactly that and nothing more, for as long as you keep the material here. If you publish an investigation or post in a shared space, you are also granting the people who can see it the ability to read it. Delete the material and the licence ends with it, apart from copies in routine backups, which age out.

We do not sell your material. We do not use the contents of your private investigations to train models.

Neither Okusoko nor Cobble Network, Inc. endorses, adopts, verifies or vouches for the statements, findings, conclusions or views of any user, or of any investigation, article, answer, note or post produced here.

Investigations on Okusoko are the work of the people who run them. They are not ours, not reviewed by us before they appear, and not published by us in any sense that implies agreement. A public investigation is one person's account of what they found — it may be incomplete, mistaken, contested, or simply wrong, and nothing about it appearing here suggests otherwise.

Okusoko's own machinery — the claims it extracts, the answers it composes, the briefs, the suggestions and the articles it writes — is produced automatically from whatever material the investigator supplied. It reflects that material and its limits. It is not our opinion, not a finding of fact, and not a statement about any person or organisation named in it.

Nothing here is legal, medical, financial, or other professional advice. Do not act on an investigation as though it were.

Naming a person or organisation in a record does not imply any wrongdoing by them. Investigations routinely gather claims that turn out to be false; showing that a claim exists is not asserting it is true.

If something on Okusoko is harmful, or infringes a copyright you hold, tell us through the report form. A person reads every report. Material that endangers someone is dealt with first.

We respond to valid notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. A notice must identify the work you say has been infringed, identify the material you want removed precisely enough that we can find it, give your contact details, and carry your statement — under penalty of perjury — that you have a good faith belief the use is not authorised and that your notice is accurate. The report form asks for each of these. Our designated agent for copyright notices is [agent name and address].

If we remove your material over a copyright claim, we will tell you, and you may send a counter-notice. We terminate the accounts of users who repeatedly infringe.

Knowingly filing a false notice makes you liable for damages under 17 U.S.C. § 512(f). Please do not use this to silence research you dislike.

We may remove material, make an investigation private, or suspend or close an account when we reasonably believe these terms have been broken, when we are required to by law, or when leaving something up would put someone in danger. Where we can, we tell you what we did and why, and give you a chance to respond. Where a risk is immediate we act first and explain after.

We are not obliged to monitor what is published here, and we do not pre-screen it. Reviewing one report does not commit us to reviewing everything.

We work to keep Okusoko running and your record intact, but we do not promise it will be uninterrupted or error-free. We may change, add or withdraw features. If we withdraw something you depend on, or shut the service down, we will give you reasonable notice and a way to export your work.

Keep your own copies of anything you cannot afford to lose. Export is built in; please use it.

Okusoko reaches search engines, archives, public record systems and model providers on your behalf, and those services have their own terms. We are not responsible for them, for what they return, or for what they do with a request made through us.

How we handle personal data is described in our privacy policy. In short: we hold what you bring in so we can run the service for you, we do not sell it, and we do not use private investigations to train models.

Okusoko is provided “as is” and “as available”. To the fullest extent the law allows, Cobble Network, Inc.disclaims all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the service, or anything obtained through it, is accurate, complete, reliable, or fit for any decision you make with it.

Some places do not allow these exclusions. Where that is so, this section applies as far as the law permits and no further, and nothing here takes away rights you have that cannot be taken away.

To the fullest extent the law allows, Cobble Network, Inc. is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, nor for lost profits, lost data, or loss of goodwill, arising out of your use of Okusoko — including anything published by another user. Our total liability for any claim relating to the service is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, or one hundred United States dollars.

If someone brings a claim against us because of material you brought in or published, or because of how you used the service, you agree to defend us and cover the resulting costs, damages and reasonable legal fees. We will tell you promptly about any such claim and let you run the defence, and we will not settle it in a way that puts an obligation on you without asking.

These terms are governed by the laws of [governing state], without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules, and the courts of [venue] have exclusive jurisdiction — except that either of us may seek an injunction wherever it is needed. If you are a consumer somewhere whose law gives you the right to bring a claim locally, that right is untouched.

Before filing anything, please write to us. Nearly everything is quicker to fix than to litigate.

We may update these terms. When a change matters, we will post the new effective date here and tell account holders by email or in the app before it takes effect. Carrying on using Okusoko after that is how you accept the change; if you would rather not, close your account.

If a part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest stands. Our not enforcing something once does not mean we have given it up. You may not transfer your rights under these terms; we may transfer ours as part of a merger, acquisition or sale of assets. These terms, with the privacy policy and any plan-specific terms, are the whole agreement between us about Okusoko.

Cobble Network, Inc. — [registered address]. To report material, use the report form. For anything else, there is a help desk inside the app.