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Terms of use

The terms, in the order they matter.

What you agree to by recording a lecture with Lectureward: your account, your audio, the permission you still have to get from your institution, and the honest limits of machine transcription.

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What this covers

These terms govern your use of Lectureward — the service at lectureward.com and the app you record into. Using the service means you accept them. If you do not, do not record with it.

They are written to be read by a student, not by a procurement committee. Where a clause is unclear to you, ask at hi@lectureward.com and you get a plain answer.

Your account

You need an account to record. Keep its credentials to yourself; you are responsible for what happens under it. Tell us at hi@lectureward.com if you think someone else has access.

The service is for people aged 16 or over. One account is one person — an account shared around a cohort is not a licence for the cohort.

Recording other people is your call to get right

A lecture is somebody speaking, and often other students asking questions. Whether you may record it is set by your institution and sometimes by the individual lecturer, and by the law where you are sitting. It is not set by us, and we do not grant you permission to record anything.

You confirm that you have whatever permission your institution requires, that you are recording for your own study, and that you will not publish, sell, or circulate a recording of a lecturer or a classmate without their agreement. Many universities have an explicit policy for disabled students — if yours is unclear, get the answer in writing before you record.

Your recordings stay yours

You keep ownership of the audio you record and of the notes, glossary, questions and transcript produced from it. We claim no ownership of any of it.

You give us one narrow permission: to transmit and process your recording so the service can produce your artifacts and hand them back. That permission covers nothing else, and it ends with the request that used it. What is held, where, and for how long is set out in the privacy policy.

What the service is, and what it is not

Lectureward turns a recording into four artifacts: structured notes, a glossary of terms the lecturer used without defining, self-test questions, and the timecoded transcript behind all three.

It is machine transcription and machine structuring of noisy live audio. It mishears things. A hard-surfaced hall, a lecturer who paces, a weak microphone, overlapping voices and unusual terminology all cost accuracy, and the transcript is the record you check a doubtful line against. Do not treat any artifact as a verbatim or authoritative account of what was said, and do not rely on it as your only record for an assessment, an appeal, a complaint, or anything else that matters. We make no guarantee of accuracy or completeness.

Nothing it produces is legal, medical, financial or academic advice.

Academic integrity is on you

Your institution decides what counts as your own work. Notes and questions generated from a lecture you attended are a study aid; submitting machine-written text as your own, or using the service in a way your course prohibits, is a matter between you and your institution. Check your rules.

Acceptable use

Do not use Lectureward to:

record people covertly where that is unlawful or against your institution’s policy; upload audio you have no right to upload; republish a lecturer’s material as your own or distribute it beyond your own study; resell the service or the output; attempt to break, overload, scrape or reverse-engineer it; or process the recordings of other people as a bulk service.

The hour is expensive to process. Automated or industrial-scale use beyond ordinary study is not covered by ordinary access.

Free use and paid plans

You can start free and read everything that comes back from a lecture before deciding anything. Where a paid plan applies, its price, billing period and cancellation terms are stated to you before you pay, and those terms apply alongside these. For what a heavier week costs, ask at hi@lectureward.com.

Availability and changes to the service

We aim to keep the service up and we do not guarantee it will be. It can be interrupted for maintenance, failure, or reasons outside our control, and features can change. If we make a change that removes something you depend on, we will tell account holders rather than let you find out mid-lecture. Keep your own backup of anything you cannot afford to lose.

Suspension, and leaving

You can stop using the service and delete your account and its contents at any time, from the account itself or by asking at hi@lectureward.com.

We can suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, puts other users or the service at risk, or is used unlawfully. Where it is reasonable to warn you first, we will.

Liability

We are responsible to you for loss we cause by breaking these terms or by failing to use reasonable care and skill — and we do not exclude or limit anything that cannot lawfully be excluded, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for your statutory rights as a consumer.

Beyond that, we are not liable for loss that was not foreseeable, for lost study time, missed deadlines, exam or grade outcomes, or for anything that follows from relying on an artifact as a verbatim record rather than checking it. Where liability can be capped, it is capped at what you have paid us in the twelve months before the claim.

Changes to these terms

We can update these terms. The date at the top always says when. If a change materially affects your rights, we will notify account holders before it takes effect; continuing to record after that is acceptance. If you do not accept it, close your account and take your material with you.

Contact

Everything — a question about a clause, a complaint, a deletion request, a demand for the handling of one specific recording in writing — goes to hi@lectureward.com.

Questions about this document, or about a specific recording, go to hi@lectureward.com. A person reads that address.