Acceptable Use Policy
1. Purpose
This AUP describes how Saidly may and may not be used. It is incorporated into and forms part of the Terms of Service. Violations may result in suspension or termination of your account and, where applicable, referral to law enforcement.
2. Scope of the index — public figures only
Saidly indexes spoken-word content by US public figures in their public roles. For these purposes, a "public figure" is:
- A current or former federal, state, or local elected official;
- A current or former senior official in the executive branch (cabinet, sub-cabinet, agency head);
- A current or former senior judicial officer;
- A senior executive (CEO, founder, board chair, or comparably named role) of a publicly traded company or a venture-backed company with $100M+ in cumulative funding;
- A person who has voluntarily entered public discourse through a sustained media presence — published authors with a substantial body of work, hosts of podcasts/shows with material audiences, or recurring on-air commentators;
- A person who has otherwise voluntarily thrust themselves into the vortex of a particular public controversy (limited-purpose public figure, per Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., 418 U.S. 323).
Private individuals — including private employees, family members of public figures, witnesses or sources quoted in coverage, and ordinary participants in public events — are not within the scope of the index. We use a curated allowlist combined with detection heuristics; we err on the side of exclusion.
If you believe the Service has improperly classified an individual as a public figure, contact privacy@saidly.org for expedited review.
3. Permitted uses
You may use the Service for:
- Journalism, news reporting, fact-checking, and editorial research.
- Academic, linguistic, or social-science research.
- Communications, public affairs, and political-research workflows that involve verifying or sourcing what a public figure has said in their public role.
- Personal informational use — e.g., locating a remembered quote.
- Building tools or workflows that integrate the Service via the published API, subject to the API rate limits and the prohibitions in Section 4.
4. Prohibited uses
You agree not to use the Service to:
- Stalk, harass, intimidate, or threaten any person — including the indexed public figures themselves, their family members, or any private individual.
- Identify, target, profile, or surveil private individuals. Specifically, you may not use the Service to attempt to identify a private individual whose voice may have been incidentally captured in any indexed source.
- Misrepresent or decontextualize quotes — for example by stripping surrounding context, swapping speaker attributions, fabricating juxtapositions, or pairing utterances with imagery/audio designed to mislead — for any purpose, but especially for disinformation, defamation, election interference, or harassment.
- Train a generative or predictive machine-learning model on the Service's transcripts, embeddings, or audio links, except under a separate written license. This includes, without limitation, voice-cloning models, deepfake-generation systems, and large language models.
- Bulk-scrape, enumerate, or mirror the index, search results, voice prints, or transcripts beyond the published rate limits or beyond the API entitlements of your plan.
- Resell, redistribute, or republish results in a way that materially substitutes for the Service or the underlying primary sources.
- Use the Service in connection with any activity that violates applicable law, including export-controlled activity, election interference, unlawful campaign coordination, or unlicensed practice of any regulated profession.
- Bypass authentication, rate limits, or access controls, or use the Service in a way intended to disrupt its availability for other users.
5. Right of removal and right to refuse
We reserve the unconditional right, in our sole discretion:
- To remove any indexed individual from the Service on request, regardless of whether removal is required by law.
- To refuse, suspend, or restrict service to any user.
- To narrow, refuse, or delay any search result that, in our judgment, presents a clear risk of misuse (for example, a query pattern consistent with stalking).
These rights are reserved out of an abundance of caution; they are exercised in good faith and not as a substitute for the formal DMCA, privacy-rights, or removal-request procedures described in our other policies.
6. Speaker identification — accuracy disclosure
Speaker identification is probabilistic and may be incorrect. Confidence scores are surfaced on every result. Before publishing or otherwise relying on a result, you are responsible for independently verifying the speaker, the context, the date, and the source. You may report likely misidentifications via the in-product feedback mechanism or to corrections@saidly.org.
7. Reporting violations
To report violations of this AUP — by another user, by a published article that misuses our results, or by any other means — contact abuse@saidly.org. We aim to acknowledge reports within 24 hours and act on substantiated reports promptly.
8. Enforcement
Violation of this AUP may result in suspension or termination of your account and, where appropriate, civil or criminal referral. We may share information with law enforcement, regulators, or affected third parties as necessary to investigate or respond to violations.
9. Changes
We may update this AUP. Material changes will be communicated by email to account holders or by prominent notice in the Service.
10. Contact
- AUP enforcement / abuse: abuse@saidly.org
- Privacy / removal requests: privacy@saidly.org
- General legal: legal@saidly.org