theuniversal Developer Terms

Draft — under legal review. Bracketed items are still being decided.

These Developer Terms are an agreement between you (and the company you act for) and Dialin LLC ("Dialin", "we", "us") for building on theuniversal: the Dial Dictionary, DIOS, the commons, and any keys or account access we grant (together, the "API"). They sit alongside the Dialin Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. If you don't agree, don't use the API.

1. Cars and roads

theuniversal works like a road network. Anyone can build a car: an app, a site, a device or an AI that helps people capture dials, find things and take up offers — designed any way you like. Dialin is one car among many. The roads are shared, and they are governed in one place so that an exchange between two strangers can be trusted.

2. What's open

• The Dial Dictionary — the shared words every dial uses — is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0). Use it, translate it, build on it, with attribution: "Dial Dictionary by theuniversal".
• DIOS — the Dial In Operating System that turns dials into a shared signal — is licensed under the Apache License 2.0 [once published at REPOSITORY URL]. Run it, study it, change it, ship it.
• The open endpoints — the dictionary and the blurred commons — may be read by anyone, without a key, subject to these Terms.

Those licences govern the dictionary and the code. These Terms govern the API: what you may do on the shared roads.

3. What's governed: the account

Taking part in an exchange takes one theuniversal account. It holds three things, and they live only on theuniversal:

• Trust — built from real dials made at real places, and offers honored.
• Points — earned by dialing in and spent on offers.
• Tastes — what a person's dials say they like.

You may show them, and act on them, only for the person they belong to and only as far as that person allowed. You may not:

• create, grant, buy, sell, transfer or redeem points except through the API, or offer anything to get points moved outside it;
• compute, store or publish your own trust score for a person, or present yours as theuniversal's;
• keep a person's tastes after their session with your app ends, build a profile from them, or share them with anyone;
• run an exchange that theuniversal does not record.

Points and trust have no cash value, and the account belongs to the person, not to any app. A person can see which apps hold access and revoke any of them at any time.

4. Building an on-ramp

• Today the API is read-only: the dictionary and the commons. Keys are issued to businesses verified on Dialin (a verified owner of a place).
• Next [coming]: registered apps will be able to act for a person — capture dials, show and accept offers — once that person signs in with their theuniversal account and approves your app for named permissions. You may act only within what they approved.
• Offers on the roads follow theuniversal's offer rules wherever they're made, whichever app shows them.
• A key belongs to the business or app it was issued to. Don't share or resell it. We may limit, suspend or revoke a key at any time.

5. The privacy rules you must keep

The commons is built so that nobody can be singled out. You agree that you will not, and will not let anyone:

• try to identify, locate, track, contact or profile any individual — by combining responses, querying repeatedly, using timing, or joining API data with any other data;
• try to recover an exact location from a randomized one, or anything about a group smaller than 5;
• use a person's taste card (shown only when that person chose to show it) for anything but understanding demand in the moment;
• use the API to target, harass, exclude or harm anyone, or to decide anyone's eligibility for housing, employment, credit or insurance;
• use API data to train models intended to re-identify people.

If you discover you have received data that could identify someone, stop using it, delete it, and tell us at seekers@dialin.io.

6. Fair use and limits

• Respect caching and the rate limits we publish or set for your key. We may throttle or block traffic beyond them.
• Don't scrape Dialin or theuniversal outside the API, and don't put an unreasonable load on our systems.
• Attribute commons data: "Data: theuniversal".

7. Names

The open licences cover the dictionary and the code, not the names. "theuniversal", "Dialin" and their logos are our trademarks; keeping them is what keeps one set of roads. You may say your app "works with theuniversal". You may not name your app, service or fork "theuniversal" or "Dialin", or present a changed dictionary or a modified DIOS as the official one. Changes to the official Dial Dictionary are proposed in the open and adopted under its published amendment process.

8. Pricing

Reading the API is free. We will give at least [30] days' notice before any fee, which would apply only to business tools such as the business dashboard. Making offers and earning points stay free for people.

9. Changes and ending

We may change or stop the API, or these Terms, with notice where reasonable. We may suspend or end your access at any time if you break these Terms or put people's privacy at risk. When access ends, stop using the API and delete any data from it you are not otherwise allowed to keep. Your rights under the open licences in section 2 continue under those licences.

10. No warranty; limits of liability

The API is provided as is, without warranties of any kind. Data is blurred, randomized and delayed by design and may be incomplete or wrong. To the fullest extent the law allows, we aren't liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits, data or goodwill, and our total liability is limited to [US$100].

[PATENTS: Apache 2.0 grants every user a licence to any of our patents that the published DIOS code uses. Decide with counsel whether the filed applications are pledged for open use or kept defensively before DIOS is published.]

11. Indemnity

You will defend and indemnify Dialin against claims arising from your use of the API or your breach of these Terms.

12. Law

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Delaware, USA, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules. Disputes will be resolved in the state or federal courts located in Delaware.

13. Contact

Dialin LLC · [MAILING ADDRESS] · seekers@dialin.io