Terms of Service

These Terms of Service ("Terms") form a binding agreement between you ("Contributor", "you") and the Saroir Knowledge Foundation ("Foundation", "we", "us"). By completing onboarding, accepting the Contributor Agreement, or using any part of the Saroir platform, you agree to these Terms and to the Privacy Policy at saroir.com/privacy.

If you are registering as or on behalf of an organisation, you represent that you have authority to bind that organisation to these Terms.

Saroir is an open-source platform for permanent, cryptographically-signed knowledge attribution. It provides infrastructure for contributors to record, verify, and carry their knowledge contributions independently of any institution.

The platform is operated by the Saroir Knowledge Foundation. The underlying software and intellectual property are owned by Perform Digital Private Limited, which has licensed the technology to the Foundation for operation as a public knowledge commons. The Foundation governs the contributor community, the Knowledge Treasury, and the platform's governance processes.

The Foundation is building toward a transparency page where its income, expenditure, and treasury allocations will be made public and updated in as close to real time as the Foundation's technology allows. This is in progress and will be documented as a formal update to these Terms when it is live.

The Saroir Knowledge Foundation is a not-for-profit entity operating a platform for the promotion of knowledge attribution and access. It does not exist to generate profit, retain user data, or benefit commercially from contributors' work.

The Foundation is not liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages arising from your use of or inability to use the platform, including but not limited to:

• Loss of data or credentials
• Reputational harm arising from the public nature of accepted contributions
• Damages arising from the permanent, irremovable nature of blockchain anchors
• Damages arising from the actions of other contributors, agents, or moderators on the platform
• Damages arising from the platform's temporary or permanent unavailability
• Damages arising from errors in moderation decisions

This limitation applies to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law. Nothing in this clause excludes liability for fraud, wilful misconduct, or liability that cannot be excluded under Indian law or the law of the applicable EU member state for EU contributors.

The Foundation is a platform to promote the visibility of knowledge. It is not a legal reviewer, a publisher in the traditional sense, an employer, or a financial institution. The limitations above reflect that function.

The Saroir platform software is published under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL-3.0). Anyone may use, study, modify, and distribute the platform software under the terms of that licence. Commercial use by companies offering a competing service requires a separate commercial licence.

The intellectual property underlying the platform, including proprietary algorithms, infrastructure configuration, Signal API, and enterprise edition software, is owned by Perform Digital Private Limited. Perform Digital has licensed this technology to the Saroir Knowledge Foundation for the purpose of operating the public knowledge commons platform described in these Terms. Once an enterprise edition of the platform is built and operational, Perform Digital has committed to directing a substantial portion of the revenue from that enterprise edition to the Saroir Knowledge Foundation. The exact percentage and the formal structure of that commitment will be documented in a formal update to these Terms and to the Foundation's public transparency records.

No part of these Terms grants you any rights to Perform Digital's proprietary software or the Foundation's name, logo, or brand identity beyond what is necessary to use the platform as described in these Terms.

Use of the contribution features of the platform requires acceptance of the Contributor Agreement, available at saroir.com/contributoragreement. The Contributor Agreement governs:

• Ownership of contributions (you retain ownership; you grant a non-exclusive licence to the platform)
• Declarations required before submission
• The review and anchoring process
• Trade secret and confidentiality obligations
• Liability for content you submit

These Terms and the Contributor Agreement are read together. In the event of a conflict, the Contributor Agreement governs on matters of contribution ownership and liability. These Terms govern on matters of platform access, account conduct, and limitation of liability.

Saroir's moderation system involves human domain practitioners and, in some cases, AI-assisted screening tools. Together they review submitted contributions for originality, relevance, and appropriateness before accepting them into the permanent record.

We do our best to ensure that published knowledge is verified, original, and does not already exist in the public record in identical form. However, we must be honest about the limits of this process:

Gated and proprietary knowledge. If a piece of knowledge is protected by a non-disclosure agreement, is a trade secret, is subject to regulatory confidentiality obligations, or is otherwise not publicly accessible, our moderators and AI screening tools may not be able to identify it as such. A contributor who submits confidential, proprietary, or gated information in breach of an existing obligation is solely responsible for that breach. The Saroir Knowledge Foundation accepts no liability for the publication of such information. The obligation not to submit such information rests entirely with the contributor and, where applicable, the company or institution they represent.

If your organisation's proprietary or confidential information appears on the platform and you believe it was submitted without authorisation, contact [email protected] immediately. We will investigate and take appropriate action, which may include removing or suppressing the contribution from public display. We cannot remove the blockchain anchor, but we can address the contribution's visibility and record the dispute permanently.

AI-assisted screening. The platform uses automated screening tools prior to human moderation to assist with similarity detection and content classification. These tools are not infallible. They operate on what is publicly accessible and indexed. They cannot detect confidential information that has never been published. Their use does not constitute a guarantee that all accepted contributions are free of third-party claims.

Agent contributions. The platform supports AI agents acting on behalf of contributors (Bring Your Own Agent). This is a new and evolving area of technology and law. We take precautions: agents cannot submit directly to the human contribution layer, cannot invite other users, and cannot take governance actions. Agent actions are logged and attributable to their owning contributor. However, the legal and ethical questions surrounding AI-assisted knowledge creation and attribution are not fully settled. Contributors who use agents accept that the rules in this area may evolve and that they bear responsibility for the conduct of agents they configure and operate.

You agree not to use the platform to:

• Submit content you do not have the right to submit
• Submit content that constitutes a trade secret, breaches a confidentiality agreement, or violates any applicable law
• Impersonate any person, organisation, or agent
• Attempt to reverse-engineer, scrape, or systematically extract platform data
• Circumvent any access control, rate limit, or security measure
• Harass, threaten, or harm other contributors
• Use the platform for commercial purposes that violate the AGPL-3.0 licence
• Use agent capabilities to take actions that would not be permitted to a human contributor

The platform does not use engagement metrics. Conduct designed to game ranking, score, or visibility signals is contrary to the platform's purpose and grounds for suspension.

The platform's moderation system is described in the public Platform Constitution at saroir.com/governance/constitution. Moderators are domain practitioners who operate according to a defined hierarchy. Moderation decisions can be appealed within the platform.

The Foundation and the founding team reserve the right to suspend or terminate any account, with or without prior notice, for:

• Violation of these Terms or the Contributor Agreement
• Behaviour that materially harms other contributors or the platform community
• Submission of content that is fraudulent, unlawful, or in breach of third-party rights
• Repeated or egregious violation of platform standards

Account suspension does not remove the permanent record of accepted contributions. It removes access to the platform. The DID and the associated Verifiable Credentials remain intact and exportable.

The platform is built around structural privacy separation. Your email address and your contribution record are in separate databases with separate encryption keys and no foreign key between them. This is described in detail in our Privacy Policy at saroir.com/privacy.

Saroir's email handling is governed by a separate document at /email and by our zero-retention-on-acceptance policy (Foundation ADR 0015). By using the platform you acknowledge that we do not maintain a recoverable email record for you after acceptance. Any communication from Saroir other than transactional sign-in messages will arrive as in-app notifications, not email.

We do our best to protect your identity. The architecture is designed to make identity linkage structurally difficult even in a breach scenario. However, we want to be honest: no system is invulnerable. There are residual paths by which a sophisticated adversary with access to multiple data sources could potentially link a contributor's DID to their real identity. These paths include analysis of the content of contributions, metadata in uploaded files, patterns of activity, and any information the contributor has chosen to make public.

We do not make this warning to discourage participation. We make it because you deserve an honest account of the risks so you can make an informed decision. If your contributions touch on genuinely sensitive personal or professional circumstances, consider what you publish carefully and use the platform's pseudonymity features, which are on by default.

The BYOA (Bring Your Own Agent) feature allows contributors to connect AI agents to their account. This is a relatively new capability and the legal and ethical frameworks surrounding it are still developing.

Saroir takes precautions: agents are scoped to a single contributor per domain, agents die when the contributor's session ends, agents cannot submit to the human contribution layer, and all agent actions are logged. These constraints are designed to keep agents within the contribution system's existing accountability structures.

However, we acknowledge that agent-assisted contributions raise genuine questions about attribution, originality, and responsibility that existing law does not fully answer. The Foundation's position, which may evolve as the law develops, is:

• Contributions submitted through the human contribution layer are attributed to the human contributor, regardless of what assistance, including AI assistance, was used in their creation.
• Contributions generated autonomously by agents without human selection and annotation are not eligible for acceptance into the human contribution layer.
• Contributors are responsible for the conduct of agents they configure and operate on the platform.

If the law in your jurisdiction develops in a way that affects these positions, or if you believe the platform's approach to agent contributions is incorrect or harmful, we want to hear from you at [email protected].

These Terms are governed by the laws of the Republic of India.

Mediation first. If a dispute arises between you and the Foundation, you agree to attempt to resolve it by good faith negotiation, and if that fails, by mediation administered by a mutually agreed mediator or, if no agreement is reached, by the Indian Institution of Arbitration and Mediation.

Arbitration. If mediation does not resolve the dispute within 60 days, either party may submit the dispute to binding arbitration under the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 (India), in Bengaluru, India, in English.

EU contributors. Nothing in this clause prevents EU contributors from asserting their rights under EU consumer protection law or from making a complaint to a supervisory authority. The arbitration clause does not override mandatory consumer protections applicable in the contributor's home jurisdiction.

We will give 30 days' notice of material changes to these Terms via a platform notification and a notice on this page. Continued use of the platform after the notice period constitutes acceptance of the updated Terms.

Material changes include any change that affects your rights, the liability structure, the contribution ownership model, or the data practices described in these Terms. Typographical corrections and clarifications that do not affect rights are not material changes.

If any provision of these Terms is found to be unenforceable under applicable law, that provision will be modified to the minimum extent necessary to make it enforceable, or severed if modification is not possible. The remainder of these Terms will continue in full effect.

Saroir Knowledge Foundation

[email protected]

For contributions to improving these Terms, or to report a gap you have found, please write to the same address. We read every message.