Terms of Use as of 12 March 2024

Preamble

(1) The Medusa Project DE GmbH (»We», «Us», «Our») provides news, information and data (»Content») on the website www.schon.berlin and Our respective social media accounts (»Website»). In addition, We enable the user of the Website (»You», «Your») to access the websites of other providers via hyperlinks. This Content is generally accessible for everyone for private purposes in accordance with these general terms and conditions of use (»General Terms of Use»).

§ 1 Scope of application

(1) These general terms and conditions of use (»General Terms of Use») apply to every visit of the Website.

(2) By accessing and using the Website, You implicitly agree to these General Terms of Use. Especially, You guarantee that you do not act in a way contrary to these general terms of use.

(3) If You wish to use services that require registration, You must also agree to special terms of use, which will be provided to You. For special services and offers such as subscriptions, reprint rights and syndication, there are also separate general terms and conditions, to which you will be referred separately. In the event that more specific terms of use and/or general terms and conditions apply to specific parts of the Website, e.g. governing the sale of (digital) goods or (digital) services provided, these more specific shall supplement the present General Terms of Use.

(4) The present General Terms of Use do not affect the privacy statement in any way.

(5) The General Terms of Use linked accordingly at the time of Your visit to the Website always apply.

(6) As new technologies and the constant development of this Website may result in changes to these General Terms of Use, We recommend that You read the General Terms of Use again at regular intervals.

§ 2 Objects; Use of the Website and its Content

(1) The main objects of the Website is to provide news, information and data about current affairs in Berlin (»Own Content»),

(2) You may only use the Content of the Website for private, i.e. Your own personal and non-commercial purposes. Any use for professional purposes and any use by foundations, corporations and institutions under public law, associations, libraries, authorities and courts is not private. Any use of the Content for commercial purposes is prohibited unless We have given Our written consent in individual cases. You can acquire rights of use from Us here: [email protected].

§ 3 Paywall; registration

(1) Parts of Our Website are only accessible to Our subscribers and not to visitors. In addition, We may not offer or make available all of Our Website or Content to residents of certain countries.

(2) The amount and types of Content on Our Website that You can access depend on whether You are a subscriber. If You are not a subscriber, You only have access to a limited number of articles each months. The remaining articles You may access in the current period is displayed on Our Website.

(3) We reserve the right to amend the number of free articles and/or the duration of the period as well as the scope of Your subscription from time to time. We will give You at least 30 days» notice of any significant reduction of free articles, shortening of the period or reduction in the scope of Your subscription. Any significant reduction in the scope of Your subscription will only take effect from the date of Your next payment following that 30-day-period. Any termination, suspension or restriction of Your subscription due to default payments or severe violations of these General Terms of Use does not constitute a significant reduction of Your subscription.

(4) To have access to all parts of Our Website and/or Content, You have to become a subscriber. To become a subscriber, You have to agree to the specific terms and conditions available here. In case of a conflict between these General Terms of Use and the specific terms and conditions for subscriptions, the specific terms and conditions for subscription prevail.

(5) You will keep Your user name and/or password confidential and will not share this information with any third party. You will also not register multiple email addresses. We may terminate or restrict Your use of Our Website or Content if You violate these General Terms of Use or are engaged in illegal or fraudulent use of the Website or Content.

(6) If You believe that there has been any breach of security as the disclosure, theft or unauthorized use of Your user name and/or password or any payment information, You must notify Us immediately by emailing us at [email protected].

§ 4 Copyright and intellectual property

(1) The entire Content, including images, graphics, text, audio, video and other files, is either Our property or the property of third parties and is protected by copyright. Insofar as Contents are the property of third parties, We are the lawful licensee.

(2) We grant You a limited license to access and use Our Website and intellectual property rights, subject to Your ability to access Our Website as set out above, and to the following usage restrictions:

• You may use Our Website for personal, private and non-commercial purposes only;
• You must not register multiple email addresses;
• You must not use, share, or otherwise exploit the Website, or any Content appearing on the Website, for any commercial, business, or monetised purpose, or for any other purpose not expressly permitted by these General Terms of Use;
• You must abide by any exclusionary protocols (e.g. Robots.txt) that may be used in connection with the Website. You may not access parts of the Website to which You are not authorised or attempt to circumvent any restrictions imposed on Your use of or access to the Website; and
• You must not:
• use the Website in any way that is unlawful, improper, or fraudulent; that is defamatory, threatening, abusive, pornographic, objectionable; or which advocates bigotry, hatred, or discrimination;
• reproduce, duplicate, publish, copy, share, or re-sell any part of the Website;
• extract any data or metadata from the Website or any Content on/available via the Website (including by means of so-called «scraping»);
• use any Content (including associated metadata) from the Website for any machine learning or artificial intelligence (AI) purposes, including, but not limited to, developing, building, training, fine tuning, or grounding or otherwise utilising in any large language models (LLMs), machine learning tools, or generative AI systems;
• alter, delete or conceal any copyright, trademark, service mark or other notices contained within Our Content or Website;
• use the Website in a way that could damage, disable, overburden, impair or compromise Our systems or security or interfere with other users;
• circumvent any digital rights management software or geo-blocking software (including by the use of a VPN or other similar technologies to mask Your location);
• incorporate the Website in parts or in total into another service or website, including by using frames or iframes;
• transmit any data, send or upload any material that contains viruses, Trojan horses, worms, time-bombs, keystroke loggers, spyware, adware or any other harmful programs or similar computer code designed to adversely affect the operation of the Website; or
• access without authority, interfere with, damage or disrupt (a) any part of the Website; (b) any equipment or network on which the Website is stored; © any software used in the provision of the Website; or (d) any equipment, network or software owned or used by any third party.

(3) The above also applies to non-commercial publication. However, the extraction is allowed for purely private purposes, which are not intended for publication, for example the mere saving on Your computer. Furthermore, extraction for non-commercial, academic purposes is permitted, provided that no publication takes place. For the purposes of the foregoing sentence, publication means the provision of content to an indefinite and/or unlimited group of persons. The provision of content to a specific and limited group of persons, such as students of a particular lecture or tutorial, is permitted provided that such provision serves non-commercial, academic purposes and is explicitly referred to the copyright of Us or the respective copyright owner.

(4) If in doubt whether the envisaged use of any Content is in line with the previous provisions, please contact us.

(5) Third party content included as part of Our Website is licensed to You either under these General Terms of Use or through such third party terms and conditions that will be made known to You as and when they become relevant.

§ 4 Availability of the Website

(1) We always endeavour to ensure that the Website is available without interruption and that transmissions are error-free. Due to the nature of the internet, however, this cannot be guaranteed. Your access to the Website may also be interrupted or restricted from time to time to allow repairs, maintenance or the introduction of new content and services. We will attempt to limit the frequency and duration of any such temporary interruptions or limitations and to provide you with timely notice of the timing, extent and duration of any such interruptions or limitations. Nevertheless, You do not have a claim to constant availability of the Website.

(2) In order to use Our services properly, You must have access to electronic media that meets the current technical standard.

(3) We reserve the right to terminate or restrict Our offer or parts of Our offer at any time. This includes, in particular, any free services and offers and, in particular, those requiring registration. If You have registered for a fee-based service, the services will be discontinued within a reasonable period of time after notification.

§ 5 Exclusion of liability

(1) Despite all efforts, it cannot be completely ruled out that damage may arise from the use of the Website, for example if third parties attempt to misuse it to spread viruses or similar despite all security measures. We therefore accept no liability for damages arising from the use of the Website — including for our legal representatives, executives and vicarious agents.

(2) We are liable without limitation if the cause of damage is based on an intentional or grossly negligent breach of duty by Us or a legal representative or executive or vicarious agent. Registered users as well as guest authors are neither Our representatives nor Our executive nor Our vicarious agents.

(3) We are liable for the slightly negligent violation of essential contractual obligations. Essential are obligations whose violation endangers the achievement of the purpose of the contract or whose fulfilment enables the proper execution of the contract in the first place and on whose compliance You regularly trust. In this case, however, We shall only be liable for the foreseeable damage typical of the contract. We are not liable for the slightly negligent violation of obligations other than those mentioned in the previous sentences.

(4) The above limitations of liability shall not apply in the event of injury to life, limb or health, in the event of a defect after acceptance of a guarantee for the quality of the product and in the event of maliciously concealed defects. Liability under the Product Liability Act remains unaffected.

(5) You are advised that any information provided on the Website is for informative purposes only. No decision whatsoever should be purely based on any information provided on the Website. You are advised that the information provided are designated for the general public and do not contain any legal, financial or economic advise whatsoever. Any liability for any damages caused by relying on the information provided on the Website is hereby excluded as far as possible under the applicable law.

(6) Own Content has been created with the greatest care. However, We cannot guarantee for the correctness, completeness and topicality of the Own Content. As a service provider We are responsible according to Sec. 7(1) of the German Telemedia Act (Telemediengesetz, TMG) for our Own Content on the Website according to the general laws. According to Sec. 8 to 10 TMG, We are not obliged as a service provider to monitor transmitted or stored third-party information or to investigate circumstances that indicate illegal activity. Obligations to remove or block the use of information in accordance with general laws remain unaffected by this. However, liability in this respect is only possible from the time of knowledge of a concrete violation of the law. As soon as We become aware of such infringements, We will remove the Content immediately.

(7) You and other users of the Website have the possibility to comment Our Own Content and to submit User Generated Content. We expressly point out that such User Generated Content does not originate from us and is not made in our name. Rather, it is exclusively content from users that has not been checked by Us and that other users have posted themselves. It is therefore possible that the User Generated Content does not correspond to the truth or infringes the rights of third parties. It is also possible that persons listed as senders are not the senders of the statements or their authors. Statements may also be deliberately intended to mislead or deceive readers. We naturally try to remove such statements from the User Generated Content areas and ask for information in this regard. Under no circumstances, however, should You use statements made as a basis for decisions, especially investment decisions. We are not responsible for such User Generated Content.

(8) This Website contains hyperlinks to external websites of third parties, on whose contents We have no influence. Therefore, We cannot assume any liability for these external contents. The respective provider or operator of the respective website is always responsible for the contents of the linked pages. The linked pages were checked for possible legal infringements at the time of linking. Illegal contents were not recognisable at the time of linking. A permanent control of the contents of the linked pages is not reasonable without concrete evidence of an infringement. As soon as We become aware of any legal infringements, We will remove such links immediately.

(9) Please raise Our awareness of any illegal User Generated Content or any legal infringement of a linked page by contacting Us immediately. Thank You!

§ 6 Electronic communication

(1) If You send an email, text message or other message from Your computer or mobile device to Us (»Electronic Message»), You are communicating with Us electronically. We will communicate with you electronically in various ways, such as by email, text message, or by posting messages on the Website.

(2) For contractual purposes, You agree to receive electronic communications from Us and that all consents, notices, publications and other communications may be in electronic form unless otherwise required by law.

(3) The contact information, including email addresses, provided on the Website are purely designated to allow You to contact Us on a specific issue. By doing so We do not consent — neither explicitly, nor implicitly — to receive any communication which is not directly addressed to Us, in particular, You are not allowed to send any unsolicited advertising to Us without Our explicit written consent. In addition, You are not allowed to add Our contact details to databases designed to send unsolicited advertising to Us and others, or to sell or make available in a different way Our contact details to third persons for whatsoever purpose.

§ 7 Data protection; cookie policy

When using the Website, personal data is stored and processed and cookies are used. We inform You about the type and scope as well as the purpose of the data collection, Your rights in this regard as well as the storage periods in the Privacy Statement.

§ 8 No waiver

If You violate these General Terms of Use and We do not do anything about it, We are still entitled to assert Our rights in the event of another violation of the General Terms of Use by You.

§ 9 Choice of law; forum

(1) The entire use of the Website and any contract concluded between You and Us is subject to German law under the exclusion of the Convention on the International Sale of Goods and international private law/conflict of laws.

(2) If You are not a consumer, the forum for any dispute relating to the use of the Website and any contract concluded between You and Us is Berlin, Germany.

§ 10 Final provisions

(1) We reserve the right to make unilateral changes to the Website including these General Terms of Use at any time, if necessary even without informing You about changes in advance. The General Terms of Use at the time of accessing the Website shall be decisive in each case. You are therefore required to regularly inform Yourself about the General Terms of Use; the current version is linked in each case on the Website.

(2) If any provision of these General Terms of Use is invalid, void or for any reason unenforceable, that provision shall be deemed severable and shall not affect the validity and enforceability of any remaining provisions. Rather, the invalid, void or unenforceable provision should be replaced by another legally permissible provision that corresponds to the spirit and purpose of the invalid, void or unenforceable provision.

Berlin, 12 March 2024