Terms of Use

These terms of use (the "Terms") govern your access to and use of thecompetitionbrief.com (the "Site"), including the Catalogue.

The Site is operated by [legal name of operator], a company registered in England and Wales under company number [number], whose registered office is at [address] ("we", "us" and "our"). You can reach us at editorial@thecompetitionbrief.com.

By using the Site you agree to these Terms. When you register a Reader Account you confirm your acceptance by ticking a box, and we record which version of the Terms you accepted and when.

Our copyright and database right in the Content exist independently of these Terms. They apply to you whether or not you have accepted these Terms, and nothing in these Terms limits them.

If you use the Site on behalf of a firm, company, public body, university or other organisation, you accept these Terms on its behalf as well as your own, and you confirm that you have authority to do so.

A separate written agreement with us for API access, bulk supply, syndication or any other licence under clause 9 governs the access it covers, and prevails over these Terms to the extent that they conflict.

Without a Reader Account you may open a limited number of Decisions each day. A Reader Account allows more. We set these limits, may change them, and tell you on screen when one has been reached.

A Reader Account is free and requires only an email address. You must register with an address that you personally use and control. We may refuse or close an account registered with a disposable, shared or role address.

A Reader Account is personal to the individual who registered it. You must not share it, or any sign-in link we send you, with anyone else, including colleagues in your own organisation. Any use of your account is treated as use by you.

You may hold only one Reader Account. You must not register accounts for other people or by automated means.

If you believe someone else has used your account, tell us promptly at editorial@thecompetitionbrief.com with the subject line [Account].

The Site is a research resource. We select Decisions, summarise them and classify them. Our summaries, translations and classifications are editorial work. No court or authority has approved them, and they are not official reports.

Nothing on the Site is legal advice, and using the Site does not create a lawyer and client relationship with us or with any contributor. You should not act, or refrain from acting, on the basis of Content without taking advice on your own circumstances.

A Decision may be appealed, set aside, varied, corrected or redacted after we publish it, and our record may not yet reflect that. Where a Decision matters to you, check its authoritative text and current status with the issuing body.

Where a Decision exists in more than one language, only the versions the issuing body treats as authentic have legal effect. Our translations are unofficial.

Editorial Content is protected by copyright and is owned by us or licensed to us.

The Catalogue is a database in whose obtaining, verification and presentation we have made a substantial investment. We own the database right in it under the Copyright and Rights in Databases Regulations 1997, and any corresponding right under the law of any other country to the extent that right is available to us, together with the copyright in the selection and arrangement of its contents.

We claim no rights in Decisions themselves. In many jurisdictions official texts of a legislative, administrative or judicial nature attract no copyright; elsewhere, any rights remain with the issuing body. You are free to obtain any Decision from its issuing body and to use it on whatever terms that body sets.

That an individual Decision is free of copyright, or is published by its issuing body on open terms, does not entitle you to take it or any other part of the Catalogue from the Site in breach of these Terms, and gives you no rights in our Editorial Content or in the Catalogue.

The name The Competition Brief and our logo are our trade marks. You may use the name to identify us as the source of material you cite, but not in any way that suggests our endorsement or a connection with us that does not exist.

Subject to these Terms, we grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable and revocable licence to use the Site for your own reading, research, study and professional work. Within that licence you may:

• (a) search, browse and read Content;
• (b) print or save individual Decisions and records, in reasonable numbers, for your own use or for a particular matter on which you are working;
• (c) quote reasonable extracts from Editorial Content in advice, submissions, academic work, articles and teaching materials, with an acknowledgement of The Competition Brief and, where practicable, a link to the page;
• (d) link to any page of the Site; and
• (e) send an individual record to a colleague or client in the ordinary course of your work.

Any other use requires our prior written permission.

Nothing in these Terms excludes anything the law entitles you to do and does not allow a contract to prevent, including fair dealing for the purposes of criticism, review, quotation and news reporting, and the extraction or re-utilisation of insubstantial parts of the Catalogue by a lawful user.

You must not do any of the following, or permit or assist anyone else to do so, whether directly or through an employee, contractor, tool or service:

• (a) access the Catalogue by Automated Access. Search engine crawlers may access other parts of the Site to the extent our robots.txt permits;
• (b) extract or re-utilise all or a substantial part of the Catalogue, evaluated qualitatively or quantitatively, or repeatedly and systematically extract or re-utilise insubstantial parts of it;
• (c) copy, download, cache, mirror or store Content in bulk, or use Content to build or supplement any dataset, corpus, archive, index or database;
• (d) circumvent, disable or interfere with any access limit, sign-in requirement, rate limit or other technical measure, including by rotating IP addresses, proxies, user agents or accounts;
• (e) republish, sell, license, syndicate or otherwise make Content available to others, or use it to build or improve a product or service that competes with or substitutes for the Site;
• (f) remove or alter any attribution, citation, copyright notice or source reference; or
• (g) impose an unreasonable load on the Site, probe or test its security, or attempt to reach any part of it you are not authorised to reach.

Text and Data Mining and AI Use are governed by clause 8.

We expressly reserve the right to carry out Text and Data Mining and AI Use of the Content, and the right to authorise others to do so. This reservation is made for the purposes of Article 4(3) of Directive (EU) 2019/790 and of any equivalent provision of any other law, and is also expressed in machine-readable form under clause 8.5.

Unless we have granted you a written licence, you must not carry out, commission or permit Text and Data Mining of any Content.

Unless we have granted you a written licence, you must not put Content to any AI Use. In particular, you must not use Content to:

• (a) train, fine-tune, distil or align any model;
• (b) create embeddings, vector indexes, knowledge graphs or retrieval collections;
• (c) ground or augment the output of an AI System, including by retrieval-augmented generation;
• (d) evaluate or benchmark an AI System; or
• (e) generate synthetic data for any of those purposes.

You must not instruct any AI agent, AI assistant or automated browsing tool to access the Catalogue, or to retrieve, collect or summarise its records, on your behalf. Access by a tool acting on your instructions is access by you.

We express the reservation in clause 8.1 in machine-readable form through:

• (a) the rules and named AI user agents in /robots.txt;
• (b) the TDM Reservation Protocol declaration at /.well-known/tdmrep.json;
• (c) X-Robots-Tag response headers, including noai and noimageai; and
• (d) robots and AI meta tags in the page markup.

The reservation applies whether or not any of those signals is present, reachable or recognised by the software concerned. The absence of a technical barrier is not permission.

Providers of general-purpose AI models placed on the market in the European Union are required by Article 53(1)(c) of Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 to put in place a policy to identify and comply with reservations of rights made under Article 4(3) of Directive (EU) 2019/790. This clause is such a reservation.

This clause does not affect any exception that the law does not allow a contract to override, including Article 3 of Directive (EU) 2019/790 (text and data mining for scientific research by research organisations and cultural heritage institutions) and section 29A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (copies for text and data analysis for non-commercial research). Each of those exceptions applies only to a person with lawful access to the material, and access obtained in breach of clause 3 or 7 is not lawful access. Both concern copyright; the database right in the Catalogue is subject to its own, narrower, exceptions. If you believe an exception applies to your project, please write to us before you begin, so that we can agree a way of supplying the material that does not require Automated Access.

Any dataset, model, index, embedding or other output produced in breach of this clause is produced in breach of these Terms and, where applicable, in infringement of our copyright or database right. On our request you must delete it and confirm in writing that you have done so.

Open Editorial Pages. Clauses 8.2 and 8.3 do not apply to the articles, topic guides, frequently asked questions, contributor profiles and enforcement statistics that we publish on the Site outside the Catalogue (the Open Editorial Pages), to the extent that /robots.txt admits a crawler to them. The operator of a crawler so admitted may carry out Text and Data Mining and AI Use of the Open Editorial Pages, including training a model and answering its users' questions, provided that it:

• (a) complies with /robots.txt as published from time to time;
• (b) does not access the Catalogue; and
• (c) where its system quotes or relies on an Open Editorial Page in an answer, attributes The Competition Brief and, where practicable, links to that page.

The permission in clause 8.10 is non-exclusive and revocable. We may withdraw it from any operator, or generally, by changing /robots.txt, and the withdrawal takes effect when that change is published. It grants no right in the Catalogue, which remains reserved in full under this clause.

We will consider licences for uses these Terms do not permit, including API or bulk access, Text and Data Mining, AI Use, syndication of Editorial Content and institution-wide access. Write to editorial@thecompetitionbrief.com with the subject line [Licensing], stating who you are, the Content you want, the use you propose and the period for which you need it.

We consider requests for non-commercial academic research on reduced terms or without charge. Please say so in your first message.

A licence exists only when we grant it in a written agreement signed on our behalf. Silence, an invoice, a purchase order or terms sent to us do not create one.

We record technical information about requests to the Site, including IP address, user agent, time and the pages requested, in order to protect the Site and enforce these Terms.

We may limit, challenge, suspend or refuse access from any account, device, address or network, without notice, where we reasonably suspect a breach of clause 7 or 8.

We may suspend or close a Reader Account that has been used in breach of these Terms.

You acknowledge that damages alone may not be an adequate remedy for a breach of clause 7 or 8, and that we may seek an injunction or other equitable relief in addition to any other remedy.

We are under no obligation to monitor use of the Site. A delay or failure in acting on a breach does not waive it.

We provide the Site as it is available from time to time and do not guarantee that it will be uninterrupted or free of errors.

We may add, correct, reclassify, withdraw or restrict any Content at any time, including where an issuing body withdraws, annuls or redacts a Decision, or where we receive a valid legal request.

We may change, suspend or withdraw the Site or any feature of it, including the limits described in clause 3.

The Site is not an archive of record. If you need to rely on a Decision, obtain and keep a copy from its issuing body.

We take reasonable care in preparing the Content, but we do not warrant that it is accurate, complete or current. Summaries, classifications and translations in particular involve editorial judgement and may contain errors.

If you find an error, please tell us at editorial@thecompetitionbrief.com with the subject line [Correction], giving the record's identifier, its address and the point concerned.

To the extent permitted by law, all conditions, warranties and other terms that might otherwise be implied by statute, common law or otherwise are excluded.

Links to other websites, including those of issuing bodies, are provided for information only. We have no control over those websites and accept no responsibility for them.

Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for any other liability that cannot be excluded or limited by law.

Subject to clause 13.1, we are not liable, whether in contract, tort (including negligence), breach of statutory duty or otherwise, for:

• (a) loss of profits, revenue, business, contracts or anticipated savings;
• (b) loss of goodwill or reputation;
• (c) loss or corruption of data;
• (d) any loss arising from reliance on Content; or
• (e) any indirect or consequential loss.

Subject to clause 13.1, our total liability to you arising out of or in connection with these Terms or your use of the Site is limited to £100. The Site is provided free of charge, and this limit reflects that.

If you are a consumer, we are responsible for loss you suffer that is a foreseeable result of our breach of these Terms or our failure to use reasonable care and skill, and clauses 13.2 and 13.3 apply to you only to the extent the law permits. We are not liable to a consumer for business losses. Nothing in these Terms affects your statutory rights.

If you use the Site in the course of a business or profession, you will indemnify us against all losses, damages, costs and expenses, including reasonable legal costs, that we incur as a result of your breach of clause 3, 7 or 8.

When you register a Reader Account we collect your email address and record your acceptance of these Terms. We use that information to provide your account, to send you sign-in links, and to tell you about material changes to the Site or these Terms. We send you editorial email, such as our newsletter, only if you have separately asked to receive it, and you may stop it at any time.

We process the request records described in clause 10.1 in our legitimate interests in protecting the Site and enforcing these Terms.

We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it with advertisers or data brokers.

You have rights under the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, including rights of access, rectification and erasure. To exercise them, write to editorial@thecompetitionbrief.com with the subject line [Privacy]. You may also complain to the Information Commissioner's Office.

You may close your Reader Account at any time by writing to editorial@thecompetitionbrief.com with the subject line [Account].

We may suspend or end your access at any time if you breach these Terms, if we reasonably suspect that you have done so, or if the law requires it.

When your access ends, the licence in clause 6 ends with it. You must stop using the Site and delete any Content you hold other than as clause 6 permitted.

Clauses 5, 7, 8, 10, 12, 13, 15.3, 16 and 17 survive the end of your access.

We may amend these Terms. The current version, with its date, is always available at thecompetitionbrief.com/terms.

We will give registered readers at least 30 days' notice by email of any material change, and ask you to accept the amended version when you next sign in. A change required by law, or needed to address misuse of the Site, may take effect sooner.

If you do not agree to an amended version, you should stop using the Site and close your account. Continued use after an amendment takes effect constitutes acceptance of it.

These Terms, together with any licence granted under clause 9, are the entire agreement between you and us about your use of the Site.

If any provision of these Terms is held unenforceable, the rest remain in force, and that provision applies with the minimum modification needed to make it enforceable.

You may not assign or transfer your rights under these Terms. We may transfer ours, including on a sale of the business, and will tell you if we do.

No one other than you and us has any right to enforce these Terms under the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999.

Neither of us is liable for any failure caused by events beyond our reasonable control.

Notices to us must be sent to editorial@thecompetitionbrief.com with the subject line [Legal notice]. Notices to you will be sent to the email address registered to your Reader Account.

These Terms, and any dispute or claim arising out of or in connection with them or their subject matter, including non-contractual disputes and claims, are governed by the law of England and Wales.

The courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction, except that we may seek an injunction or other interim relief in any court of competent jurisdiction to protect our rights under clauses 5, 7 and 8.

If you are a consumer, you keep the protection of the mandatory provisions of the law of the country in which you live, and you may bring proceedings in its courts where that law allows.

These Terms are written in English. Any translation is provided for convenience, and the English text prevails.