Terms of Use

1. The agreement

By creating an account or using Scholia, you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, please do not use the service. Scholia is operated by an individual, not a company, as a free and non-commercial project, and can be reached at clement@ishimwe.dev.

2. What Scholia is

Scholia is a note-taking tool for Bible study. It lets you write notes, attach verses to them, and read open datasets - the biblical text, tagged Hebrew and Greek, lexicons, cross references, geography, people and events - alongside the passage you are studying.

It is a study aid, not an authority. The data it displays was assembled by others, is incomplete in places and contested in others, and is presented for study rather than as settled fact. Scholia does not provide theological, historical, legal, medical or professional advice of any kind.

3. Your account

You need an account to save notes. Keep your password and any API keys to yourself: anyone holding them can read and change your notes. You are responsible for what happens under your account, and for telling us at clement@ishimwe.dev if you think it has been compromised. Revoke a key you no longer use.

You must be old enough to hold an account under the law where you live, and at least 13.

4. Your notes stay yours

You own what you write. We claim no ownership of your notes and no right to publish, license or sell them. You grant us only the narrow permission needed to run the service: to store your notes, back them up, and send them back to you or to a script you have authorised. That permission ends when you delete the content or close your account.

You are responsible for what you put into your notes. Do not store anything unlawful, and do not paste in copyrighted material you have no right to copy.

5. Fair use of a free service

Please do not:

• attack the service, probe it for vulnerabilities without permission, or try to reach accounts and data that are not yours;
• hammer the API hard enough to degrade it for other people, or bulk-scrape it as a substitute for getting the underlying datasets from their publishers - see Sources & licenses for where they live;
• resell access to Scholia, or present it as your own service;
• use Scholia to harass anyone or to distribute malware.

If you are doing research or building something that needs heavy access, write to us - a conversation is usually cheaper than a rate limit.

6. The study data and its licences

The datasets Scholia displays belong to their publishers and carry their own licences, including Creative Commons Attribution, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike and the Open Database Licence. Those terms travel with the data: if you copy material out of Scholia and republish it, you are bound by the licence on that material, not by these terms. Every source, publisher and licence is listed on the Sources & licenses page.

7. Availability, and honesty about it

Scholia is maintained by one person and offered at no charge. It may be slow, may be offline for maintenance, may lose features, and may one day shut down. There is no uptime guarantee and no support commitment. If the service is ever discontinued, we will give reasonable notice and a way to export your notes.

Keep your own copies of anything you would hate to lose. Backups exist, but a free hobby service is not the right place for the only copy of work that matters to you.

8. No warranty

Scholia is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, or non-infringement. We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, secure, or that the data it displays is accurate or complete.

9. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not liable for any indirect, incidental or consequential loss, nor for lost data, lost profits or lost opportunity, arising from your use of or inability to use Scholia. Since Scholia is provided free of charge, our total liability to you for any claim relating to the service is limited to the amount you have paid for it, which is nothing.

Nothing in these terms excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, such as liability for fraud or for death or personal injury caused by negligence.

10. Ending the arrangement

You may stop using Scholia at any time and ask us to delete your account and its contents. We may suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, that endangers the service, or that is used unlawfully - and where it is reasonable to do so, we will tell you why first.

11. Changes to these terms

These terms may change as the service does. The date at the top of the page shows when they last did. Continuing to use Scholia after a change means you accept the updated terms; if you do not, close your account.

12. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of Rwanda, and the courts of Rwanda have jurisdiction over any dispute arising from them. If you are a consumer elsewhere, this does not remove protections you have under the mandatory law of your own country.