Terms of Service

Capitalised terms have the meaning given below wherever they appear in these Terms and in the documents that form part of the legal framework listed at the end of this page.

SWLEF, we, us

SWLEF — the Screen Works Licensing & Evidence Framework, operated from its registered office at Rue du Rhône 100, 1204 Geneva, Switzerland, as identified in the Impressum.

Service

The websites swlef.com and rights.swlef.com, the public registry, the verification pages, the dashboard, the platform-connection tools, the certificate generator, the APIs and every related feature.

User, you

Any natural or legal person who accesses the Service, with or without an account.

Registrant

A User acting for a company that submits works, evidence or platform connections to the registry.

Verifier

Any person — a platform trust-and-safety team, broadcaster, distributor, lawyer, journalist or member of the public — who consults a registry record or certificate.

Work

An audiovisual or audio production recorded in the registry: a film, series, episode, documentary, programme, clip, album, song or other creative work.

Record

The structured entry for a Work or Company in the registry, identified by a Registry ID of the form MRR-YYYY-TTT-NNNNNN (Works) or MRR-COMP-YYYY-NNNNNN (Companies).

Evidence

Documents and data submitted to support a Record: corporate documents, ownership declarations, production, licence and assignment agreements, chain-of-title documents, platform administration proof and similar material.

Status

The review state of a Record as defined in the Evidence Review Methodology, including the derived public labels “Verified by evidence”, “Public metadata reference”, “Under review”, “Disputed”, “Expired authorization” and “Private record”.

Certificate

The signed document (PDF/PNG) generated for a Verified Record, carrying a QR code, a SHA-256 content fingerprint and an HMAC-SHA256 registry signature, governed by the Certificate Terms & Reliance Policy.

Platform Connection

A link between a Company and an official account on a third-party platform, established by platform sign-in (OAuth) or by a verification code placed in the account’s public profile, DNS or website.

Public Metadata Reference

A Record created from public catalogue sources without any submitted Evidence. It identifies a Work; it does not certify ownership.

These Terms form a binding agreement between you and SWLEF. They apply from the moment you access the Service. Creating an account, submitting a Work, connecting a platform account, purchasing a plan, downloading a Certificate or relying on a Record each constitutes acceptance of the version of these Terms in force at that time.

The following documents are incorporated by reference and form part of the agreement: the Privacy Notice, the Evidence Review Methodology, the Certificate Terms & Reliance Policy, the Appeals, Disputes & Notices Policy, the Platform Disclaimer, the General Disclaimer, the Data Retention Policy and the Acceptable Use Policy. In the event of conflict, the more specific document prevails over the more general one, and these Terms prevail over all marketing text, help text and user-interface labels.

If you use the Service on behalf of a company, you represent that you are authorised to bind that company, and “you” includes that company. Where a company account has several users, the company is responsible for every action taken through its users.

SWLEF is a private, independent, evidence-based documentation registry. Its function is to organise submitted Evidence, rights scope, authorisation details and audit references into structured Records, to review that Evidence under a published and consistent procedure, and to make the outcome of the review available as a reference that third parties can check in real time.

SWLEF is not any of the following, and nothing on the Service may be read as suggesting otherwise:

• a court, arbitral tribunal, regulator, ministry, intellectual-property office, customs authority or other public body;
• a copyright registration system in the sense of national copyright law. Under the Berne Convention and the Swiss Copyright Act copyright arises automatically upon creation and requires no registration; a Record is not a legal formality and creates no right;
• a collecting society, licensing agent, distributor or escrow agent; SWLEF never collects royalties, grants licences or holds rights on anyone’s behalf;
• a content-hosting platform; SWLEF does not host the Works it records and cannot remove content from third-party platforms;
• an agent, partner or certified provider of any platform, unless a separate written agreement exists and is named on the Service (see the Platform Disclaimer);
• a law firm; nothing on the Service is legal advice.

Records, Statuses and Certificates therefore do not create, transfer, confirm or adjudicate legal rights. They document that specified Evidence was submitted by a specified party and reviewed on a specified date with a specified outcome. Every Verifier remains free, and is encouraged, to form their own view of the underlying documents.

You must be at least 18 years old and legally capable of entering into contracts to open an account. Accounts for Registrants are issued to companies and other legal entities; a natural person may register as a sole proprietor where the applicable law treats that person as a business.

You must provide accurate, complete and current information at registration and keep it updated. SWLEF may require proof of corporate existence (register extracts), proof of representative authority, proof of control of the company’s e-mail domain and, where relevant, identity documents of the authorised representative before a Company passes compliance review.

You are responsible for keeping your credentials confidential, for every action taken through your account and for notifying SWLEF immediately at dmca@swlef.com of any suspected unauthorised use. SWLEF may suspend an account without notice where it reasonably suspects compromise, fraud, misrepresentation of Statuses, sanctions exposure or a breach of these Terms.

A Company passes through the statuses Pending review, Under compliance review, Verified company, More information required and Rejected. Only a Verified company may connect platform accounts and receive Certificates. Verification of a Company confirms its corporate identity and representative authority at the time of review; it is not a statement about the Company’s ownership of any Work.

By submitting a Work, a document or any other material you represent and warrant to SWLEF, to every Verifier and to every platform that will consult the Record that:

1. you are the rights holder or are expressly authorised by the rights holder to submit the material and to request registration;
2. every document is authentic, complete and unaltered, and every signature on it is genuine;
3. the information you enter — titles, years, companies, territories, rights scope, platform scope, validity dates — is accurate to the best of your knowledge and will be corrected by you promptly if it ceases to be accurate;
4. you have disclosed every competing claim, dispute, revocation, expiry or court decision you are aware of that concerns the Work;
5. you hold every consent needed under data-protection law to submit personal data contained in the documents;
6. the submission is not made to harass, to extort, to suppress lawful speech or to obtain a Status for use in a misleading way.

Submitting material never guarantees a Verified Status. Every submission is reviewed under the Evidence Review Methodology; SWLEF may request further documents, may reject a submission, may assign a limited confidence level, may classify the Record as a Public Metadata Reference, and may re-open any review at any time when new information emerges.

You grant SWLEF a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to store, copy, fingerprint, analyse, display to authorised reviewers and, where you have requested it or the law requires it, disclose to platforms, counterparties, courts or authorities the material you submit, for the purpose of operating the registry, reviewing Evidence, handling disputes and maintaining an audit trail. Posters, backdrops and artwork displayed on public Records are shown for identification only.

Evidence documents are stored privately, outside the web root, fingerprinted with SHA-256 for integrity and shown only to authorised reviewers. They are never published. Public Records display only the review summary (evidence submitted yes/no, chain of title reviewed yes/partial/no, scope, dates, confidence), never the documents themselves.

Every Record carries an internal review state (Draft, Pending review, Under review, Verified, More information required, Rejected), an evidence level (None, Basic, Standard, Strong), a confidence level (High, Medium, Limited), a dispute state and validity dates. The public label is derived from these fields exactly as described in the Evidence Review Methodology.

A Status reflects the Evidence available at the time of review. SWLEF may at any time, with or without prior notice, change a Status, mark a Record as Disputed, set or shorten a validity window, reclassify a Record as a Public Metadata Reference, make a Record private, or withdraw a Record, where review, a conflict, a dispute, a revocation, an expiry, a court or platform decision, a legal obligation or new Evidence warrants it. Every change is time-stamped in the Record’s audit trail; Records are corrected rather than silently deleted so that the history remains coherent.

Review decisions concern registry Status only. They do not decide who owns a Work, and they do not prevent any party from pursuing courts, authorities or platform procedures. Appeals are handled exclusively under the Appeals, Disputes & Notices Policy.

A Certificate is generated only for a Record whose Status is Verified on the basis of submitted Evidence, whose dispute state is “none” and whose validity window is current. The Certificate is a snapshot that points to the live Record: it displays the Registry ID, the Work and Company identity, the rights scope, the validity dates, the verified Platform Connections, a SHA-256 content fingerprint and an HMAC-SHA256 registry signature, together with a QR code resolving to https://swlef.com/verify/<Registry ID>.

A Certificate is valid only while the Record it references is valid. If the Record is later disputed, expired, reclassified or withdrawn, every copy of the Certificate ceases to be valid at that moment even though the file still exists. Verifiers must therefore check the live verification page rather than rely on the file alone. Full conditions, including the limits on reliance, are set out in the Certificate Terms & Reliance Policy.

You may show, print and transmit Certificates for your own Works in their unaltered form. You may not alter a Certificate, remove or obscure its signature, QR code, validity dates or disclaimers, create look-alike documents, or present a Certificate as issued by a public authority or a platform.

A Verified company may connect official accounts on supported platforms. Where a platform offers official sign-in, the connection uses the platform’s OAuth flow with the minimum read-only scopes needed to confirm the account identity; where it does not, SWLEF issues a unique verification code that must be placed in the account’s public profile, in a DNS TXT record or in a meta tag on the company’s website, and checks it automatically. Access tokens are stored encrypted (AES-256-GCM) and are used only to re-confirm the connection; SWLEF never posts, messages, edits or deletes anything on a connected account.

A verified Platform Connection means one thing only: at the time of verification, the Company demonstrated control of that account. It is not an endorsement, certification or integration by the platform, does not alter the platform’s policies, rights-management tools or decisions, and does not by itself establish ownership of any content published on the account. The Platform Disclaimer applies in full.

Connections may be revoked by you at any time from the dashboard or by removing the code or revoking the OAuth grant on the platform. SWLEF re-checks connections periodically and marks connections that can no longer be confirmed as lapsed; lapsed connections are removed from Certificates issued afterwards.

Access plans (Data Access, Viewer · Protected, Full Access) are monthly subscriptions billed in advance at the price shown on the Plans page at the time of purchase. A Record Pass is a one-time fee that unlocks the full Record and Certificate view of a single Work. Prices are stated exclusive of VAT or similar taxes, which are added where applicable.

Fees never purchase a Status. Fees pay for registry access, document handling, review workflow capacity, certificate rendering, protected viewing and support. A Verified Status is reached exclusively through the Evidence review process, and a submission may be rejected after the fee was paid. Review work that has been performed is not refundable because of the outcome.

Subscriptions renew automatically each month until cancelled. You may cancel at any time from the dashboard; cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period and no partial refunds are made for the remainder of a period already started, except where mandatory law provides otherwise. Where you are a consumer with a statutory right of withdrawal, you acknowledge that review and access begin immediately at your request and that the right of withdrawal lapses once the service has been fully performed.

Payments are processed by Stripe or PayPal under their own terms; SWLEF never stores card data. Bank transfers are confirmed manually and access is granted upon receipt of funds. Failed or reversed payments suspend paid features until settled; chargebacks raised without first contacting SWLEF may lead to suspension of the account.

The Acceptable Use Policy forms part of these Terms. In summary you must not: submit false, forged or misleading material; misrepresent a Status, a Certificate or a Platform Connection; use the registry to harass, extort or suppress lawful content; scrape, mirror or bulk-extract registry data beyond the limits of your plan; attempt to circumvent protected viewing, watermarks, PIN locks or access controls; probe, overload or attack the Service; or use the Service for any unlawful purpose.

Breach entitles SWLEF to suspend or terminate the account, to reclassify or withdraw affected Records, to block the submitting party permanently, to retain and disclose relevant information to platforms, counterparties and authorities, and to recover its costs.

The SWLEF name, the shield mark, the layout and texts of the Service, the certificate design, the review methodology and the registry database (as a collection) are protected by copyright, trademark, database and unfair-competition law and remain the exclusive property of SWLEF. Nothing in these Terms transfers any of those rights to you.

Titles, posters, artwork, company names and trademarks shown in the registry belong to their respective owners and are displayed solely to identify the Works and Companies on record. Rights holders who object to the display of a specific image may request its removal under the Appeals, Disputes & Notices Policy.

You may consult public Records and share links to them freely. Any other reuse of registry data — systematic extraction, re-publication, resale, use for training automated systems, or inclusion in competing databases — requires SWLEF’s prior written consent.

The Service refers to and interoperates with third-party platforms, payment providers, public metadata sources and external websites. SWLEF does not control them, does not endorse them and is not responsible for their availability, policies, decisions or content. Catalogue metadata (titles, release years, posters, production companies) is obtained from public sources and shown as received; such Records are labelled “Public metadata reference” and certify nothing.

The Service and every Record, Status and Certificate are provided “as is” and “as available” on the basis of the material submitted and the review performed at the time. To the fullest extent permitted by law SWLEF disclaims all warranties, express or implied, including any warranty that a Record is complete, that submitted documents are genuine, that a Status will be accepted by any platform, court or counterparty, that the Service will be uninterrupted or error-free, or that any particular commercial outcome will be achieved. The General Disclaimer applies in addition.

To the extent permitted by Swiss law, SWLEF’s total liability to you arising out of or in connection with the Service, whatever the legal basis, is limited to the fees you paid to SWLEF in the twelve months preceding the event giving rise to the claim, or CHF 500 if no fees were paid. SWLEF is not liable for indirect or consequential loss, loss of profit, loss of revenue, loss of business, reputational harm, loss of data, or for decisions made by third parties — including platforms, courts, distributors and counterparties — in reliance on or in disregard of a Record or Certificate.

Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits liability for unlawful intent or gross negligence (Art. 100 of the Swiss Code of Obligations), for personal injury, or for any liability that cannot be limited under applicable mandatory law.

You will indemnify and hold harmless SWLEF, its operators, reviewers and service providers from every claim, loss, cost and expense (including reasonable legal fees) arising from material you submitted, from a breach of your warranties under these Terms, from your misuse of a Record, Status, Certificate or Platform Connection, or from your breach of applicable law.

Personal data is processed as described in the Privacy Notice under the Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection and, where applicable, the EU General Data Protection Regulation, and retained as described in the Data Retention Policy. Evidence documents are treated as confidential and are disclosed only to authorised reviewers, to parties you designate, or where a legal obligation, a court order or a substantiated dispute procedure requires it.

You may close your account at any time from the dashboard or by writing to dmca@swlef.com. SWLEF may suspend or terminate your access with immediate effect for breach of these Terms, for legal or security reasons, or where the account has been inactive for more than 24 months, and may otherwise terminate on 30 days’ notice.

On termination, paid features end, Platform Connections are revoked and Certificates for your Works are no longer issued. Public Records are retained, corrected or made private as required by the registry’s verification function and the Data Retention Policy, so that third parties who relied on them are not misled by their silent disappearance; a minimal audit stub (identifiers, dates, status history) may be kept where a Record was relied upon.

SWLEF develops the Service continuously and may add, change or withdraw features. Material changes to these Terms are announced on the Service and, for account holders, by e-mail at least 14 days before they take effect; the new version applies to your continued use after that date. The version number, effective date and change log on this page identify the current text. If you do not agree to a change you may close your account before it takes effect.

These Terms and every dispute arising from or in connection with the Service are governed by the substantive laws of Switzerland, excluding its conflict-of-law rules and the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods. The exclusive place of jurisdiction is Geneva, Switzerland. Mandatory forums available to consumers under the law of their domicile remain reserved.

Before commencing proceedings the parties will attempt to resolve the matter through the internal procedure described in the Appeals, Disputes & Notices Policy. SWLEF is neither obliged nor willing to participate in proceedings before a consumer arbitration board; EU consumers may nevertheless use the European Commission’s online dispute resolution platform.

• Entire agreement. These Terms and the incorporated documents constitute the entire agreement regarding the Service and replace all prior terms.
• Severability. If a provision is invalid or unenforceable, the remainder stays in force and the provision is replaced by a valid one that comes closest to its economic purpose.
• No waiver. Failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of the right to enforce it later.
• Assignment. You may not assign your rights or obligations without SWLEF’s written consent. SWLEF may assign the agreement to a successor operator of the registry, giving you notice.
• Notices. Legal notices to SWLEF are validly served by e-mail to dmca@swlef.com or by registered post to Rue du Rhône 100, 1204 Geneva, Switzerland. Notices to you are validly served to the e-mail address of your account.
• Language. The English text is authoritative; translations are provided for convenience only.