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Copyright & Safety

Intellectual Property

The map of who owns what on ACADA: your courses, posts and notes, what students get, what ACADA owns, the Assistant and AI, and where each right's terms live.

Last updated on October 25, 2026.

What you make on ACADA is yours: your courses, your messages, reviews and submissions, your notes. You give us only the licence we need to run the site, and it ends when you delete the content. What we make is ours: the site, its design, the onboarding courses, the certificate design, the Assistant, the brand. Students get access to a course to learn from, not a copy to pass on. The ACADA Assistant reads your course only to answer your students, runs on Anthropic's API, and nothing anyone posts here is used to train AI models. This page is the map; the terms themselves live in the policies it points to.

This summary is for orientation only. The sections below are the operative terms.

1. What this covers

This statement says who owns what on acada.ac, run by ACADA L.L.C., a Tennessee limited liability company (ACADA, we), and what each person may do with it. Most of the rights it describes are granted and limited in other policies, and those are the operative terms: this page tells you where they are, and states only what no other policy covers. Ownership means copyright and the related rights in what someone has made; our name and logo are trademarks, and the Trademark policy is about those.

2. What ACADA owns

The site and everything we made for it belong to ACADA L.L.C.: the software, the design, the text of the pages and emails, the help guide, the ACADA Assistant, the design of certificates and the pages that verify them, the brand, and the onboarding courses published by the ACADA account. Anyone may use the site as it is built, link to any page, and quote short excerpts with attribution. Nobody may copy the site or its material, collect it with scripts, resell it, or build a service from it; the Acceptable Use Policy is the operative text. The onboarding courses are courses like any other: enrolled members learn from them on the terms in section 4.

ACADA is built with open-source software, used under the licences of each component. The site's own code is not open source.

3. Courses: instructors and collaborators

A course belongs to the instructor who publishes it. Nothing on ACADA transfers that ownership to us or to students; the instructor gives us a licence to host, deliver and list the course while it is here, and afterwards only for the copies and records the Instructor Agreement names in section 4 and section 12. A collaborator owns what they add and licenses it to the course under section 8 of the Collaborator Terms. In return, an instructor or collaborator may use the ACADA name and logo to say their course is here, on the terms in the Trademark policy.

Publishing carries a promise: the instructor has the rights they need for everything in the course. Other people's material may be included only with a licence or a right to it, credited, and as a minority of the course, as the Course Content Policy and Academic Integrity set out. Whether a particular use is fair use is the instructor's judgement and the instructor's risk; we do not judge it, and a claim that a course copies someone's work goes through Copyright & DMCA.

Material made with AI is the instructor's content like any other: they are responsible for it and promise they may use it. Whether it is protected by copyright is a question United States law has not settled for work made by a machine, and we make no promise about it. When and how AI involvement must be disclosed is in the AI Content Policy.

4. Courses: students

Enrolling gives you access to a course for your own learning, on any device, for as long as your access lasts. It does not give you a copy to keep or pass on: the Acceptable Use Policy, section 5, says what you may do with lessons and files, and what you may not. Two exceptions come from Purchases, Refunds & Subscriptions: a file the instructor made downloadable is yours to keep, and a lifetime buyer may keep a personal copy of a course the instructor closes. A certificate you earn is yours to keep and to show, exactly as we issued it.

5. Everything else you post

Your messages, reviews, assignment submissions, press articles, portfolio and profile stay yours. By posting them you give us a licence to host them and show them to the audience the feature defines: a review to everyone, a submission to the students of that course, a message to the people in that conversation, a press article to the public under your name. The licence lasts as long as the content does. Delete the content, or your account, and it is deleted with it, except for copies the law or another policy requires us to keep, such as material held under a copyright notice or a report to the authorities. What we keep after an account closes, and for how long, is in the Privacy Policy.

Two uses go beyond hosting. A public review may be quoted in ACADA's own marketing, with your display name as it appears on the site and nothing else. A press article is ACADA's publication: you own the text and we may keep it published under your name after your role ends, until you delete it or your account.

6. Your private tools

Your notes, highlights, flashcards and whiteboards are yours and private. Nobody else sees them, the Assistant does not read them, and we do not use them for anything but storing them for you. They are deleted with your account.

7. The ACADA Assistant and AI

The Assistant answers questions about the course you have open, if you are enrolled in it or own it, and about how ACADA works. Its answers are for your own learning: we claim no rights in them, you may keep them, and they are not the instructor's content and not a licence to redistribute the course. It runs on Anthropic's API, under terms that do not allow what passes through it to be used to train models. We do not use anything anyone posts on ACADA, courses, messages, submissions, reviews or notes, to train AI models, ours or anyone else's.

8. Feedback

An idea or suggestion about ACADA that you send through the feedback panel, support or anywhere else is ours to use, without payment or credit. That covers the idea for the product, not any content of yours it mentions.

9. What this statement does not do

  • It does not decide who owns a work. When two people each claim the same material, the law and, if it comes to it, a court decide; we act on notices and orders as Copyright & DMCA and the Trademark policy set out.
  • It does not give legal advice. Whether your use of someone else's material is lawful where you are is for you to find out.
  • It does not promise copyright in AI-made work, section 3.
  • It does not grant anything the other policies do not. Where this page and an operative policy differ, the policy applies.

10. Changes to this statement

When we change this statement, we change the date shown at the top. If a change adds a rule or a consequence, we post a notice in the app at least 14 days before it takes effect.

11. Contact

To tell us that material on ACADA infringes your copyright, use the form at acada.ac/copyright or write to copyright@acada.ac. For a permission, a licence, or a question about what you may do with something here, write to support@acada.ac.

12. Related policies