Draft Minutes Terms of Service

These Terms of Service ("Terms") are an agreement between you and Local Minutes, L3C ("Local Minutes," "we," "us," or "our"), a Vermont low-profit limited liability company. They govern your use of Draft Minutes, our service for turning a recording of a public meeting into a draft set of minutes (the "Service").

By creating an account, uploading a recording, or otherwise using the Service, you agree to these Terms and to our Privacy Policy. If you are using the Service on behalf of a municipality, board, committee, or other organization, you represent that you are authorized to accept these Terms on its behalf. If you do not agree, please do not use the Service.

Draft Minutes takes a recording or transcript of a meeting that you provide, together with any agenda or notes you add, and produces a draft set of minutes organized by agenda item. Each sentence in the draft is linked to the point in the recording where it was said, so that you can check it. The Service also lets you edit the draft, ask for changes in plain language, answer questions the tool raises, and export the result.

The Service produces a draft. It does not produce official minutes, and it does not approve, certify, adopt, or file anything on your behalf.

Draft Minutes produces a draft for you to review. You remain responsible for the official record.

Automated transcription and drafting are not perfect. The Service can mishear a word, miss a speaker, misattribute a statement, or misjudge what mattered in a discussion. It is built to help you find and fix these problems: every line links back to the recording so you can verify it, and the tool asks you about anything it is unsure of rather than guessing. Even so, the responsibility to review the draft, correct it, and confirm that it is accurate and complete rests with you and your governing body.

You are solely responsible for reviewing, editing, approving, adopting, and filing your minutes, and for meeting any legal requirements that apply to them, including open meeting law and public records law. We do not warrant that any draft is accurate, complete, or fit for adoption as an official record. Please do not adopt or file a draft without reviewing it.

You own your content. The recordings, transcripts, agendas, and notes you provide ("Your Content"), and the minutes drafts the Service produces from them ("Output"), belong to you or to the organization you represent. We do not claim ownership of Your Content or your Output.

You grant us a limited license to process it. So that we can operate the Service for you, you grant Local Minutes a limited, non-exclusive license to store, process, transmit, and transform Your Content and Output solely to provide the Service to you: for example, to transcribe a recording, to generate and revise a draft, to let you export it, and to keep it available in your account so you can return to it. This license exists only to run the Service for you. It ends when you delete the content or your account, except for copies we are required to keep by law or that remain in routine backups for a limited period. We do not use Your Content or Output for advertising, and we do not sell it.

We retain all rights in the Service itself, including our software and branding. These Terms do not grant you any rights in the Service other than the right to use it as described here.

By uploading a recording or other content, you represent and warrant that:

• You have the right to upload it and to have it processed by the Service, including any rights under copyright, and any consent required to record or process the meeting and the voices in it.
• The content is a recording, transcript, agenda, or notes of a public meeting, or other material you are entitled to use for preparing minutes. Please do not upload content unrelated to preparing meeting minutes.
• The content is not unlawful, does not infringe anyone else's rights, and is something you are permitted to share.
• It is not a recording of a properly closed executive session. If your recording contains one, remove that portion before uploading, or upload only the open-session portion.

You are responsible for what you upload. You may not use the Service to break the law, to violate anyone's privacy or rights, to attempt to disrupt, probe, or reverse-engineer the Service, or to resell the Service without our permission.

Draft Minutes is offered per meeting for a fee shown at the point of use, with no subscription and no minimum. Some municipalities may arrange an annual pass; those arrangements are set out separately when made.

If a draft you paid for does not come out usable, contact us and we will refund that meeting. Refunds are handled by us directly. Except as described here or as required by law, fees are non-refundable.

Billing is not tied to who is signed in. If you pay for a meeting and seek reimbursement from your municipality, that is a matter between you and your municipality.

Our Privacy Policy explains what we collect, how long we keep it, and the third-party providers ("subprocessors") we use to run the Service, including our transcription and language-model providers. We do not use your recordings, transcripts, or drafts to train AI models. Please read the Privacy Policy; by using the Service you agree to it.

The Service 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 or error-free, or that any draft will be accurate or suitable for your purposes.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Local Minutes and its members and contractors will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for any loss arising out of your use of, or reliance on, a draft. This includes any error in a minutes draft, any minutes as reviewed, adopted, or filed by you, and any failure to meet a legal requirement. To the fullest extent permitted by law, our total liability for any claim relating to the Service will not exceed the amount you paid us for the meeting giving rise to the claim.

Nothing in these Terms limits any liability that cannot be limited under applicable law.

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless Local Minutes and its members and contractors from any claim or demand, including reasonable legal fees, arising out of content you upload, your use of the Service, your minutes as reviewed and adopted, or your violation of these Terms or of any law or third-party right.

We may change or discontinue features of the Service, and we may update these Terms. If we make a material change to these Terms, we will update the effective date above and, where appropriate, provide notice. Your continued use of the Service after a change takes effect means you accept the updated Terms.

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Vermont, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. Any dispute relating to these Terms or the Service will be brought in the state or federal courts located in Vermont, and you consent to their jurisdiction, except where applicable law provides otherwise.

Questions about these Terms can be sent to hello@localminutes.org.