§ 1 Subject of the Community Terms of Use
We, ecodemy GmbH with registered office in Bonn, Fritz-Schäffer-Straße 1, 53113 Bonn (hereinafter referred to as ‘ecodemy’ or ‘we/us’), provide a platform ‘campus and community’ at ecodemy.com (hereinafter also referred to collectively as ‘portal’). In the campus, registered students (hereinafter referred to as ‘students’ or ‘you/your’) can access the available content and services (hereinafter collectively referred to as ‘content’) as part of the distance learning course. In the community, students can create individual profiles and create topics, posts, and groups, send messages to other members and network with other members.
§ 2 Changes to the Community Terms of Use, Special Right of Termination
We reserve the right to change these Terms of Use if this is necessary for good cause, especially due to a change in the legal situation or supreme court rulings, technical changes or further developments, new organizational requirements, regulatory gaps in the Terms of Use or for other equivalent reasons and does not unreasonably disadvantage you. We will notify you of such changes by email at least six (6) weeks before they come into force of the changes. The changes are subject to your consent. If you do not agree to the notification of changes within six (6) weeks after receipt, we may terminate the contract within a period of two (2) weeks (after expiry of the approval period) with a notice period of one (1) month (effective date of the new Terms of Use) and in compliance with the text form.
§ 3 Registration, Conclusion of the Contract of Use
(1) The use of the content available on the portal requires your registration as a student. By completing the online registration process and creating a profile, a contract of use is concluded with us. The registration is free of charge or compensated with the payment of the study fees. You are only entitled to participate if you have concluded a distance learning course with us or have booked the extension option in accordance with section 12 of our General Terms and Conditions. By submitting your declaration of consent to these Terms of Use, you confirm that this requirement has been fulfilled.
(2) You are allowed to register if you are a natural person, of full age and of unrestricted legal capacity. Minors are only allowed to register with the written consent of their legal representative(s). If you are a legal person, the registration must be done by a person authorized to represent you.
(3) The contact details and other information requested by us during the registration process must be provided by you completely and correctly.
(4) After you have provided all the requested information, we will check it for completeness and plausibility. If we consider the information to be correct and there are no other concerns, we will activate your requested access and notify you of this by email. Upon receipt of this email at the latest, a contract for use of the portal is concluded between us free of charge.
§ 4 Duties of the Students
(1) During the registration process, you will be asked to enter a username or login name and a password. You may use this data to log in to the portal after your access has been activated and confirmed in accordance with section 4 (2) of these Terms of Use. It is your responsibility to ensure that the user or login name does not infringe the rights of third parties, in particular no name or trademark rights, and does not offend common decency. We kindly ask you to use your first and last name as an additional ‘display name in the community’ to encourage an open exchange.
(2) The access data including the password must kept secret by you and not to be made accessible to unauthorized third parties.
(3) It is also your responsibility to ensure that access to the portal and the use of the content available there is exclusively by you. If it is feared that unauthorized third parties have gained or will gain knowledge of your access data, please inform us immediately.
Please note that you are liable for any use and/or other activity carried out under your access data in accordance with the statutory provisions.
(4) You are obliged to keep your data (including your contact details) up to date. If, during the period of
your participation, a change occurs in the data provided, please correct the information immediately in your
personal settings. If you do not succeed in doing so, please inform us of your changed data immediately by
email to
.
§ 5 Duration of the Contract, Deletion of the Registration Account
(1) The duration of the usage contract of the portal is based on the duration of the distance learning course as well as the renewal option according to section 12 of our General Terms and Conditions.
(2) You may delete your access account to the community at any time by logging out of the participation in
the community or by sending an email to
with the note
to deactivate or delete your access without giving reasons. This has no effect on the distance learning
course with us and the renewal option according to section 12 of our General Terms and Conditions.
(3) However, it is not possible to cancel or delete your account from the campus during the term of a distance learning course between us, as you will only have your study materials via the campus. For further information on termination please refer to section 17 of our General Terms and Conditions.
(4) Deleting the account from the campus within the scope of the renewal option according to section 12 of our General Terms and Conditions remains possible at any time.
(5) We have the right to block your access to the portal for good cause. An important reason for us in particular is if you violate section 10 of these Terms of Use.
Termination of the distance learning course with us or of the renewal option pursuant to section 12 of our General Terms and Conditions obligates you to deregister both from participation in the community and from participation in the campus, unless otherwise agreed between us in advance.
§ 6 Our Services and Portal Availability
(1) We provide you with various information and other content on the portal during your distance learning course and during the renewal option pursuant to section 12 of our General Terms and Conditions. Such content may include, for example, the provision of data, contributions, image and sound documents, information and other content. The content and scope of the use of the content are determined by the respective contracts, by our General Terms and Conditions and otherwise by the functionalities currently available on the portal.
(2) We provide you with our content, in particular the connected community as an online communication platform, in which you may create topics, posts, and groups, send messages to other members and network with other members. Individual exchange areas (for example groups or forums) may also be marked as private and are then not available to all members. Unlocking such areas marked as private is then at the discretion of the respective group or forum administrators.
(3) For access, we guarantee an availability of 98% on a monthly average within our area of responsibility. The calculation of availability does not include the regular maintenance windows of the portal or events that are beyond our control (for example disruptions of public communication networks, power outages, disruptions of your Internet connection or technical infrastructure or incompatible technical infrastructure, etc.). As much as possible, we will carry out maintenance work during periods of low usage.
§ 7 Right to Change the Portal
We reserve the right to change the portal and its contents with effect at any time also within the existing contractual relationships.
§ 8 Monitoring of the Usage Activities
(1) In order to use the portal free of charge, you must provide the necessary technical requirements, in particular hardware, Internet connection, etc. yourself.
(2) We would like to point out that your usage activities may be monitored to the extent permitted by law. This may also include the logging of IP connection data and call histories as well as their evaluation if there is a concrete suspicion of a violation of these Terms of Use and/or if there is a concrete suspicion of the existence of any other illegal act or criminal offense.
§ 9 Rights of Use, Placement of User-Generated Content for Third Parties
(1) With regard to the content available from us, we grant you the rights of use in accordance with section 5 of our General Terms and Conditions.
(2) As far as available as functionality in the portal, you may post content in the portal and make it available for other portal users (collectively referred to as ‘user-content’), subject to the following provisions.
(3) By posting user-generated content, you grant us a royalty-free, worldwide and transferable right to use such content, to the extent that it is protected by intellectual property rights, including, but not limited to, the following
- to store the contents on our server as well as to publish them, in particular to make them publicly accessible (for example by displaying the contents on our website, in particular on the portal),
- to edit and reproduce the content as far as this is necessary for the provision or publication of the respective content, and
- to grant rights of use to third parties in respect of your content in accordance with section 5 of our General Terms and Conditions.
If you take down the content you have posted, the right of use and exploitation granted to us above shall expire. However, we remain entitled to keep copies made for backup and/or verification purposes. The rights of use already granted to other portal users for content posted by you shall remain in effect.
(4) You are fully responsible for the content you publish. We do not review user-generated content for completeness, accuracy, legality, timeliness, quality, or fitness for a particular purpose. Therefore, we do not assume any responsibility or warranty for the completeness, accuracy, legality and timeliness. This also applies with regard to the quality of and suitability for a particular purpose, and also insofar as links to external websites are concerned. You therefore declare and warrant to us that you are the sole owner of all rights to the content you post with us or are otherwise authorized (for example by effective permission from the rights holder) to post the content with us and to grant the rights of use and exploitation pursuant to the preceding sections (2) and (3).
(5) We reserve the right to refuse the posting of content and/or to edit, block or remove already posted content (including private messages and forum posts) without prior notice if the posting of the content by you or the posted content itself has led to a violation of section 10 of these Terms of Use or if there are concrete indications that a violation of section 10 of these Terms of Use will occur. However, we will take into account your legitimate interests and choose the mildest remedy to prevent the violation of section 10 of these Terms of Use.
(6) We are also entitled to delete content for urgent organizational reasons for example if it concerns older entries (older than 3 years) or entries in older groups that have not been active for a long time (not active for at least 1 year). We use the time of your last entry as the connecting factor of activity/non-activity.
(7) If third parties file claims against us for statutory violations resulting from the user-generated content provided by you, you will indemnify us and hold us harmless from all damages, losses and expenses of any kind (including costs of a proper legal defense) in connection with such claims, causes of action or disputes.
§ 10 Prohibited Activities
Please note: As a matter of course, we assume that all of our students use our portal and its contents within the legally permissible scope. However, as a precaution, we would like to point out the following important points:
(1) You are prohibited from any activities on or in connection with the portal that violate applicable law, infringe the rights of third parties, or violate the principles of the protection of minors. In particular, the following actions are prohibited:
- The posting, distribution, offering and advertising of pornographic content, services and/or products that violate youth protection laws, data protection laws and/or other laws and/or are fraudulent;
- Posting and/or using content that insults or defames other students, third parties or even us;
- The use, provision and distribution of content, services and/or products that are protected by law or encumbered with the rights of third parties (for example copyrights) without being expressly authorized to do so.
(2) Furthermore, you are prohibited from the following activities when placing your own content on the portal and when communicating with other students (for example by sending personal messages, by participating in discussion forums or writing entries), regardless of any violation of the law:
- The distribution of malware, viruses, trojans, and other harmful files;
- The sending of junk or spam emails, promotional emails, and chain letters;
- The distribution of lewd, insulting, offensive, sexually oriented, obscene or defamatory content or communication, as well as content or communication that is likely to promote or support racism, bigotry, hatred, physical violence or unlawful acts (in each case explicitly or implicitly);
- Harassing or bullying other students, such as by making multiple personal contacts without or in opposition to the other student’s response, and encouraging or supporting such harassment;
- Soliciting other students to disclose passwords or personal information for commercial or unlawful purposes;
- Distributing and/or publicly reproducing content available on the portal, unless you are expressly permitted to do so by the respective author or unless this is expressly made available as a functionality on the portal;
- The placement of advertisements or links to advertise goods and services.
(3) You may not (i) rent, lease, loan, reproduce, resell or otherwise distribute or transmit the portal or access to the portal, including via the Internet or any downstream public or private data network; (ii) use the portal to develop other services; (iii) activate or use components of the portal for which you have not been granted any rights of use; (iv) transfer the rights of use to the portal to third parties or grant third parties access to the portal; and (v) remove, obscure or alter any legal notices, in particular those relating to our intellectual property rights.
(4) You are also prohibited from taking any action that may interfere with the proper functioning of our portal, in particular by placing an unnecessary load on our systems.
(5) Should you become aware of any illegal, abusive or otherwise unauthorized use of the portal, please
contact ecodemy GmbH, Fritz-Schäffer-Str. 1, 53113
Bonn,
. We will then review the matter and, if
necessary, take appropriate action.
(6) If there is a suspicion of illegal or punishable actions, we are entitled and, if necessary, also obliged to check your activities and, if necessary, to take appropriate legal steps. This may also include – if necessary – the submission of a case to the public prosecutor’s office.
§ 11 Blocking of Permissions, Other Measures
(1) We may temporarily or permanently block your access to the community or forums if there are concrete indications that you are violating or have violated these Terms of Use and/or applicable law, or if we have another legitimate interest in blocking you. If we decide to block your writing authorization and its scope and duration, we will take into account your legitimate interests and the type and severity of the violation of these Terms of Use, as well as the number of previous violations.
(2) In the event of temporary or permanent blocking, we will notify you of this by email.
(3) In the event of a temporary block, we will reactivate the corresponding authorization after the blocking period has expired and notify you of this by email.
(4) We reserve the right to take other necessary and appropriate, legally permissible measures to remedy an unlawful situation, should this become necessary. Which measure we take in this respect depends on the individual case and is at our reasonable discretion.
(5) We also reserve the right to take further legal steps, if necessary with the involvement of the relevant competent authorities (for example public prosecutor’s office), if this should be necessary due to a violation of statutory regulations or these Terms of Use.
§ 12 Data Protection
Please refer to our data protection information at ecodemy.com/privacy-policy regarding the handling of personal data provided to us in connection with the use of the portal.
§ 13 Liability
We are liable in accordance with the statutory regulations.
§ 14 Final Provisions
In case of dispute, the competent court in your place of residence is responsible. The contractual relationship between you and us is governed by the laws of Germany. Excluded from this choice of law are the mandatory consumer protection provisions of the country in which you have your habitual residence. Any amendment to the contract must be in text form. This also applies to the cancellation of the text form. If a paragraph become invalid, all other paragraphs shall nevertheless remain valid. If regulations in these Terms of Use contradict regulations in our General Terms and Conditions in whole or in part, the regulations in our General Terms and Conditions shall take precedence.