Terms of Service

Acceptance of these terms

Accessing or using Machinefixes — including browsing machinefixes.com, submitting a symptom-search query, reading a public knowledge-graph row, or scraping a publicly exposed endpoint for a legitimate integration purpose — constitutes acceptance of these terms.

If you do not agree with any of the clauses below, please discontinue use of the service. Continued use after a material change is posted on this page constitutes acceptance of the revised terms.

Acceptable use

The service is provided to help technicians, engineers, operators, and curious owners diagnose and repair machines. You agree to use it lawfully and in good faith. The following uses are expressly prohibited:

• Illegal activity — using the service to plan, facilitate, or conceal conduct that violates the law of your jurisdiction or the operator’s jurisdiction.
• Infringing content — uploading, posting, or otherwise submitting material that infringes a third party’s copyright, trademark, trade secret, or other intellectual property right (see also the DMCA section below).
• Harm to the systems — attempting to compromise, overload, or otherwise interfere with the operation of the service, the underlying database, the edge network, or another user’s use of the service.
• Automated scraping that overloads the ranker — running a crawler, bot, or scripted client at a rate that materially degrades the symptom-search response for other visitors. Polite, low-volume integration with the public endpoints is welcome; an unbounded crawler is not.
• Security probing — running penetration tests, vulnerability scanners, or fuzzers against the production service without prior written authorisation from the operator.
• Misrepresentation — presenting Machinefixes-sourced answers as your own proprietary work product where the attribution would mislead a downstream reader, or stripping the Source citations the ranker returns alongside a fix.

Intellectual property & content attribution

Machinefixes owns the operator-side intellectual property in the site: the visual design, the ranking algorithm, the graph schema, the code that backs the symptom search, and the synthesis of the underlying walkthroughs into a single knowledge graph.

The fix content itself is synthesised from public third-party sources — YouTube walkthroughs, iFixit guides, and manufacturer service manuals. Each fix returned by the ranker carries a Source attribution row pointing at the original source URL. Those third-party sources remain the property of their respective owners; Machinefixes does not claim ownership of the underlying prose, diagrams, or trademarks.

Machinefixes does not currently accept user-contributed content of any kind. If a per-user contribution surface is reintroduced in the future, the act of contributing will constitute a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to Machinefixes to host, index, and display that contribution as part of the public knowledge graph.

DMCA / IP takedown

If you believe that content made available through the service infringes your copyright, you may send a written takedown notice to the designated DMCA agent for Machinefixes, Daniel Saeckl, reachable at saeckl.daniel@web.de. A valid notice must contain the six elements the DMCA requires:

On receipt of a valid notice we will remove or disable access to the identified material and, where appropriate, notify the contributor. If you believe your content was removed in error, you may submit a counter-notice containing the elements prescribed by the DMCA at the same address.

Repeat infringers — accounts or, in the current anonymous service, IP ranges we can identify with confidence — will have their access terminated. The operator reserves the right to apply this policy at its reasonable discretion.

• A physical or electronic signature of the rights holder or an authorised agent.
• Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed (or a representative list across multiple works at the same site).
• Identification of the infringing material with enough detail for us to locate it on the service — the URL of the row, the Source URL it points at, or the symptom-search response that surfaced it.
• Your contact information: name, mailing address, telephone number, and email address.
• A statement that you have a good-faith belief that the use is not authorised by the rights holder, its agent, or the law.
• A statement, made under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notice is accurate and that you are the rights holder or authorised to act on the rights holder’s behalf.

Disclaimer of warranties

Machinefixes is provided “as is” and “as available,” without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including without limitation warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, completeness, or non-infringement. The operator does not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or free of harmful components.

The symptom-search ranker is an aid to diagnosis — not a substitute for a qualified technician. Operating a damaged machine based on an unverified result is at your own risk; always observe manufacturer service procedures and your local safety regulations before applying a fix from this service.

Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, the operator shall not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, including without limitation damages for loss of profits, revenue, data, goodwill, or other intangible losses, arising out of or in connection with your use of, or inability to use, Machinefixes.

Where liability cannot be excluded, the aggregate liability of the operator for any claim arising under these terms shall be capped at the amount, if any, paid by you to the operator during the twelve (12) months preceding the claim. The current anonymous service charges no fee, so the cap is currently zero — but the clause is worded forward-compatibly so the same ceiling applies once a paid surface ships.

Governing law & jurisdiction

These terms are governed by the law of the operator’s country of establishment in the European Union, without giving effect to any conflict-of-laws provision. The exclusive place of jurisdiction for any dispute arising out of or in connection with these terms is the competent court at the operator’s seat of establishment.

Nothing in this clause removes any mandatory consumer-protection right you enjoy under the law of your habitual residence.

Severability & entire agreement

If any clause of these terms is held by a court of competent jurisdiction to be invalid, illegal, or unenforceable, that clause shall be severed and the remaining clauses shall continue in full force and effect. These terms — together with the Privacy policy referenced in the footer — constitute the entire agreement between you and the operator with respect to the service and supersede any prior or contemporaneous understandings on the same subject matter.

Changes to these terms

We will post material changes on this page and update the effective date and version number at the top. Non-material edits (typos, clarifications that do not change the substance) will not be announced individually. The current version is always the one displayed on this page; please check back before relying on a stale copy.