The deal, in language you can actually read.

These terms cover this website, the Kodava Takk translator and dictionary, and the arivāme app. Using any of them means you accept what is on this page.

The short version

Everything here is free to use. There is no subscription and nothing is held back behind a payment.
Be accurate and be decent. Abuse, harassment and stolen work get removed, and the account with them.
What you post stays yours. You give us permission to show it, nothing more.
The heritage library is historical material, published with its sources. Treat it as a record, not as settled fact.
We are a small volunteer group. Things will break, and we cannot promise they will not.

Your account

You only need one for the parts that need a name.

The translator, the dictionary and the heritage library work without an account. You need one to post to Creator’s Corner, to comment, or to like something — the parts where what you do gets attached to who you are.

Keep your account details accurate, and do not let someone else use your account or use anyone else’s. You are responsible for what happens under yours. You can delete it at any time from inside the app; we can suspend or remove one that is being used to break these terms.

What you post

There is no tolerance for abusive content here.

A community platform for a community this small only works if it is safe to be in. We would rather lose a contributor than keep an abusive one.

Do not post, submit or link to anything that:

harasses, threatens, defames or incites hatred against anyone, including on grounds of caste, community, religion, gender, sexuality, disability or origin;
is sexually explicit, or sexualises a minor in any way whatsoever;
belongs to someone else — work, recordings, photographs or writing you do not have the right to publish;
is knowingly false, particularly about Kodava history, custom or lineage, where a confident invention can be repeated for years;
is spam, a scam, malware, or an attempt to get at someone else's account; or
breaks the law that applies to you or to us.

How this is enforced

Submissions to Creator’s Corner are reviewed before anyone else can see them. Every comment can be reported, and every creator and commenter can be blocked — blocking hides both directions and stops that person commenting on your work, so it cannot be talked around. Reports are read by a person.

We remove content that breaks these rules and, where the case warrants it, the account behind it. Serious cases are reported to the authorities.

Who owns what you post

Your work remains yours. By posting it you give us permission to store, display and distribute it within Kodavāme so the thing can function — and to show an excerpt of it when promoting the platform. That permission is non-exclusive, carries no fee either way, and ends when you remove the content, save for copies already made by others and for backups still rotating out.

Do not post work you do not hold the rights to. If something of yours is here without permission, write to info.kodavame@gmail.com and we will take it down while we look into it.

Our side

What we publish, and how far to trust it.

The heritage library

The library is built from nineteenth- and twentieth-century sources, restored from scans and published with the book and page they came from. They carry the assumptions of the people who wrote them, and where a source proved unreliable we removed it rather than cite it quietly. Read it as a historical record, check the citation, and do not treat it as the last word on anyone’s family, community or custom.

The translator

Kodava takk is a low-resource language and the translator is built on a small dataset. It will get things wrong. Do not rely on it for anything medical, legal, financial or otherwise consequential without a native speaker checking it.

Our own material

The name Kodavāme, the marks, the site design and the code are ours. Quote us, link to us, teach from us — but do not restage the whole thing as your own, and do not scrape it wholesale. Where we have built on other people’s work we say so, and we ask the same in return.

The boring but necessary part

Everything here is provided as it is, without warranty of any kind. We do not promise the services will be available, uninterrupted, accurate or fit for a particular purpose. This is volunteer work done in evenings and weekends around other jobs, and it is offered free.

To the extent the law allows, the Kodavāme project and the people behind it are not liable for loss arising from your use of these services, including loss of data or anything you relied on a translation or a heritage page to tell you. Nothing here limits liability that cannot legally be limited.

We may change or discontinue any part of this, and we may update these terms. Material changes get posted on this page with a new effective date; continuing to use the services after that means you accept them. These terms are governed by the laws of California, United States.

Contact

Reports, takedown requests, and anything on this page that reads as unfair: info.kodavame@gmail.com.