Acceptable Use Policy

1. Who this applies to

This policy applies to everyone who uses SmartKourse — learners, instructors, and anyone browsing without an account — and covers all activity on the website, the API, course content, reviews, comments, profiles, and messages you send us. It is incorporated into the Terms of Service. Rules about what may be taught or listed are in the Content Policy; this page is about conduct.

2. The basic principle

Use SmartKourse to learn or to teach, treat other people decently, and do not attack, defraud, or exploit the platform or its users. Most of what follows is a specific application of that idea. Where a situation is not listed, we apply the principle rather than looking for a loophole.

3. Unlawful activity

You may not use SmartKourse to:

• Commit or facilitate fraud, theft, or financial crime.
• Launder money or evade sanctions, export controls, or trade restrictions.
• Distribute or facilitate the sale of illegal goods or services.
• Violate export, tax, consumer-protection, securities, privacy, or intellectual property law.
• Traffic in, sexualize, or endanger minors in any way. This is reported to authorities.

4. Harm to other people

You may not:

• Harass, bully, stalk, or intimidate anyone.
• Threaten violence or celebrate, glorify, or incite it.
• Attack people based on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, disability, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, or veteran status.
• Post another person’s private information — home address, phone number, financial details, government identifiers — without their consent.
• Impersonate another person, instructor, or organization.
• Sexually harass anyone, or send unsolicited sexual content.
• Exploit or endanger minors, or attempt to contact them inappropriately.

5. Security and platform integrity

You may not:

• Access accounts, data, or systems you are not authorized to access, or attempt to.
• Probe, scan, or test the vulnerability of the service without our prior written permission, or breach authentication or access controls.
• Bypass paywalls, entitlement checks, rate limits, or other technical restrictions.
• Upload or distribute malware, ransomware, keyloggers, or malicious scripts, including inside course files or linked resources.
• Interfere with the service through denial-of-service attacks, flooding, or deliberate resource exhaustion.
• Reverse engineer, decompile, or copy the platform’s software except where that right cannot be restricted by law.

If you find a security vulnerability, we would genuinely like to hear about it. Report it privately to Contact form on this website (email address pending owner configuration) and give us a reasonable chance to fix it before disclosing it. Do not access other users’ data while investigating.

6. Automated access and scraping

Do not use bots, crawlers, scrapers, or automated scripts to harvest content, course catalogs, instructor profiles, reviews, or user information, to place bulk requests, or to create accounts automatically. Do not use the platform’s content to train machine-learning models without permission from the rights holder. Ordinary search-engine indexing of public pages consistent with our robots directives is fine.

7. Account and identity integrity

• One person, one account. Do not create accounts to evade a suspension.
• Do not share your credentials or let others use your access. Course access is personal.
• Do not register with someone else’s identity, or use a payment method that is not yours or that you lack permission to use.
• Do not sell, rent, or transfer your account, your creator handle, or your course access.
• Do not misrepresent your credentials, affiliations, or endorsements.

8. Content theft and redistribution

Course content belongs to the instructors who made it. You may not download, record, screen-capture, mirror, torrent, re-upload, or otherwise redistribute course content, except where an instructor expressly provides a file for your personal use. You may not use course material to build a competing course or training product, or post it to a piracy site. This is both a policy violation and usually copyright infringement, and it is one of the few things we act on immediately and without a warning period.

9. Payment and marketplace abuse

To be clear about what is not in this section: filing a good-faith chargeback is your right and is not a violation. What is prohibited is deliberate abuse of the payment system:

• Using stolen or unauthorized payment methods.
• Filing disputes you know to be false — for example claiming non-delivery of content you consumed.
• Running a purchase-consume-refund or purchase-consume-dispute cycle repeatedly.
• Exploiting discount codes through automation, unauthorized distribution, or duplicate accounts.
• Structuring transactions to manipulate fees, payouts, or the holding period, or self-buying to inflate sales figures.
• Reselling course access you purchased.

10. Spam, solicitation, and off-platform pressure

Do not post unsolicited advertising, referral links, pyramid or multi-level marketing recruitment, or repetitive promotional content in reviews, comments, or profiles. Instructors may not use learner contact details obtained through the platform to send unrelated marketing, and may not pressure learners to transact off-platform in order to avoid platform fees or refund rights.

11. Reviews, comments, and messages

Reviews and comments must be genuine and about your real experience. Do not post fake reviews, trade or buy reviews, review your own courses, or brigade an instructor. Do not use comments to abuse others or to leak course content. The detailed rules are in the Reviews and Endorsements Policy.

Messages to our support and legal inboxes should be about a real issue. Repeated abusive, threatening, or deliberately false submissions may cost you access to those channels, though we will always keep a route open for legally required notices.

12. Additional rules for instructors

• Publish only content you have the rights to, and follow the Content Policy.
• Describe your course accurately, including what is and is not included.
• Do not promise earnings, jobs, exam passes, accreditation, or any guaranteed outcome.
• Do not list a course that does not exist yet or that is a shell of content.
• Do not manipulate rankings, reviews, or sales figures, and do not create duplicate listings to game search.
• Do not misuse learner information. See the Instructor Terms.

13. Reporting a violation

Report problems to Contact form on this website (email address pending owner configuration) or through the contact form. Include a link to the content or profile, what rule you think it breaks, and any context. Copyright complaints go through the Copyright and DMCA Policy instead, because those require specific legal elements. If someone is in immediate danger, contact local emergency services first.

14. How we enforce this policy

Depending on severity, history, and risk, we may warn you, remove or unpublish content, restrict features, hold payouts, suspend or terminate accounts, refuse future registration, reverse transactions, or report activity to payment providers or law enforcement. Serious violations — fraud, threats, malware, child exploitation, mass content theft — skip straight to the strongest response.

We do not promise to review every report, to review reports within a set time, or to reach any particular outcome, and enforcement is not a guarantee that violations will be detected. Not enforcing a rule in one instance does not waive it.

15. Appeals

If you think an action against your account or content was a mistake, reply to the notice you received or write to Contact form on this website (email address pending owner configuration) explaining why. A staff member will look at it again. Where the action was based on a legal requirement or a payment-network rule, our discretion may be limited, and we will say so.

16. Contact

Questions about this policy: Contact form on this website (email address pending owner configuration). Legal notices: Contact form on this website (email address pending owner configuration). This policy is governed by the same terms and California law described in the Terms of Service.