Terms of Use

These Terms of Use govern access to and participation in Open Podcast Awards (the “Service”). By creating an account or using the Service, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, do not create an account or use the Service.

Open Podcast Awards is an independent, experimental, non-professional project. It is provided free of charge to support podcast discovery, peer feedback, and community participation. It is not an official industry regulator, accreditation body, professional judging service, or provider of legal, business, financial, or other professional advice.

You must be at least 18 years old and legally able to enter into these Terms. You must provide accurate account information, protect your password, and promptly report suspected unauthorized access. You may not create accounts for deceptive, abusive, or unlawful purposes.

You remain responsible for activity carried out through your account. We may suspend or close accounts that breach these Terms, threaten the integrity of the awards, harm other participants, or create legal or security risks.

You may submit only a podcast that you own or are authorized to represent. You confirm that your submission, artwork, feed, links, text, audio, trademarks, and other materials do not infringe another person’s rights or violate applicable law.

You retain ownership of your content. You grant Open Podcast Awards a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license for the duration of your participation to host, retrieve, reproduce, display, process, and link to submitted materials as reasonably necessary to operate, moderate, promote, and publish the awards and their results.

You are responsible for maintaining a working RSS feed and accurate submission details. We may reject, withdraw, recategorize, or remove submissions that are unavailable, misleading, ineligible, unlawful, unsafe, or inconsistent with the published season rules.

Participation may require you to review podcasts assigned to you. Reviews must be independent, respectful, honest, specific, and based on genuine listening. Self-review, reciprocal manipulation, coordinated scoring, retaliation, harassment, copied feedback, artificial activity, and attempts to identify or influence reviewers are prohibited.

By submitting a review, you allow Open Podcast Awards to store, moderate, analyze, and share its ratings, recommendation, and written feedback with the reviewed creator without displaying your identity. Reviews may also be used in aggregated or anonymized reporting about the awards.

Anonymous presentation is not an absolute guarantee that a creator could never infer a reviewer’s identity from writing style, timing, disclosed details, or information obtained elsewhere. Do not include personal information or confidential material in a review. We may remove identifying, abusive, unlawful, or irrelevant content while preserving legitimate feedback where practical.

Scores and feedback reflect participants’ subjective opinions. They are not professional assessments, promises of quality, endorsements, or guarantees of commercial success. Algorithms and rules aim to support fairness but cannot eliminate every bias, error, conflict, outage, or misuse.

Eligibility, assignments, shortlists, results, certificates, and other award decisions may be corrected, delayed, cancelled, or withdrawn where reasonably necessary to address mistakes, insufficient participation, suspected manipulation, technical problems, rights claims, safety concerns, or rule violations. No participant is guaranteed an assignment, review, nomination, award, audience, or particular outcome.

You must not misuse the Service; attempt unauthorized access; interfere with security or availability; scrape or harvest personal data; upload malicious code; impersonate others; manipulate assignments or results; submit unlawful, discriminatory, threatening, defamatory, or infringing material; or use another participant’s content or feedback outside the purposes reasonably expected from the awards.

You may report suspected abuse, infringement, security issues, or inappropriate feedback to info@openpodcastawards.com. We may investigate and take proportionate action, but we do not undertake to monitor every submission or communication before it appears.

We may send emails necessary to create and secure your account and operate your participation, including confirmation, password reset, submission, assignment, deadline, policy, safety, and results notices.

We may also send occasional non-essential information about seasons, the awards, or the community where permitted by law. You may opt out of these messages at any time using the method provided in the email or by contacting info@openpodcastawards.com. Opting out does not affect essential account, security, participation, deadline, policy, safety, or results communications.

We process account details, submitted podcast information, reviews, assignments, security information, and necessary technical records to provide and protect the Service. Hosting, authentication, database, email, analytics, or infrastructure providers may process information on our behalf. Do not submit sensitive personal data unless it is strictly necessary and you are legally entitled to do so.

Account closure is available through account settings, subject to safeguards such as preserving the integrity of already completed anonymous reviews and award records where legally and operationally necessary. A separate privacy notice should provide fuller information about the controller, legal bases, retention, recipients, international transfers, and data-protection rights.

The Service is provided on an experimental and “as available” basis. Features may contain errors, change, be interrupted, lose compatibility, or be discontinued. You should retain your own copies of important content and must not rely on the Service as your only record or storage system.

The Service may embed or link to RSS feeds, podcast hosts, websites, authentication services, and other third-party services. We do not control and are not responsible for their content, availability, security, privacy practices, or terms. Accessing third-party services is at your own discretion and subject to their rules.

Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits liability where doing so is prohibited by law, including liability for intent, gross negligence, fraudulent concealment, or injury to life, body, or health, and any mandatory rights or liabilities that cannot lawfully be restricted.

To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, liability for ordinary negligence is limited to breaches of essential contractual duties and to reasonably foreseeable, typical damage. Otherwise, liability for ordinary negligence is excluded. We are not responsible for subjective reviews or independent user conduct, third-party services, lost opportunities, reputational expectations, business decisions, or indirect or consequential loss except where mandatory law provides otherwise.

The experimental or non-professional nature of the project does not remove rights or obligations imposed by law. You remain responsible for deciding whether participation is appropriate for you and for obtaining professional advice where needed.

You may stop using the Service and close your account. We may modify, pause, or discontinue the Service or update these Terms for legal, security, operational, or feature-related reasons. Material changes will be communicated appropriately, and renewed acceptance may be requested where required.

If any provision is unenforceable, the remaining provisions continue to apply. Mandatory consumer protections and the laws and courts that cannot legally be excluded remain unaffected. Any choice of law or forum applies only to the extent permitted by applicable law.

Questions, complaints, rights notices, and reports about these Terms may be sent to info@openpodcastawards.com.