Terms of Service

Last updated: October 23, 2026. Effective: October 23, 2026.

Thank you for using our services. We read the public record (agendas, minutes, staff reports, and the meetings they belong to) and turn it into facts: listenpublic.com tells you what changed, and publicpublicrecord.com lets you query it. Because we don't know every reader personally, we put these Terms of Service in place to keep the service working for everyone.

When we say "Company", "we", "our", or "us", we mean Listen Public, Inc. When we say "Services", we mean listenpublic.com, publicpublicrecord.com, and everything we run behind them, including feeds, entity pages, search, the record viewer, chat, and the API. When we say "you" or "your", we mean the people and organizations that use the Services, whether or not they have an account.

We may update these Terms. When we make a material change, we will email account holders at least 14 days before it takes effect and show the new effective date at the top of this page; if you keep using the Services after that date, you accept the updated Terms. Changes that are not material take effect when we post them. These Terms contain a disclaimer of warranties and a limitation of our liability.

If you violate any of the Terms, we may terminate your account.

What we publish, and how far to rely on it

The Services republish and describe records that governments publish. The source record is the authority. Where a summary, abstract, date, place, or other detail we show differs from the record it cites, the record governs.
Some of what we show is written or extracted by machine-learning models: feed paragraphs, abstracts, the dates and places of meetings, and the people, places, and topics a record mentions. Models make mistakes. They can misread a document, attribute a statement to the wrong body, or miss something the record says. Check the cited record before you rely on anything we show for a decision with legal, financial, or other consequences.
Coverage is incomplete. We read what we can find and fetch; a meeting, document, or decision missing from the Services may still exist. The Services are not legal advice and not an official record of any government.
If you find something we got wrong, tell us at contact@listenpublic.com with a link to the page. Our Corrections policy says how we handle requests to correct what we write or to remove information from a record.

Account terms

You are responsible for the security of your account and for the email address or Google account you sign in with. We are not liable for any loss or damage from your failure to keep them secure.
You may not use the Services for any purpose listed under Use restrictions below, and you may not permit anyone in your workspace to do so.
You are responsible for all content posted to and activity that occurs under your account, including that of other users in your workspace.
You must be a human. Accounts registered by bots or other automated methods are not permitted.
The Services are not directed to children under 13, and you must be at least 13 to create an account.

Use restrictions

When you use the Services, you may not:

Collect or extract information or user data from accounts that do not belong to you.
Scrape, crawl, or bulk-download the Services, or access them through automated means other than an interface we provide for that purpose.
Circumvent, disable, or otherwise interfere with security-related features of the Services, including limits on how often sign-in codes can be requested.
Trick, defraud, or mislead us or other users, including making false reports or impersonating another person.
Upload or transmit viruses, malware, or any information-collection mechanism.
Upload content you do not have the right to share.
Interfere with, disrupt, or create an undue burden on the Services or the networks connected to them.
Harass, intimidate, or threaten others, including anyone named in a public record and any of our employees.
Use the Services in a manner inconsistent with applicable laws or regulations.

Accounts found in violation of these restrictions are subject to cancellation without prior notice. Report violations to contact@listenpublic.com with the account, the content or behavior, and how you found it, including URLs or screenshots. We will not disclose your identity to anyone associated with the reported account.

Payment

Reading shared feeds is free, and we do not ask for a credit card to create an account. If you buy a paid service from us, the order or agreement for that service sets its price, payment, and renewal terms, and these Terms apply alongside it.

Cancellation and termination

You may stop using the Services at any time. To close your account and have its data deleted, email contact@listenpublic.com from the address on the account.
We have the right to suspend or terminate your account and refuse any current or future use of the Services for any reason at any time. Suspension means you and other users in your workspace cannot access the account or its content. Termination also results in the deletion of your account or your access to it, and of the content in it after the export period described under Content ownership. We also reserve the right to refuse the Services to anyone for any reason at any time.
Verbal, physical, written, or other abuse (including threats of abuse or retribution) of a Company employee or officer will result in immediate account termination.

Modifications to the Services and prices

We reserve the right at any time to modify or discontinue, temporarily or permanently, any part of the Services, with or without notice.
If we change the price of a service you pay for, we will give at least 30 days' notice by email to the address on record.

Uptime, security, and privacy

We do not offer service-level agreements unless an agreement for a paid service says otherwise. The Warranty disclaimer below describes the basis on which we provide the Services.
We reserve the right to temporarily disable your account if your usage significantly exceeds that of other users. Except where the usage threatens the Services for others, we will contact you before taking action.
We protect your data with encryption in transit, access controls, and backups. We describe what we collect and how we handle it in our Privacy Policy, and you agree that we may process your data as it describes and for no other purpose.
We use third-party vendors and hosting partners to provide the hardware, software, networking, storage, and related technology the Services require. The Privacy Policy lists them.

Content ownership

We reproduce records that governments publish, as the law permits, and we claim no ownership of them. We own what we write and build about them: summaries, abstracts, our compilation and arrangement of the facts we extract, and the software and design of the Services. You may quote what we write with attribution to the site you quote and a link to the page.
Content you create in the Services, such as feeds, comments, notes, and files you upload, remains yours. You give us a limited license to host, store, copy, reformat, back up, and display it, to show it to the people you share it with, and to send it to the model providers our Privacy Policy names when you ask the Services to answer or act on it. This license is solely to provide the Services to you and to the people you share with. You confirm that you have the rights to everything you post or upload.
We do not pre-screen content, but we reserve the right, in our sole discretion, to refuse or remove any content available through the Services.
You may not reproduce, resell, or exploit any portion of the Services, use of the Services, or access to the Services beyond what these Terms allow without our express written permission. You must request permission to use our logos.
If we terminate your account for any reason other than a violation of these Terms, you have 30 days from our notice to export your content before we delete it. Email contact@listenpublic.com for a copy.

Copyright complaints

We respond to notices of claimed copyright infringement under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. §512). Send notices to dmca@listenpublic.com. A notice must include:

Your physical or electronic signature, as the owner of the copyright or someone authorized to act for the owner.
Identification of the copyrighted work you claim is infringed.
Identification of the material you claim is infringing, with a link to the page where it appears.
Your name, address, telephone number, and email address.
A statement that you believe in good faith that the use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
A statement, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notice is accurate and that you are authorized to act for the owner.

If we remove material in response to a notice, we will tell the user who posted it. That user may send a counter-notice to the same address containing the elements 17 U.S.C. §512(g)(3) requires, and we may restore the material if the complaining party does not file suit within the period the statute sets. We terminate the accounts of repeat infringers.

Features and bugs

We design the Services with care, based on our own experience and that of the readers who share their time and feedback. We make no guarantee that the Services will meet your specific requirements or expectations. As with any software, the Services have bugs. We track the bugs reported to us and work through the priority ones, especially those related to security, privacy, or accuracy. Not every reported bug will be fixed, and we don't guarantee error-free Services.

Indemnification

You will defend, indemnify, and hold harmless the Company and its officers, employees, and agents from any claim, loss, liability, or expense, including reasonable attorneys' fees, arising from content you post or upload, your use of the Services, or your violation of these Terms or of the law. We will tell you promptly about any claim this covers and may take part in its defense with counsel of our choosing. You may not settle a claim that imposes an obligation on us without our written consent.

Warranty disclaimer

To the maximum extent permitted by law, your use of the Services is at your sole risk, and we provide the Services "AS IS" and "AS AVAILABLE", without warranties of any kind, express or implied. We disclaim all implied warranties, including the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement, and any warranty arising from course of dealing or usage of trade. We do not warrant that the Services, or any summary, abstract, extracted fact, or other content they provide, will be accurate, complete, uninterrupted, secure, or error-free.

Liability

We mention liability throughout these Terms, but to put it all in one section:

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, you expressly understand and agree that the Company shall not be liable, in law or in equity, to you or to any third party for any direct, indirect, incidental, lost profits, special, consequential, punitive, or exemplary damages, including, but not limited to, damages for loss of profits, goodwill, use, data, or other intangible losses (even if the Company has been advised of the possibility of such damages), resulting from: (i) the use or the inability to use the Services; (ii) reliance on any summary, abstract, extracted fact, or other content the Services provide; (iii) the cost of procurement of substitute goods and services; (iv) unauthorized access to or alteration of your transmissions or data; (v) statements or conduct of any third party on the Services; or (vi) any other matter relating to these Terms or the Services, whether as a breach of contract, tort (including negligence, whether active or passive), or any other theory of liability.

If, despite the paragraph above, the Company is found liable to you, its total liability for all claims relating to these Terms or the Services is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim arose or $100.

Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits liability for fraud, gross negligence, willful misconduct, or anything else that cannot be excluded or limited by law. Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion or limitation of certain damages, so some of the above may not apply to you.

Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Delaware, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. Any dispute relating to these Terms or the Services will be resolved exclusively in the state or federal courts located in Delaware, and you and we consent to the jurisdiction of and venue in those courts. Before filing a claim, each party agrees to try to resolve the dispute informally for 30 days, starting when one party emails the other a description of it; ours is contact@listenpublic.com.

General

Severability. If any provision of these Terms is found unenforceable, it will be limited to the minimum extent necessary, and the rest of the Terms remain in effect.
Entire agreement. These Terms, our Privacy Policy, our Corrections policy, and any order or agreement for a paid service are the entire agreement between you and us about the Services.
Assignment. You may not assign or transfer these Terms without our written consent. We may assign them in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of all or part of our business.
No third-party beneficiaries. These Terms give no rights to anyone other than you and us.
Survival. The sections on content ownership, indemnification, the warranty disclaimer, liability, and governing law survive the end of your use of the Services.
No waiver. There may be times when we do not exercise or enforce a right or provision of the Terms; that does not mean we are waiving it.

If you have a question about any of these Terms, contact us at contact@listenpublic.com.

Adapted from the 37signals Terms of Service, licensed under CC BY 4.0. We changed it to describe our services.