Terms of Service

Stable URL: https://policy.publicvcons.org/terms — this is the terms_of_service target in every vCon's lawful-basis attachment.

What this service is

PublicVCons is a non-commercial public-interest transparency archive. It converts public US federal government proceedings into IETF vCons and publishes them with cryptographic provenance.

The data

Source material is US government work in the public domain (17 U.S.C. § 105). PublicVCons adds transcripts, diarization, and a neutral machine-generated analysis. The vCon corpus is released under CC0 1.0; policy text under CC-BY 4.0. You may reuse the data freely; attribution to PublicVCons is appreciated.

Accuracy and good faith

Transcripts and analyses are produced by automated local models (whisper.cpp, pyannote, a local LLM) and may contain errors. The neutral editorial summary is descriptive, not authoritative. The authoritative record is always the cited primary source; every vCon links to it and binds its SHA-256. Nothing here is legal advice.

Integrity

Every vCon's lifecycle is anchored in a SCITT transparency log with receipts anyone can verify offline (see /verify). If a vCon is corrected or redacted, an amended/redaction lifecycle statement is added rather than rewriting history.

Takedown / opt-out

Requests are handled per the opt-out policy. Because the material is public-domain federal proceedings, removal is generally limited to documented privacy or legal grounds; honored requests produce a verifiable redaction statement.

No warranty

The service is provided "as is", without warranty, to the extent permitted by law.