Terms of use

Last updated: 17 August 2026

1. Using this site

These Terms of Use apply to emdashrights.org and to material submitted to Em Dash Rights through the website.

By signing the Declaration, submitting a story, providing an organisational endorsement, or otherwise submitting material through the site, you agree to the parts of these Terms that apply to that activity.

Your use of the site is also subject to our Privacy Policy, Community Guidelines and Legal Notice.

Em Dash Rights may update these Terms from time to time. The current version will be published on this page with its effective date.

2. About Em Dash Rights

Em Dash Rights is an independent civic and editorial initiative based in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.

The project documents and advocates around the treatment of human writing in the age of generative AI, including the use of stylistic features as supposed evidence of AI authorship.

Em Dash Rights is not a court, regulator, educational institution, employer, union, political party or law firm.

Publication by Em Dash Rights does not constitute a legal or institutional determination about authorship, misconduct, liability or wrongdoing.

3. The Declaration

The Em Dash Rights Declaration is a public statement of principle.

Signing the Declaration records your endorsement of those principles.

A signature does not:

create a law, regulation or court order;
establish the facts of an individual case;
determine whether particular writing was produced using artificial intelligence;
bind a school, university, employer, platform, regulator or government; or
create a contractual obligation requiring a third party to act.

Where the signing process provides a choice about public display, your choice determines whether the information identified in that option may be displayed publicly.

You may quote and redistribute the Em Dash Rights Declaration for non-commercial advocacy, educational, journalistic, research and discussion purposes provided that:

Em Dash Rights is clearly attributed;
emdashrights.org is identified as the official source;
extracts are not presented in a misleading context;
modified wording is not represented as the official Declaration; and
your use does not falsely suggest affiliation with, endorsement by, or authorisation from Em Dash Rights.

This permission does not transfer ownership of Em Dash Rights branding, logos, website design or other original material.

5. Your submissions

You may be able to submit:

Declaration signatures;
stories or case accounts;
supporting documents or evidence;
institutional responses;
organisational endorsements;
correction requests; or
other material requested by Em Dash Rights.

When you submit material, you confirm that, to the best of your knowledge:

information you present as fact is accurate;
you are not knowingly submitting false or misleading material;
you have the right or lawful basis to provide the material;
you have not deliberately removed important context in a way that makes the submission misleading; and
your submission does not contain malicious code or material intended to interfere with the website or its services.

Do not submit confidential, restricted or unlawfully obtained material.

Do not submit another person’s private or sensitive information merely because it may be relevant to a dispute.

Where identifying information is not necessary to understand a case, you should leave it out.

6. Supporting evidence and third-party material

You may provide supporting material to help Em Dash Rights assess a submission.

Providing a document for private editorial review does not, by itself, authorise Em Dash Rights to publish that entire document publicly.

Unless publication permission is expressly given, supporting documents may be used to review, understand, fact-check or assess a submission in accordance with our Privacy Policy.

If material belongs to another person, you only grant Em Dash Rights rights that you are legally entitled to grant.

We may decide that material cannot safely or lawfully be published even where it has been submitted as evidence.

Submission and publication are separate decisions.

Sending information to Em Dash Rights does not automatically mean that the information will be published.

Where we ask whether material may be published, your selected publication choice governs the permission you give us.

Consent to publish a story does not automatically constitute consent to publish every supporting document, email address, name, institution or other identifying detail supplied with it.

We may publish less information than you have authorised where we consider anonymisation, editing or omission appropriate.

We will not intentionally publish information that you expressly submitted only for private editorial review unless another lawful basis applies.

8. Licence for submitted material

You retain ownership of copyright in original material that you submit.

To the extent that you have the right to do so, you grant Em Dash Rights a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to:

receive and securely store the material;
reproduce it for editorial and technical purposes;
review and assess it;
format it for the website;
edit it for clarity, length, safety and readability;
remove or generalise identifying information;
excerpt or summarise it;
archive it; and
where you have authorised publication, publish and communicate the authorised material through official Em Dash Rights services.

This licence allows Em Dash Rights to use hosting, infrastructure and other service providers where reasonably necessary to operate the project.

It does not transfer ownership of your copyright to Em Dash Rights.

The licence applies only to rights that you are legally able to grant.

9. Editorial changes and attribution

Where publication is authorised, you consent, to the extent permitted by law, to reasonable editorial acts necessary to operate the archive, including:

correcting spelling, grammar and formatting;
shortening material;
rearranging material for clarity;
removing irrelevant content;
anonymising names or identifying details;
presenting extracts or summaries; and
omitting your name where publication is anonymous or where anonymity is reasonably considered appropriate.

We will not intentionally edit a submission in a way that materially changes the substance of the contributor’s account.

Where a proposed change would materially alter the meaning of a submitted account, we may seek further confirmation before publication.

10. No guarantee of publication

Submission does not create a right to publication.

Em Dash Rights may decline to publish material for any legitimate editorial, safety, privacy, legal or operational reason.

We may also:

request additional information;
request supporting material;
fact-check a submission;
anonymise or shorten a submission;
delay publication while reviewing an issue; or
decide that the material falls outside the scope of the project.

An unpublished submission may still be retained and used internally to understand recurring patterns or issues, subject to the Privacy Policy and any applicable withdrawal or deletion rights.

11. Removal, withdrawal and corrections

You may ask us to review, correct, anonymise or remove material that you submitted or that identifies you.

A request does not necessarily require immediate or complete deletion in every circumstance.

For example, we may need to retain limited information where reasonably necessary for legal, security, record-keeping or dispute-resolution purposes.

Copies may also remain temporarily in routine technical backups after material has been removed from the public website.

Published material may be corrected, annotated, anonymised, restricted or removed where we consider that appropriate.

Requests should be sent to legal@emdashrights.org.

12. Organisational endorsements

If you submit or confirm an endorsement in the name of an organisation, you represent that you are authorised, or reasonably entitled, to communicate that endorsement on the organisation’s behalf.

We may request verification before listing an organisational endorsement.

We may refuse, suspend or remove an endorsement if:

authority cannot reasonably be verified;
the endorsement appears false or misleading;
the organisation withdraws or disputes it; or
continued publication would otherwise be inappropriate.

Listing an endorsement does not create a partnership, agency or other legal relationship between Em Dash Rights and the endorsing organisation.

13. Acceptable use

You must not use Em Dash Rights to:

knowingly submit materially false or misleading information;
harass, threaten, intimidate or target another person;
publish or attempt to publish another person’s private identifying information contrary to our Community Guidelines;
impersonate another person or organisation;
falsely claim authority to represent an organisation;
infringe copyright, privacy, confidentiality or other legal rights;
distribute malware or malicious code;
probe, bypass or interfere with website security;
scrape or access the service in a manner that materially disrupts its operation;
overload, disable or damage the website or infrastructure; or
use the project in a way that falsely suggests official affiliation with Em Dash Rights.

We may restrict access, reject submissions or take other reasonable measures where these Terms are breached.

14. Published cases and contributor statements

The archive may contain personal accounts, opinions, allegations and information supplied by contributors.

Em Dash Rights may review, edit, request evidence for or contextualise submitted material, but we do not represent that every contributor statement has been independently proven as fact.

Publication of an account does not mean that Em Dash Rights has made a legal determination that an allegation is true or that another person or institution has acted unlawfully.

People or organisations concerned about published material may use the corrections and legal complaints process described in our Legal Notice.

15. Third-party websites and material

The site may link to, quote or refer to material controlled by third parties.

Those third parties may have their own terms, privacy practices and copyright restrictions.

A link, citation or reference does not necessarily indicate that Em Dash Rights endorses the third party or every statement associated with it.

Em Dash Rights is not responsible for the availability or operation of third-party websites.

16. No professional advice

Em Dash Rights provides advocacy, editorial and informational material.

Nothing on the site constitutes legal, academic-integrity, disciplinary, employment, immigration or other professional advice.

Information on the site may not apply to your particular circumstances.

Using the site, contacting Em Dash Rights or submitting a case does not create a lawyer–client or other professional adviser relationship.

17. Website availability and accuracy

We aim to maintain the website and archive responsibly, but material may contain errors, become outdated or require later correction.

We do not guarantee that:

every page is complete or current;
every submission will be reviewed or published;
every third-party statement is accurate;
the website will always be available;
access will be uninterrupted or error-free; or
archived material will remain available indefinitely.

We may modify, correct, archive, restrict or discontinue website content or features.

18. Liability

Nothing in these Terms excludes, restricts or modifies any guarantee, right, remedy or liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, restricted or modified.

Subject to those non-excludable rights, and to the maximum extent permitted by law, Em Dash Rights is not responsible for loss arising solely from reliance on general informational or advocacy material published on the site where that material was not provided as professional advice.

Nothing in these Terms limits liability to the extent that doing so would be unlawful.

19. Privacy

Personal information submitted through Em Dash Rights is handled as described in our Privacy Policy.

Submitting information privately is not the same as consenting to public display.

Where applicable, publication choices, anonymity choices and consent options presented when information is collected form part of these Terms.

20. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms where the website, submission process, law or operation of the project changes.

The latest version will be published on this page and identified by its updated date.

A later change to these Terms does not retrospectively expand publication permission you previously gave for private material unless you separately agree or another lawful basis applies.

21. Governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws applicable in New South Wales, Australia.

The courts of New South Wales have non-exclusive jurisdiction in relation to disputes concerning these Terms or the website, subject to any mandatory law or jurisdiction that applies regardless of this provision.

22. Contact