Terms of Service

These Terms govern your access to and use of ISO 26262 Academy at iso26262.academy and any related services, content, software and applications (together, the “Service”). By creating an account, paying for a subscription, or otherwise using the Service, you accept these Terms in full. If you do not accept them, please do not use the Service.

The Service is provided from Germany by Paul Danci, trading as ISO 26262 Academy (referred to as the “Academy”, “we” or “us”). Our address and contact details are in the Impressum. You can reach us at [email protected] for any question about these Terms.

If you use the Service in connection with your trade, business, craft or profession, you are a business user, and the consumer-specific provisions in these Terms do not apply to you. Statutory consumer rights remain unaffected for consumers in the European Economic Area.

You must be at least 16 years old to create an account. By registering you confirm that you have the legal capacity to enter into a binding agreement and that the information you provide is accurate and kept current.

Your account is personal to you. You must:

• choose a strong password and keep your credentials confidential
• use the account only yourself, on devices you control
• promptly notify us at [email protected] if you suspect any unauthorized access

You are responsible for all activity that takes place under your account, except where that activity results from our failure to apply reasonable security on our side. Sharing your account, selling access, or letting other people use the Service under your credentials is a material breach of these Terms.

Every account belongs to one named individual, whether it was bought by that person or given to them as a seat by their employer. Accounts are never shared, pooled, resold or passed between people, and one person may not work through an account held by someone else.

An individual plan is bought by one person for that person alone. The plans and prices shown on the Pricing page are per individual, and an individual plan may only ever give one person access to the Service. You may not share it, let someone else work through it, take turns on it, or pass it between people.

That is a rule about who may use the account, not about what you may use it for. If you hold an individual plan you may use the Service in your paid work, including work you do as an employee, as a freelancer or as a consultant for a client, and section 4 gives you a separate and explicit right to build documents from our work product templates and deliver them to your own clients for a fee. What an individual plan may not do is stand in for the seats an organization would otherwise buy: a company, team or other group may not put several of its people on individual plans, whether it pays for them or reimburses them, in place of a Teams plan. An organization that needs access for more than one person buys seats on a Teams plan, which is licensed to the organization rather than to one person and lets its own people use the Service for its own work. Section 4 sets out exactly what each of the two licenses permits. Contact us at [email protected] or see our Teams options.

ISO 26262 Academy provides training, study material, exam practice, reference material and related tools focused on functional safety for road vehicles. The content is educational. It is not:

• accredited certification by ISO, IEC, TÜV, any notified body or national accreditation authority
• legal, safety, engineering or compliance advice on a specific product
• a substitute for project-specific analysis carried out by qualified professionals

Completing courses, passing internal exams or earning Academy badges does not by itself confer any official qualification. Decisions you make in real automotive projects remain your responsibility and the responsibility of your organization.

What we give you splits in two, and the difference is worth knowing before you read the detail. The templates, meaning our work product templates and our simulator templates, are tools you may use in your work, including work you deliver to your own clients. Everything else, the written material, the videos, the questions and exams, the simulators and the courses themselves, is material you may learn from but not re-teach or pass on to other people without asking us first.

If you hold an individual plan

Subject to your compliance with these Terms and payment of any applicable fees, we grant you a limited, personal, worldwide, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable, revocable license to access and use the Service and its content for your own individual study and professional development.

If your organization holds a Teams plan

Subject to compliance with these Terms and payment of the agreed fees, we grant the organization a limited, worldwide, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable, revocable license to access and use the Service and its content for the internal study, training and professional development of its own people, for as many named individuals as it has purchased seats for.

A seat is a named person, not a simultaneous connection. The number of seats an organization holds sets how many individuals it may give access to, not how many of them happen to be signed in at the same moment. Fifteen seats means fifteen named people, each with an account of their own, whether or not they ever use the Service at the same time.

The organization may make those seats available to its own personnel. That means its employees, and individual contractors, freelancers and agency staff who are working on projects of the organization itself and who use the Service for that work. Anyone else, including staff of a parent, subsidiary or affiliated company, needs seats of their own unless we agree otherwise in writing.

Seats are named. A seat belongs to one identified person at a time. Two or more people may not share a seat, work through a seat held by someone else, or take turns on one. A seat may be reassigned when the person holding it leaves the organization or moves to a role that no longer needs it, but not as a way of rotating one seat through several people. The organization is responsible for the compliance of each of its seat holders with these Terms, and the restrictions further down this section apply to the organization and to every seat holder.

Templates, and the documents you build from them

You may download our work product templates and simulator templates and use them as the basis of your own documents and analyses. Fill one in, adapt it, cut it down or build on it, and the finished document is yours. You own what you put into it. For whatever of our original template wording is still in it, we grant you a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide license to use, copy, change and pass on that document, including to your own clients and including for a fee. That license survives the end of your subscription. You do not need to credit us, and you do not need to ask us first.

What stays ours is the template library itself. The test is what you supply and who you supply it to, never how much of the template you changed. Supplying a completed document is always permitted. A document is completed once you have filled it in for a particular project, organization or product, so that whoever receives it is receiving a work product about that subject. How closely it still follows our structure, our headings, our clause order or our wording makes no difference at all. For a safety plan, a safety case or any similar work product the structure is the substance, and a document that follows the clause layout of the standard will always resemble the template it came from. We will never treat that resemblance as a reason to say you may not deliver your own work.

What you may not do is supply the template as a template. That means giving, selling, publishing or otherwise passing on a blank or unfilled copy of one of our templates, a copy you have emptied out or made generic again so that whoever receives it can fill it in for projects of their own, a set or collection of our templates, or access to the template library or any part of it as a product or a service that stands in for a subscription with us. It makes no difference whether you charge for it. So the question is always the same one, and you can answer it yourself: is the recipient getting your finished work about their subject, or is the recipient getting our tool to use on work of their own?

Using the rest of the content with people outside your organization

The concept pages and other written material, the videos, the questions and exams and their explanations, the simulators and the courses themselves are licensed for study by you, or by your seat holders. Using them to teach, train or deliver to anyone outside your organization, or making them available to a third party in any other way, needs a separate written agreement with us. This is about passing on that material itself. It does not restrict the documents and analyses you produce while using the Service, such as a completed work product or an analysis you export from a simulator, which the paragraphs above leave you free to deliver.

We would much rather agree that than have you guess at it. We do license this material for those uses, we expect consultancies, training providers and engineering service suppliers to ask, and asking costs you nothing. Write to us at [email protected] with what you want to use and who you want to use it with, and we will come back to you with terms. Please read this as an invitation rather than a refusal.

What everyone may and may not do

Under either license, you may:

• stream and view course materials on devices you control
• take personal notes for your own use
• discuss general concepts with colleagues in your own words

Except where the sections above expressly allow it, you may not, and you must not allow any third party to:

• download, store, copy, reproduce, mirror, screenshot, screen-record or otherwise extract the content beyond what is technically necessary to stream and view it on the Service, which does not restrict the downloads and exports the Service itself offers you, such as work product templates, simulator templates and the analyses you build in the simulators
• distribute, publish, broadcast, transmit, lend, rent, lease, resell, sublicense, host or otherwise make the content available to any other person, whether for free or for value, which is about our content and our templates as we supply them, and not about a completed document or analysis you deliver as your own finished work, whether you deliver it to yourself, to your employer or to a client
• share account credentials or grant any other person access to the Service under your account
• use the content or any output of the Service to train, fine-tune, evaluate or otherwise develop any machine learning or artificial intelligence model
• scrape, crawl, harvest, index or otherwise collect content using any automated means
• reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, attempt to derive source code, or remove, alter or obscure any proprietary notice, watermark, identifier or technical protection measure
• use the Service in violation of any applicable law, regulation, export control rule or sanctions program

All rights not expressly granted to you are reserved by us and our licensors.

You agree not to use the Service to:

• infringe the intellectual property, privacy, publicity or other rights of any person
• upload, transmit or generate unlawful, defamatory, harassing, hateful or sexually explicit material
• introduce malware, exploit security vulnerabilities, or probe, scan or test the integrity of the Service or any connected system without our prior written authorization
• interfere with the operation of the Service, with other users, or with the underlying infrastructure
• attempt to gain unauthorized access to any account, system or data
• circumvent any rate limit, billing control, geographic restriction or technical access control

We may investigate suspected violations and cooperate with law enforcement and competent authorities where required.

You may submit content to the Service such as exam answers, support messages, feedback, forum posts, work products or AI prompts (“Your Content”). You keep ownership of Your Content. You grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to host, store, reproduce, display, adapt and process Your Content as needed to operate, secure, improve and support the Service, including aggregated and de-identified analytics. This license ends when you delete Your Content or close your account, except for backups and legal records we are required or reasonably entitled to keep.

You represent that you have the rights necessary to grant this license and that Your Content does not violate any law or third-party right.

Some parts of the Service require a paid subscription. The plan, price, billing cycle and what is included are described on the Pricing page at the time you subscribe. By subscribing you authorize us, and our payment processors, to charge your chosen payment method for the agreed fees.

Individual plans are priced for a single individual and cover use by that person alone. They may not be shared with colleagues, and a company, team or other group may not put several of its people on individual plans in place of the seats it would otherwise buy. Using your own individual plan in the course of your work, including work you deliver to an employer or a client, is not a breach of that, as section 2 explains. Teams plans are priced per seat and are bought by the organization, which pays for one seat for each named person it wants to be able to use the Service. Organizations that need to provide access to more than one person should contact us at [email protected] about a Teams plan.

Subscriptions renew automatically at the end of each billing period at the then-current price, unless you cancel before renewal. We will give you reasonable advance notice of any price change for an upcoming renewal cycle, and you may cancel before the new price takes effect.

Prices are stated exclusive of value added tax and similar indirect taxes unless we say otherwise. Where we are required to collect VAT or another tax, it is added at checkout based on your location. You are responsible for any other taxes, fees or charges that apply to your purchase.

Failed payments may result in suspension of access until payment is brought up to date.

If you are a consumer in the European Union or European Economic Area, EU law gives you the right to withdraw from a distance contract for a paid subscription within 14 days, without giving a reason. The period runs from the day the contract is concluded.

Our policy: the right stays open until you consume the paid content

We want the 14 days to be a real chance to understand what you bought and change your mind, not a window in which to use the subscription-only content. So our policy is that the right stays open for as long as you have not begun to consume the paid content, and that beginning to consume it is what ends the right, subject to the legal conditions below. What counts as consumption is defined precisely below. When applying this policy, we rely only on our own records of the listed acts.

Which rule applies to your purchase, and how to check. EU law only lets us bring the withdrawal right to an early end for digital content where, before performance starts, you have expressly asked us to start straight away and have separately acknowledged that asking for it costs you the right (Article 16(m) of Directive 2011/83/EU), and where we then confirm both back to you on a durable medium. That gives one test, and you can apply it yourself without asking us. Open the order confirmation email we sent you for the purchase in question:

• If it reproduces the acknowledgement you gave at checkout, the policy above governs that purchase: your 14 days stay open until you consume the paid content, and consuming it ends them.
• If it does not, or if you received no order confirmation from us at all, then we have not met the legal conditions and we do not pretend otherwise. Your 14 days run in full whether or not you consumed anything, and under Article 14(4)(b) of Directive 2011/83/EU you owe us nothing for what you used in the meantime.

Every purchase made before we started asking for that acknowledgement falls on the second side of that test, and always will. We do not apply a change to this section backwards to a purchase that was already made. A right you had when you bought is a right you keep.

What counts as consuming the paid content

Consuming the paid content means one of two things: you access content that is not free under your plan, or you download or export materials. Nothing else counts. In practice that is the following list, and the list is complete rather than an example:

• you open and begin viewing or reading content that is not free under your plan, whether that content is written or video;
• you open or use a simulator that is not free under your plan;
• you open your personal evaluation, where that report requires a paid plan;
• you download or export a work product template or a simulator template.

Opening a public or free page, viewing content that does not require a paid plan, or reaching a locked page without gaining access to its subscription-only content does not count as consumption. This means that opening or using the Markov simulator does not count while that simulator remains available without a paid plan, and that building or exporting a safety case does not count while the safety case planner remains available to any signed-in user without a paid plan. Subject to the legal conditions above and any mandatory rights that cannot be excluded, one qualifying act ends the right for that purchase as a whole rather than item by item, because the purchase provides access to the plan as a whole rather than selling each item separately.

We never ask you to show that you did not consume anything. We treat the right as ended only where our own records show that you performed one of the acts listed above. If we hold no such record, we treat the paid content as not consumed and your right remains open for the rest of the applicable withdrawal period.

How to withdraw

To exercise the right, you must inform us of your decision by a clear statement, for example an email to [email protected], ideally with “Right of withdrawal” in the subject line, or a letter sent by post to the address in our Impressum. You may use the model form below, but you do not have to. To meet the deadline it is enough that you send your communication before the 14 days expire.

Effects of withdrawal. If you withdraw, we reimburse all payments received from you for that subscription period without undue delay and in any event no later than 14 days from the day we are informed. We use the same means of payment you used for the original transaction, and you incur no fees for the reimbursement. Your access to the paid parts of the Service ends when you withdraw.

Model withdrawal form

Complete and return this form only if you wish to withdraw from the contract.

This form follows Annex I(B) to Directive 2011/83/EU on consumer rights.

This section does not apply to business users.

You can cancel auto-renewal at any time from your account settings. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period. You retain access until then, and we do not pro-rate refunds for unused time within a billing period unless required by law or expressly stated by us.

Outside the EU statutory right of withdrawal described in section 8, fees are non-refundable except where required by mandatory law. Where a refund is due, we issue it through the original payment method.

You can stop using the Service at any time and may close your account from account settings. Personal data associated with closure is handled under the retention and deletion rules in our Privacy Policy.

We may suspend or terminate your access immediately if:

• you materially breach these Terms, in particular the license and acceptable use rules in sections 4 and 5
• you fail to pay fees that are due
• continued provision would expose us or other users to legal, security or operational risk
• we are required to do so by law, court order or competent authority

For non-material issues we will, where reasonable, give you notice and a chance to fix the problem before suspending or terminating. On termination, your license to use the Service ends and you must stop accessing the content. The perpetual license in section 4 over template wording inside work products you had already completed is not affected. Sections that by their nature should survive termination will continue to apply.

The Service, including all course materials, text, graphics, video, audio, software, design, structure, selection, arrangement, trademarks, logos and the “ISO 26262 Academy” name, are owned by us or our licensors and are protected by copyright, trademark, database and other intellectual property laws in the EU, the US and internationally.

“ISO 26262” and other standard designations are trademarks of their respective owners and are used only to describe the subject matter of our content. We are not affiliated with or endorsed by ISO, IEC, SAE or any standards body unless we explicitly say so.

Nothing in these Terms transfers any ownership in our intellectual property to you. Your rights in our material are the licenses described in section 4. That includes the perpetual license, set out there, over any of our template wording that remains in a document you have completed, whoever that document is for. A document you build from one of our templates is yours, and this section does not claw it back.

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, the Service is provided on an “as is” and “as available” basis without warranties of any kind, whether express, implied or statutory, including warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, non-infringement and uninterrupted availability.

If you are a consumer in the European Union or European Economic Area, your mandatory statutory rights, including conformity rights for digital content and digital services under Directive (EU) 2019/770 as implemented in your national law, are not affected by this section. If you are a consumer in the United States, this section does not limit any non-waivable rights you may have under the consumer-protection law of your state.

Nothing in these Terms limits or excludes our liability for:

• death or personal injury caused by our negligence
• fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation
• gross negligence or intentional misconduct
• any liability that cannot be limited or excluded under mandatory applicable law, including statutory consumer rights and data-protection law

Subject to the paragraph above, and to the maximum extent permitted by law:

• we are not liable for indirect, incidental, consequential, special or punitive damages, loss of profits, loss of revenue, loss of goodwill, loss of data (other than as a direct result of our breach) or business interruption
• our total aggregate liability for all claims arising out of or in connection with the Service or these Terms is limited to the greater of (a) the fees you paid to us for the Service in the twelve months immediately before the event giving rise to the claim, and (b) one hundred euros

The Service is educational. Decisions made by you or your organization in any real safety, regulatory or commercial context remain your own responsibility. We are not liable for losses caused by relying on the content for such decisions.

If you breach these Terms, including the license restrictions in section 4 (in particular by distributing, sharing, reselling or scraping our content, by passing our templates on as templates or passing on the template library itself, or by using the content to train AI models) or the acceptable use rules in section 5, you are responsible for the loss or damage that breach causes to us, to other users or to third parties.

If you are a business user, you will indemnify and hold us, our employees, contractors and partners harmless against all claims, damages, losses, fines, penalties, reasonable legal costs and expenses arising out of or related to:

• your breach of these Terms
• your use of the Service in violation of applicable law or third-party rights
• your unauthorized distribution, sharing or commercial exploitation of our content, which does not include your use or delivery of a document you have completed from one of our templates, whoever that document is for

For consumers, your liability is limited to the loss or damage that arises as a foreseeable consequence of your breach, in line with applicable national law.

These Terms, and any dispute or claim (including non-contractual disputes) arising out of or in connection with them, are governed by the laws of the Federal Republic of Germany, without regard to conflict-of-law rules and excluding the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG).

If you are a consumer in the European Union or European Economic Area, this choice of law does not deprive you of the protection of mandatory provisions of the law of the country where you have your habitual residence, and you may bring proceedings in the courts of that country.

If you are a business user, the exclusive jurisdiction for any dispute is the competent courts of Berlin, Germany, except where mandatory law requires otherwise.

Before going to court we encourage you to contact us at [email protected] so we can try to resolve the issue informally. As required by §36 of the German Consumer Dispute Resolution Act (VSBG): we are not obliged to participate in dispute resolution proceedings before a consumer arbitration board, and we do not undertake to do so. That does not stop us from settling a complaint with you directly, which we would much rather do.