BallSide GmbH i.L. General Terms of Use
for the on-line service „BallSide“

1. Scope of Terms

The following General Terms of Use contain the conditions and general provisions for the active participation in our on-line service BallSide. These terms apply exclusively.

2. Registration and Conclusion of Contract

2.1 To actively use BallSide, you have to register and create a user account. You have to state the few data we ask you to specify during the registration process completely and truthfully. Stating the personal details of a third person is especially inadmissible. We would also like to ask you not to choose a username that could be viewed as offensive by other users or is not in good taste. It is equally important that you state your actual date of birth since we cannot allow users under the age of 13 to register without the permission of a parent or guardian (see below).

2.2 If any of the information you have stated should change after your successful registration, you have to update your user account directly with the new data.

2.3 After you have entered the information necessary for the creation of a user account and if you are 13 years old or older, we will send you an e-mail with an activation link. That e-mail constitutes our offer to the completion of a user agreement with you. Should you choose to follow the activation link in the e-mail you are officially accepting our offer and the user agreement is concluded.

2.4 If you are not yet 13 years of age, we would like to ask you to enter your parent’s or guardian’s e-mail address as we need their permission to complete your registration. We will then send your parents or guardians an e-mail informing them of your wish to register at BallSide and asking them whether or not they agree with that registration. If so, they can follow the activation link included in that e-mail. In that case, a user agreement between you and BallSide GmbH i.L. will have been concluded.

2.5 Please note that we don’t operate with individual contracts. The content of the agreement concluded with us regarding the purchase and use of credits thus derives from the General Terms of Use in concert with your and our identity and the services and possibilities BallSide offers you. We don’t store individual contracts for each user.

3. Access Data and Liability

3.1 Your access data (e-mail address and/or your assigned BallSide-ID and password) may only be used by yourself. You have to keep your password secret. If you have lost your password or of there is any indication that your account has been accessed by unauthorized third parties you have the obligation to bring that to our immediate attention, for your and our safety.

3.2 If you allow other people to administer content or sections you are responsible for (which is an admissible option in certain sections) you have to note that this does not alter our existing user agreement in any way. You alone will be held responsible content that has been posted in your section or for activities that have been conducted.

3.3 The same applies if you are registering as the representative of an organization, for example a basketball club. During registration we will ask you to affirm that you have the right to represent the organization in question and administer a user account in its name in order to make sure that the organization agrees with your actions on BallSide. Nonetheless, the contractual relationship will be concluded with you personally and therefore, you will be held solely responsible.

4. The Subject-matter of our Service

4.1 BallSide offers its users many possibilities for active participation. On the one hand there are community and social networking applications (user profile, instant messaging, comments, friends functions, etc) and on the other hand a number of special „basketball features“. You can not only update your calendar, create teams and use many other features, but you can especially compile, maintain and analyze detailed statistics.

You will find details for the features in question in the different sections of the website or in the FAQ.

4.2 Apart from one exception, BallSide can be used free of charge. Only analyzing PlayerStats and TeamStats by the Analyzer tool is subject to a fee. In order to access the Analyzer section on BallSide the user (as well as unregistered interested persons) needs a certain amount of credits, which can be purchased from BallSide. The purchase of credits is not subject to these General Terms of Use, but the Terms of Purchase.

We reserve the right to present accordingly indicated offers by third parties, which will be subject to a charge. In regard to these offers, a new user agreement will be concluded with their respective provider.

4.3 Another special feature is the fact that the coaches who compile and maintain the TeamStats and PlayerStats will participate directly in the income generated by the credits and the access to the Analyzer section on BallSide (see also section 6).

5. Your Content / Rights of Use for Content

5.1 BallSide offers its users in many sections the possibility to contribute to the content of the website. In your own section you can post texts and images, document your career as a player, manage teams as a coach, compile and maintain statistics, etc. In other areas of the site you can interact with other users, send them messages, comment on their posts, etc. All the different possibilities will be presented and explained to you on the website and in the FAQs - just give it a try.

Everything you post on BallSide, be it texts, images, game scores and commentaries, statistics, multimedia content, etc will be hereafter referred to as “contents“ or “your contents“.

5.2 We do not claim any rights on your contents, but the operation of BallSide requires you to grant us certain simple rights of use on your contents. For purposes of clarification we would like to point out the following:

When you post content on BallSide, you confer to us certain transferable, non-exclusive, rights of use, unlimited in time and without geographic restriction to the extend necessary for the operation of the service. Specifically, you grant us the right to make the contents accessible and available on BallSide and make the necessary duplications (storing the contents on the servers, etc.). You also grant us in our function as operators of BallSide the right to make certain contents publicly accessible, transmit contents or otherwise reproduce it publicly, encompassing in particular the right to make content available or transmit content by way of transfer to other users' stationary or mobile devices within the scope of automated subscription services (push services) or on-call services (pull services) (e.g. via podcasting, RSS feed, Atom feed, XML interface or other technologies).

5.3 As a coach you are furthermore granting us the right to make the TeamStats and PlayerStats you have compiled and maintain available to other users and third parties for a charge (see also section 6 below) and grant them the rights on these contents as explained in section 6 of the Terms of Use regarding the purchase of credits.

6. Income generated by analyzing TeamStats and PlayerStats at extra charge

6.1 When a registered user or a third party purchases credits and uses these credits to gain access to the Analyzer tool you as a coach have compiled and maintained (be it in form of a Daily, Weekly or Monthly Pass) or grants access to others (through a sponsorship), half of the utilized credits will be assigned via intersystem transfer to the compiler of the statistics in question and offset at EUR 0.02 per credit. If a Analyzer subscription “costs” 10 credits, then 5 credits will be offset at EUR 0.02 per credit and EUR 0.10 credited to the compiler of the examined statistics.

6.2 We will assign your new credit according to section 6.1 directly to your user account. You can check your balance at any time by going to “Account“ in your user panel.

6.3 As soon as your balance reaches an amount of EUR 50.00 you can ask as to cash it out. Remittance will take place within 14 days. Please understand that the payment of smaller amounts requires disproportionate administrative arrangement and is therefore not possible. Upon explicit and special demand even smaller amounts can be paid, if you can demonstrate legitimate interest.

6.4 A PayPal account and a respective e-mail address are necessary for the payment. Only the complete current balance can be cashed out. Please note that PayPal might charge fees for the money transfer.

6.5 Alternatively you can also you your balance to directly purchase credits.

7. Inadmissible contents

7.1 You are free in regarding to the posting of content as far as the technical possibilities of BallSide allow it. There are some limits and provisions though, which are presented in the following provisions. These provisions apply regardless of kind of contents involved in each individual case.

7.2 Any kind of content that is deemed illegal for whatever reason is inadmissible on BallSide. This encompasses on the one hand everything that is disorderly or punishable but also contents that can “only“ lead to third-party civil claims. Apart from any legal classification there are contents that will not be accepted on BallSide. Unacceptable on BallSide are especially contents that

• include propaganda material and/or symbols of unconstitutional organizations or refer to such organizations and/or are directed against the free basic democratic order or the concept of understanding among nations,
• incite hatred against parts of the population or specific national, ethnic or religious groups or groups distinguishable through their national tradition and folklore, call for acts of violence or arbitrariness against them or violate the human dignity of others by abusing, maliciously slurring or defaming part of the population or aforementioned groups;
• depict, describe or refer to cruel and otherwise inhuman acts of violence in a way that glorifies or belittles these acts or depict the cruel and inhuman aspect of such actions in a way that violates the human dignity;
• offend human dignity, in particular by presenting persons who are or were in the process of dying or being subjected to severe physical or mental suffering and where an actual event is being shown without a justifiable interest for this form of presentation or reporting; the fact that consent may have been granted is irrelevant; and/or
• are slanderous or defamatory and/or show racist or xenophobic tendencies and/or threaten or pressurize others in any way.

In other words: political or religious extremism of any kind, racism, violence, mobbing and “internet drama”, flaming or insults to other users or third parties will not be tolerated on BallSide.

Inadmissible are also contents that:

• violate laws governing narcotics, drugs and firearms, refer to such violations or in any other way propagate or promote such violations;
• show or describe children or young people in unnatural and blatantly sexual positions, especially if they involve acts of violence, sexual abuse of children or young people or sexual acts of humans with animals as well as contents violating laws for the protection of minors for whatever other reasons, especially contents according to § 4 par. 1 and par. 2 JMStV (German interstate treaty on the protection of minors in the media) as well as § 5 JMStV; this also applies to contents that only refer to or imply such contents;
• advertise games of chance subject to state licensing (especially games of chance according to § 184 StGB [German Penal Code] or that advertise or refer to chain letter campaigns, pyramid schemes, lotteries, betting games or games of similar nature;
• violate the rights of others to the protection of their privacy or other privacy rights, in particular legal positions protecting against the publication of one’s own image;
• violate copyright and labeling law (trademarks and company labels, titles) or other industrial copyright laws (e.g. product piracy) and/or
• violate copyrights and/or ancillary copyrights or similar rights of others (e.g. bootleg copies of music or movies as well as text of other taken without permission).

7.3 We would like to draw your attention to one specific aspect: Contents that advertise, promote or recommend “efficiency-enhancing“ substances have no place on our platform. We do not wish to see any reference whatsoever to pills or powders of an illegal or dubious nature or any kind of doping drugs.

7.4 You commit yourself to not posting any inadmissible content according to section 7. It is your responsibility to examine any content accordingly before posting it.

8. Other rules of conduct

8.1 You may in principal in your posts link to websites outside of BallSide, but before you do, you have to ensure that the website you want to link to does not contain anything that is inadmissible on BallSide according to section 7. If that should be the case, then you are not allowed to post your link.

8.2 Forbidden are of course, the following actions:

• Reading out, storing, editing, transmitting and other misuse of data on BallSide, be it through automatic or manual process;
• Intercepting e-mails or messages addressed at other users;
• The insertion of viruses, Trojan horses and other corresponding scripts and programmes or similar malicious code;
• Distribution of spam e-mails or messages;
• Hacking into other user accounts;
• Contacting other users after he or she has specified that he or she does not wish to be contacted; and/or
• The publication, transmission or distribution of any kind of personal data of other users or third parties (e.g. name, telephone number, e-mail address), without their express permission. This also applies to e-mails or messages you might have received from other users.

8.3 BallSide enables you to send specific people that are not yet registered at BallSide e-mail messages ( a coach can for example invite the members of his team to BallSide). You may use this feature only to send messages to people you know and where you can assume that they will not feel disturbed by such an e-mail.

Warranty and Liability of the User / Exemption from Liability

9.1 You warrant that you are able and authorized to grant the rights to the extend described in section 5. You further warrant not to post any contents that are in violation of section 7 or in any other way illegal, not to commit any actions that are in violation of section 8 or in any other way illegal or enter any false data. You have the obligation to carefully examine if any content or action as intended on BallSide, violate the rights of others.

9.2 You alone are responsible for any contents posted by you or actions conducted by you as well as possible legal positions required therefore. In principal we do not review the posted contents.

In this respect, you agree to hold us harmless or exempt us from any liability or any costs including possible and actual costs of legal proceedings, in case of third party claims against us because you have acted in culpable breach of obligations from your side towards us, especially obligations according to sections 5, 7 and 8, thus violating their rights (e.g. copyright and trademark rights, rights regarding one own’s image, basic personal rights, etc) or because you have acted in violation of the law in any other manner. We will inform you of the third-party claims and give you the opportunity to defend yourself against that claim insofar as that is legally necessary and/or possible. At the same time you will immediately convey to us any information you might have concerning the facts of that case that are the subject of the claim.

Any further claims for damages remain unaffected.

9.3 § 828 BGB [German Civil Code] (Liability exclusion or limitation fro minors) however, applies.

10. Our Liability

In principal, we are liable according to the legal provisions. Two exceptions apply though: we are not liable for any damage that may occur to you through the loss of data, if the loss of data could have been prevented by you by performing a regular and complete data backup. Furthermore, in case of slight negligence or acts of omission liability is excluded for damages of an unforeseeable nature or untypical for contractual situations, to the extent that the damage does not affect life, the body or health.

11. Violations of the General Terms of Use

In case of violation of the general terms of use, we reserve the right to delete the contents in question, issue a warning and/or temporarily or permanently disable your user account. Apart from that, an immediate termination of the user agreement may be issued.

12. Termination of the User Agreement

12.1 The user agreement may be terminated at any time from your or our side. The right to a termination without notice due to serious reasons is reserved for both parties. The termination has to be made in written form according to § 126 b BGB (German Civil Code), i.e. not less than an e-mail. We reserve the right to provide our users with other means of termination in the future.

12.2 After termination of the user agreement we will delete your user profile including all content posted there from the platform. Texts that you have posted as comments on third party pages or elsewhere on the platform will remain intact to ensure the continuity of the platform. The same applies to your membership in teams, although the profile picture you might have chosen will of course cease to be displayed. If you expressly ask us to delete your username completely, we will of course do so.

12.3 If your user account has been disabled or we have terminated your user agreement with immediate effect, you may not register a new account at BallSide without our express permission.

12.4 Coaches‘ balances will be calculated to the moment, when the termination becomes effective; the outstanding balance will be paid out regardless of the amount within 13 days of the termination of the user agreement. For the technical procedures regarding payments refer to section 6.4.

13. Changes in the General terms of Use

13.1 We reserve the right to modify the General terms of use at any given time without giving any reason. The modified General Terms of Use will be sent to you via e-mail. The modified General Terms of Use are deemed as agreed, if you do not object to them within 13 days of receipt of the e-mail. Any objection must be made in written form. We shall inform you separately in the e-mail of the right of objection, the time period available and the consequences of your inaction. If you object, both parties have the right to terminate the user agreement as provided in section 12.

13.2 The possibility to modify the General Terms of Use does not apply to modifications that would alter the basic possibilities of use of BallSide to your disadvantage, nor for the introduction of new obligations on your part that were not prior part of the General Terms of Use.

14. Choice of Law

The User Agreement as well as the General Terms of Use shall be governed exclusively by the laws of the Federal Republic of Germany. Application of German International Private Law and of the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods is excluded.

 

June 2010

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