These terms govern use of COCPA Connect (“Connect”). To use Connect, you must agree to these terms with the Colorado Society of Certified Public Accountants.

Important Terms

These terms include a number of important provisions that affect your rights and responsibilities, such as the disclaimers in Disclaimers, limits on COCPA’s liability to you in Limits on Liability, your agreement to cover COCPA for damages caused by your misuse of Connect in Your Responsibility, and an agreement to arbitrate disputes in Disputes.

Your Permission to Use Connect

Subject to these terms, COCPA gives you permission to use Connect. Everyone needs to agree to these terms to use Connect.

Conditions for Use of Connect

Your permission to use Connect is subject to the following conditions:

1. You must be at least thirteen years old.
2. You may no longer use Connect if COCPA contacts you directly to say that you may not.
3. You must use Connect in accordance with Acceptable Use and Content Standards.

Acceptable Use

1. You may not break the law using Connect.
2. You may not use or try to use another’s account on Connect without their specific permission.
3. You may not buy, sell, or otherwise trade in user names or other unique identifiers on Connect.
4. You may not send advertisements, chain letters, or other solicitations through Connect, or use Connect to gather addresses or other personal data for commercial mailing lists or databases.
5. You may not automate access to Connect, or monitor Connect, such as with a web crawler, browser plug-in or add-on, or other computer program that is not a web browser. You may crawl Connect to index it for a publicly available search engine, if you run one.
6. You may not use Connect to send e-mail to distribution lists, newsgroups, or group mail aliases.
7. You may not falsely imply that you’re affiliated with or endorsed by COCPA.
8. You may not hyperlink to images or other non-hypertext content on Connect on other webpages.
9. You may not remove any marks showing proprietary ownership from materials you download from Connect.
10. You may not show any part of Connect on other websites with <iframe>.
11. You may not disable, avoid, or circumvent any security or access restrictions of Connect.
12. You may not strain infrastructure of Connect with an unreasonable volume of requests, or requests designed to impose an unreasonable load on information systems underlying Connect.
13. You may not impersonate others through Connect.
14. You may not encourage or help anyone in violation of these terms.

Content Standards

1. You may not submit content to Connect that is illegal, offensive, or otherwise harmful to others. This includes content that is harassing, inappropriate, or abusive.
2. You may not submit content to Connect that violates the law, infringes anyone’s intellectual property rights, violates anyone’s privacy, or breaches agreements you have with others.
3. You may not submit content to Connect containing malicious computer code, such as computer viruses or spyware.
4. You may not submit content to Connect as a mere placeholder, to hold a particular address, user name, or other unique identifier.
5. You may not use Connect to disclose information that you don’t have the right to disclose, like others’ confidential or personal information.

Enforcement

COCPA may investigate and prosecute violations of these terms to the fullest legal extent. COCPA may notify and cooperate with law enforcement authorities in prosecuting violations of the law and these terms.

COCPA reserves the right to change, redact, and delete content on Connect for any reason. If you believe someone has submitted content to Connect in violation of these terms, contact us immediately.

Your Account

You must create and log into an account to use some features of Connect.

To create an account, you must provide some information about yourself. If you create an account, you agree to provide, at a minimum, a valid e-mail address, and to keep that address up-to-date.

You agree to be responsible for all action taken using your account, whether authorized by you or not, until you either close your account or notify COCPA that your account has been compromised. You agree to notify COCPA immediately if you suspect your account has been compromised.

COCPA may restrict, suspend, or close your account on Connect according to its policy for handling copyright-related takedown requests, or if COCPA reasonably believes that you’ve broken any rule in these terms.

Your Content

Nothing in these terms gives COCPA any ownership rights in intellectual property that you share with Connect, such as your account information, posts, or other content you submit to Connect. Nothing in these terms gives you any ownership rights in COCPA’s intellectual property, either.

Between you and COCPA, you remain solely responsible for content you submit to Connect. You agree not to wrongly imply that content you submit to Connect is sponsored or approved by COCPA. These terms do not obligate COCPA to store, maintain, or provide copies of content you submit, and to change it, according to these terms.

Content you submit to Connect belongs to you, and you decide what permission to give others for it. But at a minimum, you license COCPA to provide content that you submit to Connect to other users of Connect. That special license allows COCPA to copy, publish, and analyze content you submit to Connect.

When content you submit is removed from Connect, whether by you or by COCPA, COCPA’s special license ends when the last copy disappears from COCPA’s backups, caches, and other systems. Other licenses you apply to content you submit, such as Creative Commons licenses, may continue after your content is removed. Those licenses may give others, or COCPA itself, the right to share your content through Connect again.

Others who receive content you submit to Connect may violate the terms on which you license your content. You agree that COCPA will not be liable to you for those violations or their consequences.

Your Responsibility

You agree to indemnify COCPA from legal claims by others related to your breach of these terms, or breach of these terms by others using your account on Connect. Both you and COCPA agree to notify the other side of any legal claims for which you might have to indemnify COCPA as soon as possible. If COCPA fails to notify you of a legal claim promptly, you won’t have to indemnify COCPA for damages that you could have defended against or mitigated with prompt notice. You agree to allow COCPA to control investigation, defense, and settlement of legal claims for which you would have to indemnify COCPA, and to cooperate with those efforts. COCPA agrees not to agree to any settlement that admits fault for you or imposes obligations on you without your prior agreement.

Disclaimers

You accept all risk of using Connect and content on Connect. As far as the law allows, COCPA and its suppliers provide Connect as is, without any warranty whatsoever.

Connect may hyperlink to and integrate forums and services run by others. COCPA does not make any warranty about services run by others, or content they may provide. Use of services run by others may be governed by other terms between you and the one running service.

Limits on Liability

Neither COCPA nor its suppliers will be liable to you for breach-of-contract damages their personnel could not have reasonably foreseen when you agreed to these terms.

As far as the law allows, the total liability to you for claims of any kind that are related to Connect or content on Connect will be limited to $50.

Feedback

COCPA welcomes your feedback and suggestions for Connect.

You agree that COCPA will be free to act on feedback and suggestions you provide, and that COCPA won’t have to notify you that your feedback was used, get your permission to use it, or pay you. You agree not to submit feedback or suggestions that you believe might be confidential or proprietary, to you or others.

Termination

Either you or COCPA may end the agreement written out in these terms at any time. When our agreement ends, your permission to use Connect also ends.

The following provisions survive the end of our agreement: Your Content, Feedback, Your Responsibility, Disclaimers, Limits on Liability, and General Terms.

Disputes

Colorado Law will govern any dispute related to these terms or your use of Connect.

You and COCPA agree to seek injunctions related to these terms only in state or federal court in Colorado. Neither you nor COCPA will object to jurisdiction, forum, or venue in those courts.

Other than to seek an injunction or for claims under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, you and COCPA will resolve any Dispute by binding American Arbitration Association arbitration. Arbitration will follow the AAA’s Commercial Arbitration Rules and Supplementary Procedures for Consumer Related Disputes. Arbitration will happen in Colorado. You will settle any dispute as an individual, and not as part of a class action or other representative proceeding, whether as the plaintiff or a class member. No arbitrator will consolidate any dispute with any other arbitration without COCPA’s permission.

Any arbitration award will include costs of the arbitration, reasonable attorneys’ fees, and reasonable costs for witnesses. You and COCPA may enter arbitration awards in any court with jurisdiction.

General Terms

If a provision of these terms is unenforceable as written, but could be changed to make it enforceable, that provision should be modified to the minimum extent necessary to make it enforceable. Otherwise, that provision should be removed.

You may not assign your agreement with COCPA. COCPA may assign your agreement to any affiliate of COCPA, any other company that obtains control of COCPA, or any other company that buys assets of COCPA related to Connect. Any attempted assignment against these terms has no legal effect.

Neither the exercise of any right under this Agreement, nor waiver of any breach of this Agreement, waives any other breach of this Agreement.

These terms embody all the terms of agreement between you and COCPA about use of Connect. These terms entirely replace any other agreements about your use of Connect, written or not.

Contact

You may notify COCPA under these terms, and send questions to COCPA, at info@cocpa.org.

COCPA may notify you under these terms using the e-mail address you provide for your account on Connect, or by posting a message to the homepage of Connect or your account page.

Changes

COCPA last updated these terms on April 5, 2019, and may update these terms again. COCPA will post all updates to Connect. For updates that contain substantial changes, COCPA agrees to e-mail you, if you’ve created an account and provided a valid e-mail address. COCPA may also announce updates with special messages or alerts on Connect.

Once you get notice of an update to these terms, you must agree to the new terms in order to keep using Connect.