Terms of use

§ 1 Scope

(1) The following terms and conditions apply to the use of the EBBC-community platform (hereinafter referred to as the „Platform“) of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung e.V., registered with the register of associations of the local court of Munich under VR  4461 (hereinafter referred to as “we“, „us“ or “our”) under the URL www.batterybusinessclub.com. The Platform is operated by our legally dependent Fraunhofer-Institut für Fertigungstechnik und Angewandte Materialforschung IFAM.

(2) Your use of the Platform is only permitted if you accept these Terms of Use. You can access these Terms of Use under the URL www.batterybusinessclub.com/termsofuse and print it out if you wish.

(3) We may amend these Terms of Use as we deem appropriate. We shall notify the user of any changes to the Terms of Use in writing, by facsimile or email. Where the user does not object to such changes within six weeks from the date of receipt of the notice, the changes are deemed to have been consented to. In our notification we will draw the user’s attention specially to his right of objection and to the legal consequences of silence.

§ 2 Registration, Conclusion of Contract and Subject Matter

(1) A prerequisite for the use of the Platform is your registration via the corresponding online form. After registering for access to the Platform via the online form, you will receive a confirmation-email to verify your data, which you can use to confirm your registration. Once your account has been activated by us, these Terms of Use come into effect (conclusion of contract).

(2). The subject matter of these Terms of Use is the use of the Platform free of charge as an online communication platform regarding the topic of batteries. For this purpose, you as a user will be provided with an “account” with which you can post contributions in forums on the Platform to certain topics as defined by us, send messages to other users, view members and send invitations for the Platform to third parties.

From time to time we may also stream live events regarding the topic of batteries on the Platform (hereinafter referred to as “Live Events”) and may provide you with a function with which you can communicate with other users in writing in real time (hereinafter referred to as “Chat Comments”). We may make recordings of some or all live events available after their transmission for a certain period of time (hereinafter referred to as “Recordings”).

(3) You have no claim for activation of your account or participation in the Platform. We remain owner of the unrestricted virtual domiciliary rights.

(4) You guarantee that your data provided for the purpose of registration are true and correct. You may only register with your real name, the use of a pseudonym is not allowed.

(5) Your account may only be used by yourself. As the owner of the account, you are also responsible for protecting it from misuse. You must therefore protect your access data from third parties.

(6) We shall endeavor to offer the Platform with as few interruptions as possible. Even with all due care, downtimes cannot be ruled out in which the Platform cannot be accessed. You acknowledge that 100% availability of the Platform is technically not feasible.

(7) We reserve the right to amend the Platform and the services we provide on the Platform at our sole discretion, in particular to amend the content and structure of the Platform as well as the associated user interfaces.

§ 2a Live Events, Recordings, Chat Comments

(1) You are granted such rights in the Live Events and the Recordings which are necessary for you to watch such Live Events and Recordings online. You are not granted any further rights. In particular, you are not entitled to record the Live Event, to download the Recordings in whole or in part, to reproduce Live Events and/or Recordings beyond the scope as mentioned in sentence 1 of this § 2a, to modify them, to make them publicly accessible, to sell them or to use them otherwise for commercial purposes.

(2) The Chat Comments can be read by other chat participants. We reserve the right to make Chat Comments visible to other chat participants only after editorial review and to not publish Chat Comments that violate these terms of use. We reserve the right to discontinue the chat function without notice if Chat Comments increasingly violate these terms of use.

(3) §3 applies to the Chat Comments accordingly.

§ 3 Your Obligations as a Platform User („Netiquette“), Indemnification

(1) We are looking forward to hearing your opinion and having an open, factual and enriching exchange on the topic of batteries on the Platform. Please be fair, friendly, tolerant, and respectful of other opinions. As a user you undertake to not publish any contributions or send any messages to other users that violate these Terms of Use, the common decency or otherwise violate applicable law. In particular, you are prohibited from

• posting any form of discrimination or defamation of people based on their race, language or ethnicity, age or gender, religion, nationality, physical condition or sexual identity;
• posting any insulting, degrading, pornographic, provocative, harmful to minors or criminal statements;
• posting spam on the Platform;
• using a machine to generate comments (particularly bots);
• posting content protected by law, in particular by copyright and trademark law, without a required authorization;
• disclosing personal or confidential information without a required consent;
• posting your contribution more than once in the Platform (prohibition of double posting);
• publishing third-party press articles on the Platform without a required consent of the author;
• advertising on the Platform without our express written permission. This also applies to so-called surreptitious advertising such as, in particular, linking to your own homepage with or without post text in the signature or within posts. Homepage URLs and address or contact data may only be published in the user profile of the Platform.

(2) As a user, you undertake to check your posts before publishing them to see whether they contain information that you do not wish to publish. Your posts may be recorded in search engines and thus be accessible worldwide. A claim for deletion or correction of such search engine entries against us is excluded.

(3) In the event of a breach of these Terms of Use, in particular of the aforementioned rules § 3 (1) and (2), of the common decency (guten Sitten), of third party’s rights or of applicable law we may also impose the following sanctions on you, irrespective of termination of this agreement:

• deletion or modification of content posted by you,
• issuing a warning;
• temporarily or permanently blocking your access to the Platform; and/or
• deleting your account.

(4) If you believe that others are violating our Netiquette and we have not taken action, please send us an email to: ebbc@ifam.fraunhofer.de.

(5) Should third parties or other users assert claims against us due to possible legal violations that result from the content posted by you as a user you undertake to indemnify us against any claims, including claims for damages, and to reimburse us for the costs incurred by us due to the possible legal violation. In particular, we shall be indemnified against the costs of any necessary legal defense. We are entitled to demand a reasonable advance payment from you as the user. As a user, you are obliged to support us in good faith with information and documents in the legal defense against third parties. All our further rights and claims for damages remain unaffected. If you as the user are not responsible for the possible infringement, the aforementioned obligations do not apply.

§ 4 Rights of Use

(1) The copyright for your postings, insofar as they are protected by copyright, remains with you as the user.

(2) However, by posting a contribution, you grant us a free of charge, irrevocable, temporally and geographically unlimited right to keep the contribution permanently available on the Platform and otherwise process the contribution as required for the provision of our service on the Platform. In addition, you grant us the right to delete, edit or move your contributions. For the avoidance of doubt: Our aforementioned rights of use shall remain in force even if your account is terminated.

(3) The rights in the Platform and our contributions remain with us.

§ 5 Limitation of Liability

(1) The individual posts on the Platform represent the opinions of individual users. We assume no responsibility for the accuracy or the integrity of the postings of other users.

(2) We shall only be liable for intent and gross negligence.

§ 6 Term and Termination of the Agreement

(1) This agreement is concluded for an indefinite period. Either party may terminate this agreement at any time without notice.

(2) The right for extraordinary termination for an important reason remains unaffected. For us, in particular a severe or repeated breach of your obligations under § 3 constitute such an important reason.

(3) If you delete your account or have it deleted (termination of the contract), your public statements, in particular posts on the Platform, remain visible to all other users, but the account can no longer be accessed.

§ 7 Miscellaneous

(1) Changes or amendments to this agreement (including this § 7 (1)) must be made in writing or text form unless any stricter form is legally required.

(2) You shall not be entitled to assign any rights or claims under this agreement without our prior written consent.

(3) This agreement shall be governed by, and be construed in accordance with, the laws of the Federal Republic of Germany, without regard to principles of conflicts of laws and without regard to the UN Convention on the Sale of Goods.

[Date of these Terms of Use: August 2024]