Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

Privacy Policy

Collection of Personal Information

Cookbooker collects some personal information from users. Required information includes, when you register, your email address, a username and a password. Your profile information can also include optional information such as your city and state/province, as well as anything you choose to share in the 'About Me' section and information about your favorite cookbook, recipe etc. It can also include a personal photograph. Your username and optional profile information is public and can be viewed by anyone. Your email address will always be private.

Use of Personal Information

We will never sell any information to a third party which would personally identify a user of Cookbooker, including email addresses. We may make anonymous or aggregate information available to third parties. Aggregate information is data collected about groups of people, from which individually identifying information has been removed. This might include listings of popular books, recipes and purchases.

We will not send you emails without your permission unless administrative messages are required by the nature of the business (site outages, significant changes etc). From time to time we may launch services available by email such as newsletters and notification opportunities and will make these available to members on an opt-in basis. All non-administrative email communications will allow you to opt-out.

E-mail A Friend

If you use our referral service for e-mailing a link to Cookbooker content to a friend, we ask you for your friend's name and e-mail address. Cookbooker will automatically send your friend a one-time e-mail on your behalf which contains the link or other content, and which invites your friend to visit the Web site. Cookbooker uses your friend's name and e-mail address only to send this one-time e-mail, and will not share this information or contact the recipient for any other purpose. If your friend does not wish to receive 'e-mail-a-friend' messages to be sent on your behalf, he or she must contact you directly. Cookbooker users may not use our referral service to send unwanted spam to others.

Public Forums

We may offer message boards, blogs or similar public forums where you and other users of Cookbooker can communicate. The protections described in this Privacy Policy do not apply when you provide information (including personal information) in connection with your use of these public forums. Any information you share in a public forum is public information and may be seen or collected by anyone, including third parties that do not adhere to our Privacy Policy. We are not responsible for events arising from the distribution of any information you choose to publicly post or share through our Website.

Contests, Offers, Surveys

If we hold contests, special offers or surveys run by ourselves or by an associated third party, there may be more personal information requested. If so, separate terms for each promotional event will be provided.

Cookies and Logs

Participation in Cookbooker requires that users allow 'cookies' to be placed by this website in your web browser's memory. These cookies do not contain any personally identifying information about you but are used to allow you to log into your account and create and edit reviews and comments as well as remember any personal preferences you may be able to set now or in the future. If you do not accept cookies (some browsers can be set to reject them) you will not be able to use features of this site which require you to log in.

We will also keep log files which track visits to the site (all web servers do this by default). This information will be used for internal purposes, though we may share aggregate, anonymous information such as the number of visitors and popular pages with third parties.

Law Enforcement

We will cooperate with the legal authorities in the countries where we are subject to local laws if explicitly compelled by law (e.g., a lawful subpoena, warrant or court order).

General Terms of Service

Individual Accounts

Cookbooker accounts are designed for personal collections of opinions, reviews and commentary on recipes from the user's personal library of cookbooks and magazines. Organizations such as book and magazine publishers (including self-publishers) are required to contact us to set up organizational accounts. Authors may, with proof of authorship, set up author accounts.

Security

We make reasonable efforts to keep the personal information of our users secure including the use of encryption. Please be advised, however, that while we strive to protect your personally identifiable information and privacy, we cannot guarantee or warrant the security of any information you disclose or transmit to us online and are not responsible for the theft, destruction, or inadvertent disclosure of your personally identifiable information.

You are responsible for the control of your account and login information. If you lose your password you can request that it be reset from the sign-in page. If you suspect that your account has been compromised, please contact us immediately using our contact form at www.cookbooker.com/contact.

Children not allowed

Due to restrictions imposed by COPPA (Children's Online Privacy Protection Act) in the Unites States we do not intend, and the Website is not designed, to collect personal information from children under the age of 13. If you are under 13 years old, you are not allowed to register with Cookbooker or otherwise provide information on our Website and should ask your parent to do so for you.

Content submitted to Cookbooker

We may now or in the future permit users to submit content to the Website, including but not limited to reviews, commentary, messages, photographs, videos and web links. Your content belongs to you and you may remove or alter it at any time without notice to us. However, by submitting it to Cookbooker you also grant us certain rights to use, display and potentially generate revenue from the use of user-submitted content.

By submitting content to Cookbooker, you grant (and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant) Cookbooker a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, fully sublicensable, and transferable right and license to use, record, sell, lease, reproduce, distribute, create derivative works based upon (including, without limitation, translations), publicly display, publicly perform, transmit, publish and otherwise exploit the User Content (in whole or in part) without compensation as we, in our sole discretion, deem appropriate including, without limitation, (1) in connection with our business; and (2) in connection with the businesses of our successors, parents, subsidiaries, and their related companies.

Please note that we do not assert copyright over the content you post to Cookbooker, and that the "non-exclusive" above means you can post your content elsewhere and otherwise do what you want with it. By submitting material to Cookbooker you let us use it, but you do not restrict what you can do with it.

We do not allow any user to submit content protected by copyright, trademark, patent, trade secret, moral right, or other intellectual property, personal, contractual, proprietary or other third party right without the express permission of the owner of the respective right.

What does this mean? Please don't copy and post recipes from published cookbooks to Cookbooker. Although copyright law in many countries suggests that simple lists of ingredients cannot be copyrighted, the expression of these lists in the form of a recipe with instructions and author commentary is copyrighted. We're trying to promote cookbooks and cookbook authors here, not remove their sources of income. Please report to us (www.cookbooker.com/contact) any material that might violate this principle.

Account Termination

You may cancel your account at any time by informing us directly using www.cookbooker.com/contact. We will confirm any account cancellations using the email address on file with the user. We reserve the right to cancel the accounts of any user who has not submitted any reviews or added any books to his/her bookshelf within three months of creating an account.

Copyright

The Website and included content (and any derivative works or enhancements of the same) including, but not limited to, all text, illustrations, files, images, software, scripts, graphics, photos, sounds, music, videos, information, content, materials, products, services, URLs, technology, documentation, and interactive features (collectively, the "Website Content") and all intellectual property rights to the same are owned by us, our licensors, or both. Additionally, all trademarks, service marks, trade names and trade dress that may appear on the Website are owned by us, our licensors, or both. Except for the limited use rights granted to you in these Terms of Use, you shall not acquire any right, title or interest in the Website or any Website Content. Any rights not expressly granted in these Terms of Use are expressly reserved.

Prohibited Activity

Please don't abuse Cookbooker. Users considered to be abusing the service or conducting prohibited activity will have their accounts cancelled and may be prohibited from using the website in future. What constitutes abusive behaviour is up to the discretion of Cookbooker staff. This includes, but is not limited to:

• Using Cookbooker for illegal activity.
• Submitting any content considered to be harassing, threatening, libelous, obscene, hateful, inflammatory, pornographic etc. This includes posted, submitted and emailed content as well as usernames and profile information.
• Impersonating other users or members of the community, including Cookbooker staff or misrepresenting your affiliation with a person or entity.
• Harrassing other users.
• Using Cookbooker to advertise products or services or conduct any unsolicited promotions including spam and chain letters. If you are a cookbook author or publisher we provide specific tools, many free of charge, to enable you to promote your work.
• Using Cookbooker to promote your own cookbooks or magazines through positive reviews submitted by yourself, under an assumed user name or names or solicited by employees or friends (or conversely to submit negative reviews to a competitor's book or magazine for reasons of competition). This applies to authors and publishers both. Again, we provide tools and services for authors and publishers to promote their work professionally.

If you discover any material which you feel is objectionable, click the 'report this comment' icon, available on all reviews. This will flag the material for review by Cookbooker staff. We reserve the right to ignore any flagging of material if we do not feel it fits the criteria for prohibited activity or objectionable content. If the material is not part of a review, please contact us using the contact form at www.cookbooker.com/contact.

Small Print

The website and its content are provided on an 'as is' and 'as available' basis without warranties of any kind.

These terms and conditions are subject to change at any time. We will post notice of these changes on this page but are under no obligation to inform users individually. We will attempt to be as open as possible about changes which affect users in any substantial way, however, and are committed to user privacy and the principle that you control your submitted material.