Data Copyright / UGC & IP Policy

1. Purpose and Scope

This Data Copyright / UGC & IP Policy explains how content, business listing data, database rights, user-generated content, uploaded media, intellectual property, copying, scraping, linking, and rights complaints are handled on ContactTheBusiness.com.

ContactTheBusiness.com is a B2B business visibility and discovery platform. Business users may submit, upload, display, edit, or link business-related content such as business descriptions, logos, photos, videos, banners, thumbnails, contact details, service information, opening hours, social links, websites, call-to-action links, and other business listing materials.

This policy applies to:

• business listings;
• business profile pages;
• business descriptions;
• business categories;
• business addresses and service areas;
• logos;
• images and photos;
• videos and thumbnails;
• featured banners;
• social media links;
• call-to-action links;
• external business links;
• database content;
• page structure and layout;
• metadata, titles, captions, alt text, and related listing information;
• any other user-generated content submitted to or displayed through ContactTheBusiness.com.

This policy also explains restrictions on copying, scraping, exporting, reusing, hotlinking, embedding, and text/data mining of ContactTheBusiness content and database materials.

2. Relationship with Other Legal Pages

This policy is separate from, but connected to, the other legal pages of ContactTheBusiness.com.

The General Terms and Conditions / Terms of Service govern the contractual relationship between ContactTheBusiness and business users.

The Content Standards explain which business listing content is permitted or prohibited and how content moderation may be handled.

The Privacy Policy explains how personal data is processed.

The Imprint contains legal operator information.

If there is a conflict between this policy and the General Terms and Conditions / Terms of Service, the Terms prevail.

3. Ownership of Business-User Content

Business users retain ownership of the content they submit to ContactTheBusiness.com, unless otherwise agreed.

This means that the business user or the relevant rights holder continues to own their own business descriptions, logos, photos, videos, banners, thumbnails, links, trade names, trademarks, and other submitted materials.

Submitting content to ContactTheBusiness.com does not transfer ownership of that content to us.

However, by submitting content, the business user grants us the licence rights necessary to operate, display, moderate, technically process, and promote the business listing as described below.

4. Licence Granted to ContactTheBusiness

By submitting, uploading, linking, editing, or providing content to ContactTheBusiness.com, the business user grants us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to use the submitted content for the operation and promotion of the Platform.

This licence allows us to:

• host and store the content;
• reproduce the content technically where needed;
• display the content on business profile pages;
• publish the content on ContactTheBusiness.com;
• resize, crop, compress, convert, transcode, or otherwise technically process media;
• create thumbnails, previews, excerpts, snippets, or metadata;
• display content in search results, category pages, location pages, profile pages, dashboard views, and public previews;
• moderate, review, restrict, or remove content;
• index content within the Platform;
• make public business profile content available to visitors and search engines;
• use public business profile links or previews for platform visibility, where appropriate;
• use the content as reasonably necessary to provide, maintain, secure, improve, and promote ContactTheBusiness.com.

This licence exists for as long as the content is published, stored, required for the business listing, required for technical operation, or needed for legal, moderation, security, backup, documentation, or dispute-handling purposes.

The licence is limited to what is necessary or useful for operating, displaying, securing, moderating, documenting, and promoting the Platform and the relevant business listing.

5. Social Media Link Announcements and Public Previews

Where we maintain official ContactTheBusiness social media pages or related business communication channels, we may share links to public business profile pages or public previews that already appear on ContactTheBusiness.com.

Such announcements may include limited public information such as the business name, profile link, category, location, short description, or preview image where this is already publicly available on the Platform.

We do not re-upload private or unpublished user media to third-party platforms unless separately agreed.

We do not claim ownership over the business user’s content by sharing a public profile link or preview.

Business users may object to non-essential public-link announcements by contacting us through the contact options provided on ContactTheBusiness.com.

6. User Responsibility for Rights and Permissions

Business users are responsible for ensuring that they have all rights, permissions, licences, consents, releases, and authorisations required for the content they submit.

This applies to:

• logos;
• business names;
• trade names;
• trademarks;
• photos;
• videos;
• banners;
• thumbnails;
• text;
• descriptions;
• music;
• sound recordings;
• designs;
• documents;
• screenshots;
• customer images;
• employee images;
• portfolio images;
• product images;
• building or location images;
• external links;
• third-party content;
• personal data appearing in uploaded content.

Business users must not upload, submit, link, or publish content that infringes copyright, trademark rights, design rights, personality rights, image rights, privacy rights, data protection rights, trade secrets, database rights, moral rights, contractual rights, or other third-party rights.

Business users are responsible for ensuring that any persons appearing in uploaded photos, videos, banners, or other media have given the required consent or that another lawful basis exists.

Business users are also responsible for ensuring that any logos, trademarks, music, product images, brand materials, or third-party content are used lawfully.

7. Warranties and Indemnity

By submitting content to ContactTheBusiness.com, the business user represents and warrants that:

• they are authorised to submit the content;
• the content is accurate and lawful;
• the content does not infringe third-party rights;
• the content does not violate copyright, trademark, privacy, personality, data protection, competition, advertising, professional, or sector-specific laws;
• the content complies with the General Terms and Conditions / Terms of Service;
• the content complies with the Content Standards;
• the content does not contain unlawful, misleading, harmful, fraudulent, or prohibited material.

The business user shall indemnify us against third-party claims, damages, losses, costs, expenses, and reasonable legal defence costs arising from content submitted by the business user, to the extent the business user is responsible for the violation.

This includes claims relating to copyright, trademarks, image rights, personality rights, data protection, unfair competition, misleading advertising, unlawful business information, or unauthorised use of third-party materials.

8. Removal of Content and End of Licence

Business users may request deletion or removal of their own business listing content, subject to the available account functions, contractual rules, legal obligations, moderation requirements, technical limitations, and backup cycles.

Where content is deleted from the live Platform, the licence granted to us for public display normally ends prospectively.

However, deleted content may continue to exist for a limited period in:

• technical backups;
• security logs;
• moderation records;
• legal documentation;
• support records;
• cached previews;
• search-engine caches;
• third-party archives;
• previously generated public previews;
• social media link previews or posts that are outside our direct technical control.

We may retain content, records, notices, correspondence, and evidence where reasonably necessary for legal claims, security, misuse prevention, rights complaints, contractual documentation, or statutory obligations.

9. Prohibited Copying, Scraping, Extraction, and Reuse

Copying, scraping, extracting, harvesting, exporting, reproducing, republishing, selling, licensing, mirroring, framing, indexing, or systematically collecting ContactTheBusiness content or database materials without permission is prohibited, except where expressly permitted by law.

This includes:

• automated scraping;
• crawling for data extraction;
• mass export of listings;
• copying business profile data into another directory;
• repeated extraction of business data;
• harvesting email addresses, phone numbers, websites, or social links;
• copying logos, images, videos, thumbnails, or banners;
• republication of listings or categories;
• creating competing databases from ContactTheBusiness content;
• use of bots, scripts, automated tools, browser automation, or AI agents for extraction;
• bypassing access controls, rate limits, robots.txt, technical restrictions, or security measures;
• hotlinking media files without permission;
• misleading framing or embedding that hides the origin of content;
• using ContactTheBusiness data for spam, unsolicited marketing, profiling, or unlawful purposes.

Limited normal access by human visitors, ordinary search-engine indexing, and standard link previews may be permitted where they do not violate this policy, technical restrictions, the Terms, or applicable law.

10. Database Rights

The structure, selection, arrangement, organisation, categorisation, presentation, and collection of business listing data on ContactTheBusiness.com may be protected by copyright, database rights, and related legal protections.

The ContactTheBusiness directory, database structure, business listing collection, category/location structure, search pages, profile pages, metadata, and organised listing content are protected against unauthorised extraction and reuse.

Substantial extraction or reuse of the database, as well as repeated or systematic extraction of insubstantial parts, is prohibited without prior permission, except where expressly permitted by law.

This applies even where individual public business listings are visible on the website.

The fact that data is publicly accessible does not mean it may be copied, scraped, harvested, exported, reused, sold, or republished without permission.

11. Text and Data Mining Reservation

To the extent permitted by law, we reserve all rights against text and data mining, machine learning extraction, automated dataset creation, model training, web-scale copying, crawling, scraping, and automated content analysis of ContactTheBusiness.com, its database, business listings, media, metadata, and public pages.

This reservation applies to all content and database materials on ContactTheBusiness.com unless expressly permitted by us in writing or required by mandatory law.

The reservation may also be expressed in machine-readable form, including robots.txt, metadata, headers, terms metadata, or other technical signals.

Access to ContactTheBusiness.com does not grant permission to use the website, database, listings, or media for training, developing, evaluating, or improving artificial intelligence systems, machine learning models, search datasets, business intelligence databases, lead-generation databases, scraping tools, or similar systems, unless expressly permitted by us in writing or required by mandatory law.

12. Embedding, Linking, and Previews

Standard links to public ContactTheBusiness pages are generally permitted, provided they are lawful, not misleading, and do not suggest false sponsorship, partnership, endorsement, certification, or affiliation.

Standard Open Graph, social media, or search-engine previews of public ContactTheBusiness pages may be permitted where they are generated in an ordinary way and do not misrepresent the source.

The following are not permitted without permission:

• hotlinking ContactTheBusiness media files;
• embedding images, videos, thumbnails, or banners in a way that bypasses the Platform;
• framing pages in a misleading way;
• hiding or disguising the origin of content;
• using previews to imply false endorsement or partnership;
• embedding content in unlawful, misleading, harmful, offensive, or infringing contexts;
• using ContactTheBusiness content in competing directories, lead-generation databases, or scraped datasets.

We may block, restrict, redirect, watermark, remove, or technically prevent embedding, hotlinking, scraping, or misuse where appropriate.

13. Copyright, Trademark, and IP Complaints

Rights holders may report alleged copyright infringement, trademark infringement, misuse of logos, unauthorised use of images, unauthorised use of videos, impersonation, misuse of business names, database-right violations, or other intellectual-property concerns.

Reports may be submitted through the reporting or contact options provided on ContactTheBusiness.com.

Reports may also be sent to:

businesscontact@contactthebusiness.com

To help us review a complaint, please include where possible:

• the exact URL or location of the reported content;
• a description of the protected work, trademark, logo, business name, image, video, database material, or other right allegedly infringed;
• evidence of ownership or authorisation;
• the legal or factual reason for the complaint;
• your name and contact details;
• your organisation or role, if applicable;
• a good-faith statement that the information provided is accurate;
• any supporting documents, screenshots, registrations, licences, or correspondence.

We may review the complaint and take appropriate action, including no action, requesting further information, restricting content, removing content, suspending access, notifying the affected business user, or taking other reasonable measures.

Submitting a complaint does not guarantee removal, restriction, suspension, or any specific outcome.

We may reject or ignore complaints that are incomplete, misleading, abusive, repeated, bad-faith, automated, clearly unfounded, or unrelated to ContactTheBusiness.com.

14. Response to Notices and Counter-Evidence

Where appropriate, we may notify the affected business user of a rights complaint or content concern and give them an opportunity to provide clarification, evidence, licences, permissions, or counter-evidence.

We may also remove or restrict content without prior notice where this is reasonably necessary to prevent legal risk, infringement, misuse, security issues, or harm.

If a business user believes that content was removed or restricted incorrectly, they may contact us and provide supporting evidence.

We may decide whether to maintain, modify, or reverse a measure based on the information available, the legal risk, the rights involved, the Content Standards, and the Terms.

15. Retention of Notices, Evidence, and Records

We may retain notices, complaints, reports, evidence, correspondence, moderation records, logs, and related information where reasonably necessary to:

• review rights complaints;
• prevent repeated misuse;
• document decisions;
• protect our rights;
• protect users’ rights;
• comply with legal obligations;
• establish, exercise, or defend legal claims;
• support moderation, security, or fraud-prevention processes.

Retention of personal data is explained in more detail in our Privacy Policy.

16. No Sale of Platform Database or Permission by Public Access

Public access to ContactTheBusiness.com does not mean that the database, listings, media, or content may be copied, scraped, exported, sold, reused, republished, or incorporated into another product or service.

We do not grant permission for third parties to build competing directories, lead-generation lists, marketing databases, AI datasets, scraping datasets, analytics datasets, or commercial data products from ContactTheBusiness content without prior written permission.

Any licensed use must be agreed separately in writing.

17. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Data Copyright / UGC & IP Policy from time to time for legal, technical, operational, platform, moderation, database-protection, or intellectual-property reasons.

Changes will be published on this page. The version and effective date will be shown at the top of the page.

Continued use of ContactTheBusiness.com after changes take effect means that business users and visitors must comply with the current version of this policy.

Where required, we may also notify registered business users of material changes by email, dashboard notice, or another reasonable communication method.

Operator information is available in our Imprint.