Terms of Service
Dimtse — Contributor Terms of Service
Effective date: _to be set at launch_ · Version: v1 (draft)
These Terms govern your use of Dimtse ("Dimtse", "the platform"), a contributor
platform for building open speech and language resources for East African languages.
Dimtse is operated by Samic Ventures LLC, a Wyoming (USA) limited liability company
("the operator", "we", "us"). By registering and contributing, you agree to these Terms
and to the Privacy Notice, which is part of this agreement.
If you do not agree, do not contribute. No recording, rating, or text capture begins
before you accept.
1. Who can contribute
You may contribute if you can form a binding agreement under the law that applies to you
(generally, you are an adult). You agree to provide accurate registration details,
including a working payout method, and to keep your payout handle current so we can pay
you.
2. What you contribute, and the license you grant
Dimtse asks you to provide one or more of: voice recordings, ratings of audio,
transcript corrections, and text. When you submit an item and it is accepted,
you grant the operator the rights described below. **You confirm that each contribution
is your own** — your own voice, your own work — and that you have the right to grant
these rights.
You grant two scopes of use, both shown on the consent screen before you contribute:
1. Open dataset release — CC-BY-SA-4.0. You agree that your accepted contributions
may be published as part of an open dataset under the
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International
license. Under CC-BY-SA-4.0 others may use, adapt, and redistribute the data
(including commercially) provided they give attribution and license derivatives under
the same terms. This license is irrevocable for copies already distributed — see
§7.
2. AI model training. You grant the operator a worldwide, royalty-free license to use
your accepted contributions to train, fine-tune, and evaluate speech and language
models (ASR, TTS, NLU), and to deploy and **license those models openly and
commercially** — including the synthetic voices and models used in the operator's own
products (such as the Dewul service). The model that results is the operator's, built
on your consented data plus permissively-licensed base models.
You keep ownership of your underlying voice and persona; what you grant is the license
above for the contributed items. We may reject any submission that fails quality or
authenticity checks; rejected items are not used and are not paid.
3. Pay
- Contribution is paid work. You are paid a stated rate per accepted item (per
- Rates are set to be fair for the local cost of living — above the applicable local
- We compute amounts owed from your accepted-item counts and pay via the method and
- You are responsible for any taxes that apply to you on what you earn.
- We may withhold or reverse pay for items that are fraudulent, plagiarized, not your own
recording, per rating), shown before you start.
minimum wage and consistent with ethical research-participant norms (Masakhane), not a
race to the cheapest number. The rate in effect when you contributed is the rate you
are paid.
handle you provide. Payouts may be batched on a regular schedule.
voice, or otherwise violate these Terms.
4. Your responsibilities
You agree not to:
- submit anyone else's voice, recordings, or copyrighted text as your own;
- inject personal data about third parties, unlawful, hateful, or harmful content;
- submit machine-generated audio as if it were your natural voice;
- attempt to inflate counts, automate fake contributions, or otherwise game the pay
- interfere with, probe, or attack the platform.
system;
Violations may result in rejected items, withheld pay, and suspension.
5. Privacy, de-identification, and your payout handle
How we handle your data is governed by the Privacy Notice. In summary:
- Before contributions leave the platform for a dataset or model, **direct identifiers in
- Your payout handle and contact details are sensitive: stored encrypted, used only
text are removed** (phone numbers, emails, long digit runs, obvious names), and
recordings are referenced by an internal key.
to pay you, never included in any dataset, export, model, or public artifact, and
never released — not even in aggregate.
6. Attribution and community benefit
- You may opt to be credited as a contributor (under your chosen display name or
- Resulting datasets are released openly (CC-BY-SA-4.0) so the language communities
- The operator commits to fair wage, attribution option, and community benefit, and
pseudonym) in released datasets, or to remain uncredited.
they represent benefit, and model performance is reported across dialects and genders.
to no parachute research (local co-investigators share authorship, budget, and
governance). See `docs/DATA_GOVERNANCE.md`.
7. Withdrawal and deletion
- You may stop contributing at any time; this does not affect pay already earned for
- You may request deletion of your contributions and personal details. On a verified
- Honest limits: copies of an already-published CC-BY-SA-4.0 dataset that others
accepted items.
request we remove them from our active store and **purge them from all derived datasets
and model-training inputs at the next build.**
have already downloaded cannot be recalled, and a model already trained before your
withdrawal cannot have one contribution surgically removed. We exclude your data from
all future releases and training. See the Privacy Notice §7.
8. Disclaimers
The platform is provided "as is" and "as available." To the fullest extent
permitted by law, the operator disclaims all warranties, express or implied, including
merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. We do not
warrant that the platform will be uninterrupted or error-free.
9. Limitation of liability
To the fullest extent permitted by law, the operator's total liability to you arising out
of or relating to the platform or these Terms is limited to the **total amount we paid
you for contributions in the three (3) months before the event** giving rise to the
claim. We are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive
damages. Nothing in these Terms limits liability that cannot be limited under applicable
law.
10. Suspension and termination
We may suspend or terminate your access for violations of these Terms. You may stop using
the platform at any time. Sections that by their nature should survive termination —
license grants for already-accepted and already-released contributions (§2), pay
already earned (§3), disclaimers (§8), and limitation of liability (§9) — survive, except
that your deletion rights under §7 continue to apply to data we still hold or have not
yet released.
11. Changes to these Terms
We may update these Terms. Material changes will carry a new version and effective date,
and active contributors will be notified. Your recorded consent always reflects the
version you agreed to; new scopes require fresh consent.
12. Governing law and disputes
These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Wyoming, USA, without regard to
its conflict-of-laws rules. The state and federal courts located in Wyoming have
jurisdiction, except where mandatory local law gives you the right to bring a claim in
your home jurisdiction.
13. Contact
- Operator: Samic Ventures LLC, Wyoming, USA.
- Contact: legal@dimtse.ai (placeholder — set the real address at launch).