Legal terms

General terms and conditions of use of the Website

1- Definitions

1.1 - GTCU: means these general terms and conditions of use, in the version applicable at the time of use of the Website.

1.2 - Third-party content: means content from another website or application that is listed on the Website.

1.3 - Personal data: means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person.

1.4 - Intellectual Property Rights: means any copyright, patent, design, database right, trademark right, business secret, trade secret, know-how, or any other property or intellectual property right or right protected by unfair competition law, whether registered or not.

1.5 - Force majeure: means circumstances beyond the reasonable control of TWL and all acts that are neither foreseeable nor objectively attributable to TWL.

1.6 - We (or us) or TWL: stands for The Watch Library Foundation, c/o Europa Star HBM SA, route des Acacias 25, 1227 Les Acacias, Geneva.

1.7 - Privacy Policy: means the privacy policy relating to the Website, in the version applicable at the time of use of the Website.

1.8 - Website: means the Website accessible by means of the domain name watchlibary.org

1.9 - You (or you): means any person (natural or legal; male or female, the use of the masculine gender having been chosen for simplification) accessing the Website.

2 - Legal information

2.1 - Publisher

2.1.1 - The publisher of the Website is The Watch Library Foundation, route des Acacias 25, 1227 Les Acacias, Geneva.

2.2 - Host

2.2.1 - The Website host is Amazon Web Services.

3 - Object

3.1 - Our GTCU govern your use of the Website.

3.2 - As a user of the Website, you understand and agree that you are subject to these GTCU and that they constitute a legally binding agreement with us.

3.3 - By accessing and using the Website, you acknowledge and confirm that you have read and understood our GTCU and that you agree to be bound by their terms. You also warrant that you have the legal capacity to accept our GTCU. It is your responsibility to ensure that you have fully understood our GTCU and their scope.

3.4 - If you do not accept these GTCU and/or do not wish your Personal Data to be processed as described in our Privacy Policy, you must immediately stop using the Website.

3.5 - We reserve the right to modify the clauses contained in the GTCU at any time and at our sole discretion. You will be notified of any changes when you access the Website. You will be deemed to have accepted the changes by continuing to use the Website.

3.6 - If, after modification and notification of changes to the GTCU and/or the Privacy Policy, you no longer wish to be bound by the GTCU or you do not wish your Personal Data to be processed by us, you are invited to refrain from using the Website.

4 - Access

4.1 - All costs incurred by you in accessing the Website (hardware, software, Internet connection, etc.) are your sole responsibility.

4.2 - Interruption, suspension or closure of the Website or parts of it, whether scheduled or not, may occur for various reasons, such as maintenance requirements, network problems, software problems or in the event of Force Majeure.

4.3 - No costs or compensation may be claimed in the event of partial or complete interruption, suspension or closure of the Website. We may freely and at our sole discretion interrupt, suspend or terminate access to the Website or any part thereof from time to time for such period as we may in our sole discretion determine.

4.4 - We do not guarantee the accuracy of the information on the Website and are under no obligation to update it.

5 - Data protection

5.1 - Our Privacy Policy sets out how your Personal Information is processed when you access our Website. It is available at the following address.

6 - Annotations

6.1 - Insofar as the Website offers this functionality, which is not guaranteed to you, you acknowledge and accept that any annotations you make on the Website are not saved on the Website's servers, but only locally on your computer. Consequently, these annotations may be lost when you close or refresh the Website or your browsing session.

6.2 - We will not be liable for any loss or damage resulting from the loss or corruption of your annotations, however caused. Accordingly, we will not be liable for any loss or damage, direct or indirect, of any nature whatsoever, that you may suffer as a result of the loss or alteration of your annotations.

7 - No warranty

7.1 - The content of the Website is provided to you "as is" and "as available", without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including, without limitation, any warranty of accuracy or availability.

7.2 - You access the Website at your sole risk. We cannot guarantee permanent availability and cannot be held responsible for any interruption, even prolonged, of access to the Website, in particular in the context of a network overload or impossibility of access to the Website.

7.3 -We give no warranty and make no representation that :

(I) the Website and its content will meet your specific needs or will be accurate, complete or free of any risk;

(II) the Website and its content will be available, uninterrupted, timely, secure or error-free; and

(III) other users will comply with their obligations and/or applicable legal provisions.

7.4 - No information, whether oral, written, graphic or audiovisual, obtained by you from us and/or through the Website shall create any warranty or other obligation on our part not expressly stated in the TOU, and we disclaim all liability to you arising from any reliance placed on such material or to anyone who may be informed of any part of such material.

7.5 - The information and indications appearing on the Website are in no way our responsibility and do not constitute a contractual commitment on our part. The photographs and other images on the Website are not contractually binding and we accept no responsibility for their accuracy or authenticity.

8 - Exclusion of liability

8.1 - You understand and accept that we cannot be held responsible for unlawful behaviour on the part of other users of the Website.

8.2 - We exclude all liability for our actions and those of our agents, to the extent permitted by applicable law. In particular, we exclude all liability for indirect damage and/or loss, in particular in the event of loss of turnover, lost profits, sales or income, business interruption, loss of anticipated savings, loss of business opportunities, loss of clientele or damage to reputation.

8.3 - We accept no responsibility for Third Party Content and/or for any disputes that may arise in relation to such Third Party Content. We also accept no responsibility for the content of websites to which links on the Website may refer.

9 - Compensation

9.1 - If you breach or fail to comply with your obligations under the TOS and/or your legal obligations, we reserve the right to restrict your access to the Website, without notice or giving any reason and without any compensation.

9.2 - We reserve the right to suspend or restrict access to all or part of the Website on a permanent or temporary basis, without notice and without having to provide any justification, at our sole discretion.

9.3 - You agree to indemnify us and our representatives and employees and hold them harmless from and against all losses, damages, claims, penalties, fines, costs and expenses, including without limitation attorneys' fees and court costs, which may arise in connection with :

- your use of the Website;

- failure to comply with the GCU;

- any infringement of the rights of third parties, in particular intellectual property rights and/or personality rights of third parties; and

- for any damage caused by the Website.

10 - Force majeure

10.1 - We shall under no circumstances be liable for any failure(s) to perform if such failure(s) is (are) the result of Force Majeure.

10.2 - In the event of Force Majeure, our obligations, if any, are suspended until the situation that led to the Force Majeure has been fully restored.

11 - Intellectual property

11.1 - We are the owner or licensee of all Intellectual Property Rights relating to the Website, the software on which it is based, its structure and its content, including any databases it contains.

11.2 - The domain name on which the Website is hosted is our exclusive property. You are not authorised to point another site to this domain name and/or to use or adopt a similar name for your own use.

11.3 - We grant you a non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable (sub)licence to the Intellectual Property Rights relating to the Website and its content, allowing you to access the Website, display the content of the Website and consult it for your personal use only (with no right of use by third parties). This licence is limited to the time required for the aforementioned use and may be revoked at any time. Subject to this (sub)licence, consultation and use of the Website does not confer on you any Intellectual Property Rights in respect of any element appearing on the Website.

11.4 - Any reproduction in any form whatsoever (including by downloading, screen capture, printing, etc.), representation, making available, communication to the public, adaptation, modification, translation, transformation, broadcasting, integration into another digital platform, exploitation and/or re-use in any way whatsoever of all or part of the elements of the Website, in particular its content (texts, images, videos, sounds, data, databases, etc.) and its code, is strictly prohibited without our prior written authorisation.

11.5 - You undertake not to use, copy or in any other way take advantage of our name, trademarks and other distinctive signs, whether registered or not, without our prior written authorisation.

11.6 - You undertake not to take any action that is contrary to the law, to our rights or to the rights of third parties, in particular Intellectual Property Rights, including, in particular, decompiling software, circumventing, infringing, counterfeiting, decomposing or reproducing in any way the Website, its content, its code, its software and the elements thereof that are subject to Intellectual Property Rights.

11.7 - When you use our Website and access the various content made available to you, you undertake to comply in all cases with applicable Intellectual Property Law, including by citing any sources used.

11.8 - We reserve the right, without prior notice, to take all appropriate measures to put an end to any infringement of the law, of our rights or of the rights of third parties, including Intellectual Property Rights, or in order to protect the integrity and proper functioning of computer systems, servers, databases, networks, the Website and the Personal Data of Website users.

12 - Security

12.1 - You are responsible for ensuring the security of your systems, programmes and data within your sphere of influence. You are solely responsible for the configuration of your computer hardware, programmes and platforms used to access the Website. It is your responsibility to maintain your browser in a state that enables you to use the Website properly.

12.2 - Technical access to the Website is via the browser provider you have chosen and your Internet provider. We accept no responsibility in the event of malfunction of your browser and/or network failure.

13 - Prohibited activities

13.1 - You undertake not to transmit, by any means whatsoever, on or via the Website any content including programmes, codes, viruses or any other process intended to destroy or limit the functionality of the Website or to unlawfully collect Personal Data. You warrant that you have verified that your computer configuration does not contain any program, code, virus or other process that contravenes this requirement.

13.2 - You are authorised to use the Website only in accordance with the laws of Switzerland and any other laws to which you are subject. You are authorised to make only lawful use of the Website and any unlawful or improper use is excluded.

13.3 - By using the Website, you undertake in particular not to:

- use or attempt to use the Website in an offensive, abusive or unlawful manner or for an offensive, abusive or unlawful purpose, including committing or facilitating fraud, in particular by publishing or using terms that may be offensive or inappropriate;

- solicit or attempt to solicit commercial services in any form of communication sent or published via the Website;

- transmit or attempt to transmit content protected by an Intellectual Property Right without having first obtained the express consent of its owner;

- use or attempt to use any script or automated programme (including, but not limited to, robots, spiders (spidering, sniffing, crawling, web scraping, etc.)) or any other automated means or interface to access the Website and/or Users' Personal Data;

- interfere or attempt to interfere with the proper working of the Website or with any user's enjoyment of the Website, by any means whatsoever, in any manner that could damage, disable, overburden or impair the Website, including but not limited to hacking or attempting to circumvent any content filtering techniques that we reserve the right to use;

- copy, modify, merge, sell, redistribute, assign or transfer the software or source code of the Website or any part thereof, or reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, translate, decipher or attempt to discover the source code used for the Website;

- infringe or attempt to infringe any of our Intellectual Property Rights;

- introduce or attempt to introduce viruses, Trojan horses, ransomware or other malicious or technologically harmful material into the Website or users' devices; and

- use or attempt to use the Website in breach of these GTCU.

14 - Third-party content and hypertext links

14.1 - Third-party Content is the sole responsibility of the third party from which it originates.

14.2 - The presence of hypertext links on the Website to other websites does not guarantee the quality of the content of these websites or their proper operation.

14.3 - We cannot in any way be held responsible for the content of third-party sites to which the Website points. You consult the content of third-party sites at your own risk and under your sole responsibility.

14.4 - We may, at any time and without notice, remove any Third-Party Content or links to third party sites from the Website.

14.5 - We have no control over and will not be responsible for any content that is posted on any website, search engine or social network as a result of a third party sharing or referencing our Website.

15 - Miscellaneous

15.1 - The GTCU, including any changes or additions we may make at any time, constitute the entire agreement between you and us in relation to the use of the Website.

15.2 - We are free to enter into an agreement with any user who so wishes which supplements the GTCU. Provided that said agreement expressly excludes them, the GTCU shall in all cases be fully applicable to the relationship between us and the user concerned.

15.3 - If any provision of these GTCU is or becomes unlawful, void or ineffective, or if any loopholes appear, the remaining provisions shall remain in full force and effect. Invalid clauses will be interpreted or replaced in such a way that the intended purpose of the parties is achieved as far as possible.

15.4 - The titles of the articles in the GTCU are for ease of reference only and have no legal or contractual effect.

15.5 - The fact that we do not claim the application of one of the provisions of these GTCU or that we do not invoke its violation shall not be interpreted as a waiver on our part of the benefit of said provision.

16 - Cancellation

16.1 - We may block, terminate or suspend a User's ability to use or access the Website, in whole or in part, without notice and at any time, at our sole discretion, in particular in the event of a breach of the GTCU, and without having to state the reasons. Our right to claim compensation for any loss suffered remains in any event reserved.

16.2 - All Personal Data collected through the Website will be retained after use of the Website has ceased in accordance with the Privacy Policy.

17 - Applicable law and place of jurisdiction

17.1 - The GTCU and all matters arising out of or in connection with them (including non-contractual disputes or claims and their interpretation) shall be governed by Swiss law, to the exclusion of conflict of law rules.

17.2 - The exclusive place of jurisdiction for any dispute relating to the interpretation, application or performance of these GTCU is Geneva, Switzerland.