Acceptable Use Policy

Akordly — Acceptable Use Policy

Effective date: 2026-04-23 Last updated: 2026-09-11

This Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) lists what you must not do on or through Akordly. It's incorporated into our Terms of Service by reference, so a breach of this AUP is a breach of the Terms.

We have no tolerance for objectionable content or abusive users. Akordly shows songs other people have added, and content that breaches this AUP has no place there. We review every report we receive and act on objectionable content within 24 hours — see §6.

1. Content you must not upload or submit

You must not upload audio, submit URLs, or otherwise feed the Service any content that:

  • you don't have the rights to — including third-party copyrighted recordings unless you own the copyright, have a license, or have another legal basis (e.g., a clearly applicable personal-use exception in your country);
  • infringes someone else's intellectual-property, privacy, publicity, or moral rights;
  • depicts, promotes, or is produced through child sexual abuse material, non-consensual intimate material, or human trafficking;
  • incites violence against a protected group, is hate speech, or is otherwise illegal in your jurisdiction or ours;
  • contains malware, exploits, or code designed to attack the Service or other users;
  • is intentionally crafted to bypass copyright-detection or abuse-prevention systems (e.g., pitch-shifting to evade hash-blocking of a known-infringing track); or
  • you know or suspect to be sourced from a leaked, pre-release, or unauthorized distribution of a commercial work.

2. How you must not use the Service

You must not:

  • use the Service on behalf of anyone under 16;
  • create multiple accounts to evade rate limits, bans, or repeat-infringer termination;
  • share your account credentials or let another person use your account;
  • attempt to bypass authentication, authorization, Firebase App Check, or any other access controls;
  • scrape, crawl, index, or bulk-extract Service content or outputs;
  • reverse-engineer, decompile, or attempt to extract the underlying models or training data;
  • build a competing product using our outputs or by systematically routing third-party audio through our Service;
  • re-sell Service output as your own (for example, selling machine-generated transcriptions as "professional transcriptions");
  • probe, scan, or stress-test our infrastructure without prior written permission;
  • run denial-of-service attacks or send traffic intended to disrupt the Service;
  • use the Service for bulk commercial harvesting of its outputs or to feed a third-party data pipeline; or
  • interfere with other users' use of the Service.

3. YouTube-specific rules

You may only submit YouTube URLs you have the right to process. In particular:

  • do not submit content marked private, unlisted, or otherwise not intended for public access, if you do not have the uploader's permission;
  • do not attempt to use Akordly to circumvent geographic, age, or embed restrictions; and
  • respect YouTube's own terms — your agreement with YouTube is separate and governs your relationship with that platform.

4. Security and research

We welcome good-faith security research. If you find a vulnerability, report it to abuse@akordly.app before doing anything further. Do not access or modify data that isn't yours, do not run exploits against real users, and give us a reasonable window to fix before public disclosure. In return, we will not pursue action against researchers who follow these rules.

5. Automated access

Automated clients and scripts are only allowed:

  • through official, documented interfaces,
  • at request rates we explicitly permit, and
  • with the same authentication a human account would use.

We may block automated traffic we consider abusive or unnecessary.

6. Reporting abuse

In the app: open any song, tap the ⋯ menu, and choose Report objectionable content. You do not need an account to report — reporting works whether or not you are signed in. You will get a reference number for the report on the spot.

By email: abuse@akordly.app, if you would rather write to us or want to report something that isn't a specific song.

We review every report and act on objectionable content within 24 hours of receiving it. Acting means one of: removing the content, restricting or terminating the account behind it, or — where we conclude the report is unfounded — closing it with no action. Quote your reference number if you follow up.

For copyright-specific matters see the Copyright Policy. The in-app Report copyright infringement option flags a song for us, but a formal takedown notice still needs the details set out in that policy, sent to copyright@akordly.app.

7. Enforcement

We enforce this AUP proportionally, based on what we observe and what's reported to us. Possible actions include:

  1. Warning — we contact you and explain the issue.
  2. Content removal — we remove the specific upload or block the specific URL.
  3. Feature restriction — we limit YouTube ingest, paid features, or other capabilities.
  4. Suspension — we suspend the account while we investigate.
  5. Termination — we close the account, potentially with hash-based blocking of associated content.

Severe or egregious violations can skip straight to termination without warning. This applies to abusive users as well as to abusive content: an account that repeatedly posts objectionable material, or that targets other people, is terminated.

8. Changes

We may update this AUP. Material changes will be communicated in-product or by email at least 14 days before they take effect.

9. Contact

Changelog

  • 2026-09-11 — Generalised the bulk-harvesting prohibition, which named lyric harvesting specifically — the Service no longer displays lyrics, and the prohibition should cover every output it does return. No change in what is prohibited. Pre-launch change; no users to notify.
  • 2026-08-23 — Added a no-tolerance statement for objectionable content and abusive users to the introduction. Rewrote §6 (Reporting abuse) around the in-app report flow, which is now the primary reporting route and works without an account, and committed to acting on reports within 24 hours. Extended §7 (Enforcement) to name termination of abusive users explicitly.
  • 2026-04-23 — Initial publication.