There are set out below the terms and conditions under which you may use the Garden Planner software and web pages and services on the website at http://www.motherearthnews.com (collectively referred to as “the Service”). They should be read in conjunction with the Privacy Policy which is hyperlinked from these terms and conditions.

Please read this page carefully. If you do not accept these terms and conditions then you may not use the Service and its facilities. In using the Service you are accepting these terms and conditions. These terms and conditions may be revised at any time by updating this posting.

The following terms shall have the following meanings:

“You/your” shall mean all individuals and/or entities accessing the Service for any reason. “We/us/our” shall refer to Growing Interactive Ltd, a company limited by guarantee (registration no. 5997411) whose registered office is situated at 9 The Nurseries, Formby, Liverpool, L37 4JG, UK.

You should visit this page periodically to review the terms and conditions because they are binding on you.

2. Your Use of the Site

2.1. You may not browse, use or subscribe to the Service or upload content to the Service without acceptance of these terms and conditions.

2.2. You may register for a Free Trial of the Garden Planner software and service, or an online account once. In the case of a Free Trial, after your Free Trial expires, you must subscribe in order to continue to have access to the Garden Planner. You may not use a different e-mail address to sign up for a further Free Trial without the express permission of Growing Interactive Ltd, and such action may render you liable to pay the full subscription to Growing Interactive Ltd together with our reasonable expenses in pursing the matter and/or for your account to be disabled.

2.3. Unless you have a designated “schools,” “charity” or “professional” account with Growing Interactive Ltd, your subscription is limited to use by the persons of one household, up to a maximum of six people who live together at that address. You may not give your username or password to others outside of your household thereby allowing them to access the subscription areas of the Service under your user credentials. Please contact us if you require access by more people so that suitable arrangements can be made.

2.4. You may be restricted from areas that contain sensitive or confidential information belonging to third parties.

2.5. The GrowGuides and any blogs or facilities for uploading comments are for the discussion of gardening and the use of computers to facilitate the planning of gardens or vegetable plots. Please keep your contributions civil, tasteful and relevant. We are committed to providing an atmosphere in which constructive and mature dialogue takes place. Unlawful, harassing, defamatory, abusive, threatening, harmful, obscene, profane, sexually oriented, racially offensive, or otherwise objectionable material will not be tolerated. The content is monitored on a regular basis and failure to abide by these rules will result in your message being deleted. Growing Interactive Ltd reserves the right to delete any posting, at any time, for any reason. You must also comply with Growing Interactive Ltd’s Child, Young People and Vulnerable Adults Protection Policy: Growing Interactive Ltd aims to create an environment in which children, young people and vulnerable adults are listened to, valued and respected as individuals. Their views and opinions are to be taken seriously.

You will ensure that any information or material provided by you to be posted on the Service, to be transmitted or distributed by use of the Service or stored or otherwise on the Service:

2.5.1. is accurate, and complete in all material respects, up-to-date and not misleading;

2.5.2. is not defamatory, threatening, abusive or of any obscene or menacing character, or which may, in our judgment, cause annoyance or inconvenience or anxiety to any person including without limiting any racist, sexist, harassing, threatening, vulgar or obscure material, opinions or messages; it does not infringe any third party intellectual property rights and does not contain any other unlawful content.

2.6. You will not impersonate any person or entity or misrepresent any affiliation with any person or entity in your use of the Service.

2.7. You will observe safe practice when using the GrowGuides and any blogs or facilities for uploading comments, by using your username rather than your real name and not disclosing personally identifiable information.

2.7.1. You will, however, supply a valid working e-mail address when posting a comment on the Service so that Growing Interactive Ltd may contact you directly should we need to query content you have posted. Your e-mail address will be protected and not used for other purposes in accordance with our Privacy Policy.

2.8. You will not collect or store other users’ personal data.

2.9. You will ensure that your use of the Service is lawful and does not cause any damage or interference to the Service or facilities. In particular:

2.9.1. You are prohibited from violating or attempting to violate the security of the Service, including, without limitation: (a) accessing data not intended for you or logging into a server or account which you are not authorized to access; (b) attempting to probe, scan or test the vulnerability of a system or network or to breach security or authentication measures without proper authorization; (c) attempting to interfere with service to any user, host or network, including, without limitation, via means of submitting a virus to the Service, overloading, flooding, spamming, mail bombing or crashing; (d) sending unsolicited email, including promotions and/or advertising your products or services; or (e) forging any TCP/IP packet header or any part of the header information in any e-mail or news group posting. Breaches of system or network security may result in civil or criminal liability. We will investigate occurrences which may involve such breaches and may involve prosecuting you if you are involved in such breaches.

2.9.2. You will not submit any incomplete, false or inaccurate information.

2.9.3. You will not delete or revise any material posted by any other person or entity on the Service.

2.9.4. Notwithstanding anything to the contrary contained herein, using or attempting to use any engine, software, tool, agent or other device or mechanism (including without limitation browsers, spiders, robots, avatars or intelligent agents) to navigate or search the Service other than the search engine and search agents available from the Service and other than generally available third party web browsers (e.g. Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Safari, Google Chrome, Opera).

2.9.5. You will not attempt to decipher, de-compile, disassemble or reverse engine any of the software comprising or in any way making up a part of the Service.

2.9.6. You are responsible for your own postings of comments to the Service and are responsible for the consequences of their posting. You must not, and by using the Service you agree not to do the following things: (a) submit material for posting that is copyrighted, unless you are the copyright owner or have the permission of the copyright owner to submit it; (b) submit material that reveals trade secrets, unless you own them or have the permission of the owner; (c) submit material that infringes on any other intellectual property rights of others or on the premise of publicity rights of others; (d) submit material that is obscene, defamatory, threatening, harassing, abusive, hateful or embarrassing to another user or any other person or entity; (e) submit a sexually explicit image or statement; (f) submit advertisements or solicitations of business, post chain letters or pyramid schemes; (g) impersonate any other person or entity; (h) submit material that contains viruses, Trojan horses, worms, time bombs, cancelbots or other computer programming routines or engines that are intended to damage, detrimentally interfere with, intercept or expropriate any system, data or information; (i) harm minors in any way; or (j) submit links to sites or resources that contain any of the above apart from links to sites of interest to other members which have their own copyright statements and privacy policies in effect.

2.9.7. We do not represent or guarantee the truthfulness, accuracy, or reliability of comments submitted by users to the Service for posting, or endorse any opinions expressed by users. You acknowledge that any reliance on material submitted by other users will be at your own risk.

2.9.8. You agree that you will only use the Service in a manner that is consistent with these terms and conditions and in such a way as to ensure compliance with all applicable laws and regulations.

2.9.9. You agree to take full responsibility for the use of the Service made by you and accordingly you accept liability under these terms and conditions for third party use through you of the Service which is in breach of these conditions.

2.9.10. You agree not to use the Service to gain or seek unauthorized access to other computer systems.

2.9.11. Parts of the Service act as a passive conduct for the online distribution and publication of user submitted information and we have no obligation to screen communications or information in advance and we are not responsible for screening or monitoring material posted by users. If notified by a user of communication which allegedly does not conform to these terms and conditions, we may investigate the allegation and determine in good faith and our sole discretion whether to remove or request the removal of the communication. We have no liability or responsibility to users for performance or non-performance of such activities. We reserve the right to expel users and prevent their further access to the Service for breaching the terms and conditions or the law and the right to remove communications which are abusive, illegal or disruptive. We may take any action with respect to a user submitted information that we deem necessary or appropriate in our sole discretion if we believe it may create liability for us or may cause the loss of (in whole or in part) the services of our ISP’s or other suppliers.

3. Intellectual Property Rights

3.1 All copyright, trademarks and all other intellectual property rights in all material or contents supplied as part of the Service shall remain at all times vested in us or our licensors. We grant you a non-exclusive license to access and use the content on the Service for your personal use only, and you may not (and agree not to assist or facilitate any third party to) copy, reproduce, transmit, distribute, commercially exploit or create derivative works of such material or content. If you become aware of any such distribution or commercial exploitation, you agree to notify us immediately.

The use of the contents of the Service such as text, graphics, images, logos, button icons, flash files, software and other material on any other website or in a network computer environment for any purpose is prohibited. You shall not copy, decompile or adapt any computer executed code, including the HTML code, JavaScript code and Adobe Flash Actionscript code that is created to generate pages on the Service.

3.2. By submitting content to any public or non-public area of the Service, including the garden designs created in the Flash-based planning application, the GrowGuides and any blogs or facilities for uploading comments, images and competition entries, you grant us and our affiliates the royalty free, perpetual, irrevocable, sub-licensable (through multiple tiers) non-exclusive right (including any moral right) and license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, communicate to the public, perform and display the content (in whole or in part) worldwide and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed, for the full term of any rights that may exist in such content.

You also warrant that the holder of any rights, including moral rights in such content, has completely and effectively waived all such rights and validly and irrevocably granted to you the right to grant the license stated above. You also permit any subscriber to access, display, view, store and reproduce such content for personal use, subject to the foregoing, the owner of such content placed on the Service retains any and all rights that may exist in such content. We may use such materials in our discretion and may remove them from the Service at any time without notice to you.

4. Confidentiality

Through your use of the Service you may have access to sensitive or confidential information or materials belonging to other parties. You agree not to disclose any such information or materials to any other person and not to use such information or materials other than for the purposes for which you were given access to it on the Service.

5. Age and Responsibility

You represent that you are 18 years of age or older or if under the age of 18 that you are using the Service with parental consent or consent of your guardian(s) or person acting in loco parentis (e.g. teacher) and that the terms of use of the Service have been brought to their attention and are accepted by them. If required by law you will provide us with any necessary references. You are responsible for anything you say or post. You understand that you are responsible for any use of the Service by you.

6. Changes to the Terms and the Service

6.1. We reserve the right to alter or remove the Service or any part of it and any information, material and facilities incorporating the Service, without any notice to you.

6.2. We reserve the right to terminate or suspend your access to or use of all or some areas of the Service without any notice to you at any time.

6.3. No compensation will be payable to you as a result of any removal, alteration or termination under clauses 6.1 and 6.2 above unless, at our discretion, we believe that we have failed to fulfill our service to you as set out in the Refund Policy below.

6.4. We reserve the right to change these terms and conditions at any time. Such revised terms and conditions will be posted on the Service. You should therefore continually check theses terms and conditions. By continued use of the Service after such terms and conditions have been posted you agree to abide by such changes.

7. Refund Policy

7.1. Growing Interactive Ltd will, at our discretion, issue a refund for your subscription if we believe that we have failed to fulfill our Service Obligations (see 7.4) to you, that you have paid your subscription in full, that funds have been received by us for such and that you have fully complied with the Terms and Conditions set out in this document. In such cases we will, at our discretion, refund all or part of the fee paid by you for subscription to the Service within one calendar month of notifying you of our decision to do so.

7.2. Refunds will normally be issued on a pro-rata basis based on the number of full calendar months of the subscription remaining from when the refund was requested.

7.3. Refunds will not be made for unused portions of subscriptions where you no longer require the Service provided by Growing Interactive Ltd and where we continue to meet our Service Obligations (see 7.4) to you. Refunds will also not be made for circumstances in which your computer equipment or software is not compatible with our website services since you are expected to have used the Free Trial to test our services before subscribing.

7.4. Failure to fulfill our Service Obligations means the failure to provide the normal working operation of the Garden Planner software and service (for which you have paid a subscription) for more than 10 percent of the subscription term (usually one or two years) excepting periods of down-time required for maintenance, security checks, software upgrades and factors beyond our control (such as ISP down-time, general Internet problems or failure of your Internet provider). You should be aware that our support staff will do their utmost to prevent downtime, that we aim to provide a much higher service availability level than is set out in this clause and that we will try to notify users via our web pages of any scheduled downtime for maintenance work and upgrades.

7.5. The extent of our refund to you shall be limited to the gross value of your most recent subscription and we cannot accept responsibility for any consequential loss, damage, failure of crops or other material consequence incurred through use of the Service (see section 8, below).

8. Limitations of Liability

8.1. You acknowledge that information and material available on or through the Service is for your general information and use and is not intended to address your particular requirements. In particular, any information or material accessed through the Service is provided for your general information only. You should seek independent advice before making any decision based on anything you have seen on the Service.

8.2. You acknowledge that we have no control over much of the information and material which can be accessed by or through the Service and that we do not know the nature of the information and material you or other users are sending, uploading or posting on the Service. We therefore exclude all liability of any kind (including for libel, breach of confidence, intellectual property rights infringement, invasion of privacy, defamation and negligence) for the transmission or reception of such information or material of whatever nature by, about or to you.

8.3. You acknowledge that your use of the Service and any information or material you download or obtain through the Service is at your own risk and we will not be responsible or liable to you for any loss of content information or material uploaded or transmitted through the Service. You confirm that we shall not be liable to you or any third party for any modification to, suspension of or discontinuance of the Service.

8.4. You further acknowledge that it is your decision to use the Service and, where applicable to (or not to) post, submit, remove or alter information or material on, to or from the Service. You agree that you do this at your own risk that we shall have no liability for any loss or damages incurred by you or any other party as a result of you doing or failing to do the same.

8.5. To the full extent permissible by law, you agree that we will not be liable for any consequential, incidental or indirect loss or damages in contract, tort or otherwise, for any loss or damage whatsoever arising from or in any way connected with your use of the Service, including, without limitation, damage for any loss in gardening or growing plants, business projects, loss of profits, loss of privacy or other consequential losses arising in contract, tort or otherwise from the use of or the inability to use the Service or any information or material appearing on it, or from any action or decision taken as a result of using the Service or any such information or material. This includes, but is not limited to, the exclusion of any implied warranty that the information and material it contains is lawful, accurate, complete or up-to-date, or is suitable for any particular purpose.

8.6.1. Links to Third Party Sites: The GrowGuides, any blogs or facilities for uploading comments and site content pages may contain links to third party websites (“linked sites”). Any linked sites are not under our control and we are not responsible for the contents of any linked site, including without limitation any link contained in a linked site, or any changes or updates to a linked site. We may provide these links to you only as a convenience, and the inclusion of any link does not imply endorsement by Growing Interactive Ltd of the linked site. You are responsible for viewing and abiding by the privacy statements and terms of use posted at the linked sites. You acknowledge and agree that we are not responsible for the availability of any third party websites or material you access through links on the Service.

8.6.2. The existence of a link from or to any organization’s site on the Service does not imply that we approve or endorse the activities or views of that organization.

8.6.3. We do not endorse and shall not be held responsible or liable for any consent, advertising, products or services on or available from such websites or material.

8.6.4. Any dealings between you and any third party advertisers or merchants whose website links are found on the Service, including payment for and delivery of products, services and any other terms, conditions, warranties or representations associated with such dealings, are made between you and the relevant advertiser or merchant. Therefore, we are not responsible or liable for any loss or damage of any kind incurred as the result of any such dealings.

8.7. You agree that your only recovery for any damages that you incur, and your exclusive remedy, shall be limited to the direct damages you actually incur in reasonable reliance upon the applicable Site service.

9. Privacy

9.1. We shall comply with all applicable UK data protection legislation from time to time in respect of any personal information relating to you gathered by us.

9.2. You may be asked to input information about yourself. We will not use the information you provide to us for any purpose that is not set out in our Privacy Policy. You must read the Privacy Policy along with the Terms and Conditions set out in this document.

9.3. Please notify us as soon as possible using our Contact Form of any changes to the information you have previously given or if you wish to withdraw your consent to our using your information for the stated purposes or for any form of promotional contact.

10. Severability

Each provision of these terms and conditions shall be construed as separately applying and surviving even if for any reason one or other of those provisions is held to be inapplicable or unenforceable in any circumstances. No waiver by us shall be construed as a waiver of any proceeding or succeeding breach of any provision.

11. Entire Agreement

These terms and conditions constitute the entire agreement between you and us with respect to their subject matter and exclude any representations and warranties previously given or made other than any negligent or fraudulent misrepresentation and may be amended only by us on notice to you by posting on the Service.

12. Agency, Partnership

Nothing in these terms and conditions shall be construed as creating any agency, partnership or any other form of joint enterprise between you and us.

13. Applicable Law and Jurisdiction

These terms and conditions are exclusively governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of England and Wales whose courts will have exclusive jurisdiction in any dispute, save that we have the right at our sole discretion to commence and pursue proceedings in alternative jurisdictions.

14. Indemnity

You agree to defend, indemnify and hold harmless us, our officers, directors, employees and agents, from and against any claims, actions or demands, including without limitation reasonable legal and accounting fees, alleging or resulting from your use of the Service or your breach of these terms and conditions. We shall provide notice to you promptly of any such claim, or proceeding and try and assist you, at your expense in defending any such claim.

15. Termination

We reserve the right at our sole discretion, to pursue all of our legal remedies including but not limited to deletion of your postings from the Service and immediate termination of your ability to access the Service and/or any other service provided to you by us, upon any breach by you of these terms and conditions.

16. Force Majeure

We shall not be liable to you in respect of anything that may constitute breach of these terms and conditions arising by reasons of force majeure, namely circumstances beyond our control which shall include (but shall not be limited to) acts of God, perils of the sea or air, fire, flood, draught, explosion, sabotage, accident, embargo, telecommunications and utilities failure, riot, civil commotion or civil authority, including acts of local government and parliamentary authority, breakdown of plant or machinery or software or death of royalty.

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