Intellectual Property
1. Summary
ColabYard is protected work. The platform, its source code, design, and branding belong to ColabYard Ltd. Copying, scraping, reselling or rebuilding it — in whole or in part — is not permitted.
Your teaching material stays yours. Content you create on ColabYard remains your intellectual property. We take only the limited licence we need to run the service for you, and that licence is scoped to that purpose and nothing else.
Institutions keep theirs too. Where a school, college, university or employer licenses ColabYard, the institution is the licensing party for content created under its seats, and that content stays with the institution when a member of staff leaves. See section 6.
We keep anonymous usage patterns, not your content. Aggregated, de-identified information about how ColabYard is used belongs to ColabYard Ltd and helps us improve it. Your quizzes, uploads and learners' answers are not part of that and never will be. See section 5.
2. Which terms apply to you
More than one document can govern your use of ColabYard. Where they conflict, the order is:
- A signed institution licence agreement, where your school, college, university or employer has one with ColabYard Ltd. It takes precedence over this notice for everything it covers — ownership, warranties, indemnities, seat terms, exit and data protection. This page then fills the gaps.
- This notice, together with our Privacy Policy, for individual trainer accounts and for anything an institution agreement does not address.
If you are buying ColabYard for an institution, ask us for the institution licence agreement and the data processing agreement rather than relying on this page. Public notices like this one are written for individual accounts; they are not a substitute for a negotiated contract, and we do not expect a procurement team to accept them as one.
3. Ownership of the platform
ColabYard, accessible at colabyard.co.uk, is owned and operated by ColabYard Ltd. All intellectual property rights in the platform are owned by or licensed to ColabYard Ltd, including:
- Copyright in the source code, page layouts, stylesheets, illustrations, icons and written copy
- Database rights in the structure, selection and arrangement of the platform's data
- Trademarks — the name ColabYard and the ColabYard logo and mark, whether registered or unregistered
- Design rights in the visual appearance and interface of the platform
- Know-how in the underlying methods and workflows the platform implements
Nothing in your use of ColabYard transfers any of these rights to you. You are granted a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the platform for its intended purpose — teaching, training and learning — and nothing more.
4. Content you create
You keep your rights
Quizzes, discussion prompts, activities, scenarios, assessments, slides, lectures, notes, whiteboards and any files you upload remain your intellectual property, or that of your employer or institution where your contract with them says so (see section 6). ColabYard Ltd does not claim ownership of it, does not sell it, and does not license it to anyone else.
The licence you give us
So that we can actually run the service, you grant ColabYard Ltd a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive licence to host, store, back up, reproduce, transmit and display your content solely for the purpose of operating ColabYard for you and the learners you invite. That purpose is the limit of the licence: it does not permit us to publish your material, show it to other customers, include it in marketing, or use it to build anything else.
The licence is sublicensable only to the service providers who run the platform on our behalf — hosting, storage, email and the AI provider — and only to the extent they need it to perform that role. Those providers are named in the Privacy Policy. The licence ends when the content is deleted, except for backup copies, which age out on the retention cycle in section 7.
We do not use your content to train machine learning models, and we do not permit our AI provider to do so with content sent through our integration. Where you choose to use an AI feature, the relevant content is sent to that provider to generate that specific output and for no other purpose.
What you promise us — including about your employer
By uploading content you confirm that you own it or have permission to use it, and that it does not infringe anyone else's copyright, trademark, database or other rights. Material copied from textbooks, awarding bodies, exam boards, stock libraries, journals, websites or other platforms must be properly licensed or cleared before you put it on ColabYard.
If you are employed, check who owns your teaching material before you upload it. Under UK copyright law, work made by an employee in the course of their employment usually belongs to the employer. Many universities and colleges vary this for academic and scholarly material, so that the academic keeps it — but the position differs from one institution to the next, and it is set by your contract, not by us. By uploading, you confirm that you either hold the rights yourself or have your employer's permission to grant the licence above. If your institution licenses ColabYard, section 6 applies instead and the institution gives us that confirmation on your behalf.
You are responsible for the material you upload, and you agree to indemnify ColabYard Ltd against claims arising from it. Where an institution licence agreement is in place, that agreement's indemnity provisions apply instead of this one.
AI-assisted content
Several ColabYard features draft material for you: quizzes generated from a deck, branching guided scenarios, role-play characters, knowledge maps, worked solutions, suggested feedback on written answers. The position on what comes out of them is:
- It is yours. You provide the brief, the source material and the judgement about what to keep — you are the person making the arrangements necessary for the work to be created. To the extent ColabYard Ltd would otherwise hold any right in AI-assisted output generated for you (including under section 9(3) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, which deals with computer-generated work), we assign that right to you, or where an assignment is not effective, license it to you exclusively, irrevocably and free of charge.
- The law here is unsettled. Nobody can promise you that AI-assisted output attracts copyright protection at all, in the UK or elsewhere. We are telling you what we claim — nothing — not guaranteeing what a court would find.
- It is not warranted to be original. AI output can resemble existing material, and it can be wrong. Review it before you teach with it, and treat the warranty above as applying to what you publish, not to the first draft a model gives you.
- Our provider's terms apply to their part. AI features are delivered through a third-party model provider, named in the Privacy Policy. We contract with them on terms that do not permit your content to be used to train their models. If we change provider, or those terms change in a way that affects this promise, we will update this notice and tell account holders.
5. Usage data
Separately from your content, ColabYard Ltd generates and owns usage data: aggregated, de-identified information about how the platform is used. Counts of how many activities of each type are created, how long a lecture runs, which features are adopted, where learners drop off, error rates and performance figures.
We use it to operate, secure, support and improve ColabYard. To be explicit about the boundary:
- It does not include your content — not the text of your quizzes, scenarios, uploads or documents, and not what a learner wrote in an answer or a discussion
- It does not identify anyone, and we do not attempt to re-identify it or to reconstruct content from it
- It is not sold, licensed or shared as a data product
- It is not used to train machine learning models on your material
- Anything published from it is at a level that cannot be traced to an individual, an institution or a class
Personal data is handled under the Privacy Policy, and where an institution licenses ColabYard, under the data processing agreement between us. Where usage data would still count as personal data, those terms take precedence over this section.
6. Organisation and institution accounts
ColabYard can be licensed to an organisation or institution — a school, college, university, training provider or employer — rather than to an individual trainer. Where it is, the following applies, subject always to any signed institution licence agreement.
The institution is the licensing party
The right to use ColabYard is held by the institution, not by the individuals using it. Its administrators register and manage the trainers who work under that licence, and each of those trainers is also bound by this notice.
The institution grants the licence in section 4 for content created under its seats, and confirms that it has the rights to do so from the staff who create it — under their employment or engagement terms, or its own intellectual property policy. Whether a particular lecturer or the institution owns a particular set of slides is a question between them, decided by their own policies; ColabYard Ltd is not a party to it and takes no view on it. What we need, and what the institution gives us, is the confirmation that somebody on its side has the right to put the material here.
Seats, named users and sharing
A seat is a named individual, not a password to be passed around. One person, one login. A seat may be reassigned when someone leaves or changes role — the institution's administrators can do that themselves, without asking us — but two people may not use the same seat at the same time or take turns with it to avoid buying another.
If usage regularly exceeds the number of seats licensed, we will raise it with the institution's administrators and agree a true-up rather than cutting anyone off mid-term. A signed agreement will set out how that is priced.
When a member of staff leaves
Teaching material built under an institution's licence stays with the institution. When a seat is reassigned or a trainer's access is removed:
- The quizzes, scenarios, activities, lectures, modules and uploads they built under that licence remain available to the institution, and can be transferred to whoever takes over the course
- The departing individual loses access to them, as they would to any other institutional system
- Where they also hold a personal ColabYard account, content they created in that account is theirs and is untouched
This is deliberate, not a side effect of how deletion happens to work: a term's worth of course material should not leave with the person who happened to type it in. If a departing member of staff and their institution disagree about who owns a particular piece of material, that is for them to resolve under the institution's policy; we will act on the institution's instructions as the account holder.
Exit: what happens to content and when
Unless an institution licence agreement says otherwise, these are the timescales we work to:
| Event | What happens |
|---|---|
| A user is removed from the service | Their access ends immediately. Their content stays with the institution. |
| The institution asks us to delete specific content | Deleted from live systems within 30 days of the request. |
| The licence ends or is terminated | Administrators keep export access for 90 days, then the content is deleted from live systems. |
| Backups | Deleted content ages out of backups within a further 30 days, after which it is not recoverable. |
Export is by the institution's administrators, in the formats the platform provides. If you need a specific format for a virtual learning environment or an archive, ask before the licence ends rather than after.
Its own address and branding
An institution may be given its own address on ColabYard — for example yourorg.colabyard.co.uk — and may show its own name and logo on its sign-in and learner-facing pages. That address remains part of ColabYard and the property of ColabYard Ltd; the institution is licensed to use it only for the term of its licence, and it does not transfer the ColabYard name or mark or any of the rights in section 3.
The institution's own name, logo and marks stay the institution's. ColabYard Ltd claims no rights in them and uses them only to run the institution's space on the platform.
Indemnities and data protection
Under an institution licence, the institution gives the content warranty and indemnity in section 4 on behalf of its users, and ColabYard Ltd gives a corresponding indemnity for claims that the platform itself infringes a third party's intellectual property. Both are set out, with their limits, in the signed agreement — not on this page.
For personal data, the institution is normally the controller and ColabYard Ltd the processor. That relationship is governed by a data processing agreement meeting Article 28 of the UK GDPR, which names our sub-processors, including the AI provider. Ask us for it at customer.support@colabyard.co.uk. The Trust Center summarises our security and data protection position.
7. Content shared with learners
Material a trainer publishes in a session belongs to that trainer or their organisation. If you are taking part in a quiz, discussion, activity or lecture:
- You may use the material for your own learning
- You must not record, screenshot, copy or redistribute it without the trainer's permission
- You must not republish it, share it outside the session, or pass it to a third party
Your own contributions — your posts, answers and comments — remain yours. Posting them in a shared session allows the trainer and the other participants in that session to see them.
8. What is not permitted
You must not, and must not permit anyone else to:
- Copy, reproduce, republish or mirror any part of the platform
- Reverse-engineer, decompile or disassemble the software, or attempt to derive its source code
- Scrape, harvest, crawl or bulk-extract content, data or media from the platform by any automated means
- Use platform content or data to train, fine-tune or evaluate a machine learning model
- Resell, sublicense, rent or otherwise commercially exploit access to the platform
- Build a competing or derivative product from its design, interface, structure or workflows
- Use the ColabYard name, logo or marks without written permission, including in a way that suggests endorsement or partnership
- Remove, obscure or alter any copyright, trademark or ownership notice
- Frame or embed the platform so that it appears to be someone else's service
- Share, resell or rotate a named seat between people to avoid licensing another
These restrictions apply whether or not you hold an account, and whether access is manual or automated. Access to a page does not imply a licence to reuse what is on it.
9. Permitted use
You may, without asking us first:
- Use ColabYard normally to teach, train, assess and learn
- Link to ColabYard pages from your own site, intranet or virtual learning environment
- Quote short extracts of our public pages with clear attribution to ColabYard, where copyright law permits it
- Export, download and reuse the content you created yourself
For anything beyond this — reproducing substantial parts of the platform, commercial reuse, or use of our marks — please ask at customer.support@colabyard.co.uk.
10. Third-party and open-source components
ColabYard is built with open-source software, and uses third-party fonts, icons and services. Those components remain the property of their respective owners and are used under their own licences. Their presence does not give you any right to the rest of the platform, and nothing here limits rights you have under those open-source licences.
Every dependency is licence-checked automatically on each build. A build fails if a component carries a licence whose terms could require us to release our own source code or impose obligations on our customers — the strong copyleft licences such as AGPL, SSPL and GPL without a linking exception. The only exceptions are components individually reviewed and recorded as never reaching users — a build tool, for example. This is an automated gate in our release pipeline, not a periodic manual review, and it is why we can say that using ColabYard puts no open-source obligation on your institution.
A list of our components and their licences is available to customers and to procurement teams on request at customer.support@colabyard.co.uk.
11. Reporting infringement
If you believe material on ColabYard infringes your intellectual property, tell us and we will act. Please email customer.support@colabyard.co.uk with:
- Your name, organisation and contact details
- Identification of the work you say has been infringed
- A link to, or description of, the material on ColabYard you are complaining about
- A statement that you hold the rights, or are authorised to act for the rights holder
- A statement that the information you have given is accurate
What happens next:
- We acknowledge your notice within 2 working days
- Where a notice gives us enough information to identify the material and the complaint is well-founded on its face, we remove or disable access to it expeditiously — normally within 5 working days of receiving it, and sooner where the infringement is clear
- We notify whoever posted it, who may respond with a counter-notice within 10 working days. If they do, we will tell you and may restore the material unless you tell us you are taking the matter further
- If a notice is incomplete we will come back to you quickly saying what is missing, rather than leaving it open
Repeat infringers. We keep a record of notices we act on. An account that is the subject of repeated well-founded complaints will be suspended and, for persistent infringement, terminated.
12. Consequences of infringement
Where we find that these terms have been breached we may suspend or terminate the account concerned, remove the material, and — for serious or repeated breaches — pursue the remedies available to us in law, which may include an injunction, an account of profits, and damages.
Nothing on this page limits any right or remedy ColabYard Ltd has under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, the Trade Marks Act 1994, or any other applicable law. No delay in enforcing these terms waives our right to enforce them later.
13. Changes to this notice
We may update this notice from time to time. When we do, the "last updated" date at the top of this page changes. Where a change materially affects the rights of account holders — the scope of the licence in section 4, the usage data boundary in section 5, or the exit timetable in section 6 — we will tell account holders directly rather than relying on this page alone. Continued use of ColabYard after an update means you accept the revised notice.
14. Contact
For permissions, licensing questions, intellectual property concerns, or to request the institution licence agreement, the data processing agreement or the open-source component list: