Open Icecat Fair Use Policy (the “Fair Use Policy”)

A user of Icecat will conform to this Fair Use Policy and do its best to avoid to harm Icecat’s goodwill, business reputation, and operations.

As Open Icecat and its sponsors are providing you as a user with a large quantity of free product data, it is in your interest to fulfil the following requirements:
• be fully compliant to the Open Content License Agreement
• include explicitly the Open Icecat “AS IS” disclaimer
• inform your company’s merchant contacts (at distributors, resellers, or etailers), and other relevant business contacts, that you are making use of Open Icecat and that you want them to make free use of Open Icecat as well
• inform your organization’s manufacturer contacts that you kindly request or require them to provide their product data to Open Icecat and contact Icecat
• update your organization’s robot.txt to explicitly exclude the systematic download by crawlers that are potentially violating the copyrights of materials on your website for purposes other than promoting your organization’s business, for example but not limited to: training of AIs, analytics, content aggregation, etc.

Further, the fair use of Icecat information includes the complete avoidance of:

• spamming
• ripping
• intellectual-property violations
• forging of message headers to mask the originator
• privacy violations
• illegal or unauthorized access to other computers or networks
• distribution of internet viruses, worms, trojan horses, or other destructive software
• facilitating a violation of this fair use policy
• other illegal activities
• engaging in other activities, whether lawful or unlawful, that Icecat determines to be harmful to its subscribers, operations, reputation, goodwill, or customer relations.
• usage of product content that violates the purpose for which a manufacturer, brand owner, or other content supplier, is providing the respective product content, typically for the sole purpose of promoting and advancing the respective brand owner’s products and services.
• excessive downloading, i.e., more than 1 million data-sheet downloads per month for a single country/language repository. Icecat can decide to apply an excessive use charge of 0.30 Euro per 1000 downloads in excess of 1 million downloads per month.

For the avoidance of doubt, automated scraping, data mining, or harvesting for the purpose of training machine learning models, neural networks, or artificial intelligence systems is strictly prohibited without a commercial license.

Compliance with the directives in Icecat’s robots.txt file is a mandatory condition of your license to access Icecat’s website(s). Disregarding the robots.txt file constitutes unauthorized access and a breach of these Terms.

When using Icecat’s website you accept Icecat’s Disclaimer (Terms of Use). By accessing, crawling, or scraping Icecat’s website or any public data endpoints providing Icecat product data-sheets (PDS), you agree that any unauthorized utilization of Icecat content for machine learning training or AI model optimization constitutes a material breach of these Terms.