Terms and Conditions for using the AST CaptionSync Service
Welcome to the CaptionSync service, owned by Automatic Sync Technologies, LLC ("AST"). The AST CaptionSync service is a web-based captioning system that provides the fastest captioning turnaround time available at rates far lower than traditional captioning houses. Using the AST CaptionSync service is as simple as logging on to your account, submitting the media and transcript (if you have one) for your show, and receiving your results via email just minutes later.
When you are using the AST CaptionSync service, the Terms and Conditions set forth here will apply. AST also may supplement the Terms and Conditions with posted guidelines or rules applicable to specific areas of the AST Service. Because the Terms and Conditions contain legal obligations, please read them carefully.
If you have previously accepted Terms and Conditions with AST, then this agreement replaces any previous agreement and is effective as of the date you accept this agreement.
1. Acceptance:
By establishing an account with AST and using the AST CaptionSync service, you agree, without limitation or qualification, to be bound by, and to comply with, these Terms and Conditions and any other posted guidelines, rules or instructions applicable to the AST CaptionSync service ("Agreement"). All such guidelines and rules are hereby incorporated by reference into the Terms and Conditions.
2. Conditions of Use:
Upon your acceptance of these Terms and Conditions, AST hereby grants you a non-exclusive, non-transferable limited license to use the AST CaptionSync service ("Service") in accordance with these Terms and Conditions. Use of the Service is subject to compliance with these Terms and Conditions. You acknowledge and agree that AST may terminate your access to the Service should you fail to comply with the Terms and Conditions. Any such termination shall be in AST's sole discretion and may occur without prior notice, or any notice. If you have a prepaid account with AST and AST opts to terminate your account, your prepaid balance will be refunded.
You acknowledge and agree that all content and services available on the AST web site are property of AST and are protected by copyrights, moral rights, trademarks, patents, trade secrets and/or proprietary rights. All rights not expressly granted here are reserved by AST.
3. Restrictions:
Except as explicitly permitted, you agree not to copy, download, sell, license, rent, lease, reproduce, publish, distribute, or create derivative works from the code or content provided on the AST CaptionSync website or systems. You agree that you shall not attempt to reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, or translate, any code, content, or materials received through the use of the Service.
4. Security:
You agree that if you are issued a Username and Password by AST, you shall use your best efforts to prevent access to the Service through your Username and Password by anyone other than yourself.
5. What AST will do:
To use the Service, you will log on to the Service and submit program information ("Program") as described in the AST user manuals. This information will include a media file with an audio track and (optionally) the transcript of the Program. Upon receipt of this information, AST will process your Program and return, via email, caption files in the format(s) that you requested. You may use, alter, or distribute these caption files as you need. The caption results are returned to an email address established when your account is created; they are also available to you on the AST website by logging into your AST account. You may change your pre-enrolled email address at any time through the AST website, or disable the emailing of results completely and instead use our website to download your results.
If you provide a transcript with your submission, results are normally returned in less than 10 minutes. AST is not responsible for email failures or delays; turnaround time is measured from the completion of upload of your Program to the sending of the email containing the results.
If you do not provide a transcript of the Program, you need to purchase both transcription and captioning services from AST and AST will perform the transcription for you, assuming the audio files are intelligible enough to make a high quality transcript. Turnaround time for transcription is normally less than 3 business days. If you have special terms or names that might be difficult to spell, AST encourages you to add these to the Transcriber Guidance field.
6. RUSH transcription:
AST offers a RUSH transcription service which will return transcription results to you within 24 hours of submission (excluding weekends and holidays). An additional cost is levied for the use of the RUSH service.
You may request a credit if your RUSH transcript is late: if AST is more than 4 hours late with a RUSH transcript, then we will credit you the difference between Rush and Regular transcription rates. If AST is more than 24 hours late with a RUSH transcript, then we will credit you the full cost of the transcript.
AST will endeavor to make the RUSH service available at all times, however in order to ensure quality of service we reserve the right to temporarily disable this service for new submissions when our capacity for RUSH jobs is reached.
7. Copyright:
AST does not obtain copyright permission for you to caption your Programs. It is your responsibility to ensure that you have appropriate permissions from the copyright owner to caption any material that you submit to the CaptionSync server and to copy your Programs to DVD if you are using our DVD Transfer Service.
You agree to indemnify and hold harmless AST (and any of AST's suppliers) from any and all liabilities, losses, actions, damages, or claims (including all reasonable expenses, costs, and attorneys fees) arising out of or relating to any claims of copyright violation for materials that you submit to AST's system for captioning, or to AST's DVD Transfer Service.
8. Agreement to pay for Service:
Submission of a Program to the AST CaptionSync server constitutes your agreement to pay for the use of the Service.
You may pre-pay for CaptionSync service time in order to take advantage of volume pricing. In general, pre-purchased time is nonrefundable. If you pre-pay for time on the CaptionSync server, AST will guarantee the transcription portion of the price for a period of 1 year; if you still have a pre-paid balance after 1 year, AST reserves the right to change the transcription portion of the price and invoice you for the difference. If you do not wish to pay the increased transcription costs at that time, AST will refund the unused transcription balance of your account at that time.
Prepaid time bought after April 1, 2010 on the CaptionSync server is valid for five years from the date of purchase. If the time is unused after five years, it expires. Time usage is computed on a first-in-first-out basis (that is, when you consume time from your account, you always use the oldest time you have available).
If you do not pre-pay for time on the CaptionSync server, AST will invoice you monthly for the time you use. You agree to receive such invoices via email at an email address that you provide when your account is created. You may change this invoicing email address at any time through the AST website.
AST invoice terms are Net 30 days. Late payments are subject to a late payment fee of 10% of the amount due, or $50, whichever is greater. Payment checks returned NSF are subject to a $50 fee.
9. Third Party Billing:
Under some circumstances you may be eligible to have your fees billed to a third party (such as a grant). Such third party billing is subject to the prior approval of both AST and the third party. Once approval is obtained, AST will invoice fees for work you submit to us to the third party; you remain financially responsible for any fees that you incur from AST until such fees are paid. If the third party rejects, in whole or in part, any invoices from AST, the invoices will be reissued to you and will be due upon receipt. An administrative fee of $50 will apply to any reissued invoices.
10. Administrative Fees:
AST's invoicing system is fully automated and will automatically issue invoices for work that you have submitted (for bill-in-arrears accounts) or for time that you request to purchase (for prepaid accounts). If you need special invoicing arrangements to have invoices split into parts, to exchange prebought minutes of one type for another, or to consolidate existing invoices, then please contact us to request this. AST may charge an administrative fee for these services.
11. Incomplete or Inaccurate Results:
The AST Caption Server is an automated system and it may not be able to caption every Program. Programs in which the transcript does not match the audio, or in which the audio contains a lot of sound effects or music may not caption well. In most such cases, the Service will return a notice of rejection stating that your Program cannot be captioned by the Service. You will not be charged captioning fees for rejected Programs.
If you request AST to perform the transcription, and your content is not captionable, you will receive only the transcript, and you will be billed only for the transcription portion of the fee.
If the Service is successful in captioning your Program, you will usually find the results to be accurate and reasonable. The results are generated from an automated system, and are unlikely to be identical to that produced by human captioners. If you are not satisfied with the results of the Service, you may apply to AST for a refund. Such applications must be made in writing within 30 days of the submission of the Program and must state the Program reference number and the problem with the results. AST will review your request for a refund and grant it as appropriate.
If you request AST to perform the transcription and you find errors in the transcription, you may request a "retranscribe" through the CaptionSync website or by contacting AST. AST will repair the transcript without any additional cost to you. A retranscribe must be requested within 30 days of completion of the original transcript.
12. Availability of Results:
Caption and transcription results for your Programs are available to you from the CaptionSync website. AST will attempt to keep your results available for as long as possible, but they will be available to you for at least one year from the date of your submission.
Once results are available, you may use the "Redo" feature from the CaptionSync website to rerun the captioning on your Program. The Redo feature allows you to make modifications to the transcript (to correct typos or adjust timing) and/or to modify the advanced settings associated with that Program. Once you issue a Redo request, new caption results will be returned to you within minutes. There are no additional charges for a Redo. The Redo feature will be available for at least 6 months from the data of your original submission.
13. DVD Service:
If you have your account enabled for AST's service to transfer videotapes to captioned DVDs (DVD Transfer Service), then you agree to the following additional terms:
i. Additional copyright permissions may be required to transfer media from one type to another; by submitting content to AST's DVD Transfer Service, you agree that you are solely responsible for obtaining such permissions from the copyright holder and that you have obtained such permissions.
ii. Placement of all captions will be as per the default Broadcast settings on your AST account (either all at the bottom of the screen, or all at the top of the screen). You understand that AST does not place individual captions according to video content.
iii. Users of AST's DVD Transfer Service must use AST's transcription service as well; there is no provision for providing your own show transcript when using this service.
iv. The DVD Transfer Service can accept VHS tapes, miniDV tapes, Hi8 tapes, or Video DVDs as input. If you send in alternate media, we will transfer it if possible, but it may be subject to additional charges. We do not accept data DVDs (DVDs with computer data on them) for this service.
v. If you send us a VHS tapes, the entire contents of each tape will be put on a separate DVD and captioned. If the tape contains multiple shows, they will appear on the DVD as a single show combining all of the shows on your original tape. If you send us Video DVDs that have more then one chapter title, an additional surcharge may be applied.
vi. If you send in tapes or DVDs that are unreadable, are in an unsupported format, or cannot be transferred to Video DVD, they will be returned without transfer to DVD, and are subject to a handling charge.
vii. If you receive an unplayable DVD from us, we will replace it for no additional charge, provided you notify us of the bad DVD within 30 days of receiving it. Notification of a bad DVD must include the DVD job "Request ID" from our system so that we may properly identify the DVD.
viii. We endeavor to completely caption every tape that you submit to us, but some tapes may not be captionable due to poor quality audio or excessive sweetening. If a tape cannot be properly captioned, the following actions will be taken:
* If we are unable to read your input media and cannot repair it, we will return your original media only subject to a shipping and handling charge as per AST's DVD Transfer Service price sheet.
* If we can read your media, but are unable to transcribe the audio, we will transfer your media to DVD and return the original media and an uncaptioned DVD, subject to a reduced DVD transfer fee as per AST's DVD Transfer Service price sheet.
* If we can transcribe the audio, but are unable to caption it, we transfer your media to DVD and return the original media and an uncaptioned DVD along with an electronic transcript, subject to our regular transcription fee plus a reduced DVD transfer fee as per AST's DVD Transfer Service price sheet.
14. Warranty Disclaimer:
THE WARRANTIES SET FORTH IN SECTION 11 CONSTITUTE THE ENTIRE WARRANTIES AVAILABLE UNDER THIS AGREEMENT. AST OFFERS NO OTHER STATUTORY, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF ANY OTHER TYPE OR KIND UNDER THIS AGREEMENT, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY, OPERABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
15. Limitation of Liability:
AST will make every reasonable effort to ensure you have access to the Service and that it returns accurate results in a timely manner. However, you understand and agree that AST cannot control, and cannot be held liable for:
* unavailability or disruption of Service
* lost email or email blocked by SPAM filters, whether for results from the Service, or for notices from you
* inaccurate timing in the Program results
* inaccuracies in the Program Transcript
* slow turnaround time
AST does not review, spellcheck, or verify the accuracy of transcripts provided by you. Captions will be generated from the transcript as provided. AST is not responsible for any erroneous captions.
AST shall not be responsible for, and shall not pay, any amount of incidental, consequential or other indirect damages, whether based on lost revenue or otherwise, regardless of whether AST was advised of the possibility of such losses in advance. In no event shall AST's liability hereunder exceed the fees paid to AST for captioning the Program.
16. Withdrawal from Service:
You may terminate your use of the Service at any time by requesting such termination in writing to AST. Within 14 days of receipt of such a request, AST will deactivate your Username and Password. Any outstanding balance for previous use of the Service becomes due and payable at that time. Pre-paid balances are not refundable.
17. Governing Law:
This Agreement shall be construed and enforced in accordance with the laws of the state of California without regard to conflict of law principles as if entered into and performed entirely within California by California residents. Any dispute arising under this Agreement shall be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the state or federal courts located in California. The prevailing party shall be entitled to recover its reasonable attorney's fees and costs.