Terms of service
These terms govern your use of the silken API, the silken dashboard and the silken.io website. They describe what the service does, what you owe for it, and what each side is responsible for.
Who this is between.
Creating a silken account, or using the API with a key issued to you, means you accept these terms.
If you accept these terms on behalf of a company, you confirm you are authorised to bind it, and "you" means that company. The privacy policy and the acceptable use policy form part of this agreement.
The agreement is with Velvet Software Limited, registered in Dublin, Ireland (company registration no. 633270), registered office 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, D02 AY28, Ireland. "silken", "we" and "us" mean that company throughout this document, and it is the party you are contracting with. Where to give it notice, and how to escalate a complaint against it, is section 14; which law governs the agreement is section 12.
Order forms. If you and Velvet Software Limited have signed an order form or a master agreement, those documents and these terms are read together. The order form prevails over these terms where they conflict, and a master agreement prevails over both, but only on the points it covers; everything else in these terms continues to apply. If you buy silken through AWS Marketplace, these terms are the agreement that applies to your use of the service, and the marketplace listing sets the price and the invoicing.
You may hold an account only if you are able to enter into a binding contract. An account is for the person or company that created it, and its keys are not to be shared outside that organisation.
Your account and your keys.
One account, one email address, and credentials that are yours to protect.
- If you sign up on silken.io, you must give a working email address and verify it. Until the address is verified you cannot sign in, and an unverified account cannot use the service. The information you give us must be accurate and kept current; an account opened on information that is not is one we may suspend under section 10.
- Your password must be at least 12 bytes long and at most 1,024. That is 12 characters of ordinary Latin text; a character that encodes to more than one byte counts for more than one, so a password in another script reaches the minimum in fewer characters. You are responsible for keeping it, and your API keys, confidential.
- An API key is a full-power credential. Anyone holding it can submit jobs, read your jobs and usage, and change your webhook configuration. It is shown once, when it is created; if it is lost or exposed, revoke or rotate it from the dashboard. Do not embed one in a browser, a mobile app or anything else you hand to a third party — a key in a client is a key you have published.
- You are responsible for everything done through your account and your keys, including by anyone you give them to.
- Email and password, plus API keys, are the credentials used today.
What the API enforces on a key
Every request is admitted or refused against your account rather than against your key, so several keys share one budget. Four checks run on job submission, each with its own refusal:
- a request rate, with a burst allowance, refused with a retry-after;
- a concurrent-job limit;
- a monthly spend cap; and
- the requirement that billing is set up at all.
Operating limits are configured for your account and workload. Use GET /v1/job-options or contact our team to confirm the values for your integration. Working around any of them — by opening further accounts, by spreading load across keys to defeat a per-account budget, or otherwise — is a breach of the acceptable use policy.
We may change these limits; the values that apply to your account are available from GET /v1/job-options.
An AWS Marketplace subscription is not one of these accounts. Subscribing there creates your access from the AWS fulfilment itself: silken registers the customer against a synthetic, non-deliverable address, issues an API key, and activates the subscription without a password and without an email to verify. There is no dashboard sign-in and no silken billing portal for such an account. Manage the subscription in AWS Marketplace, and see section 14 for anything else. Where a clause below describes the dashboard or the billing portal, it does not apply to you.
If you believe your account or a key has been compromised, tell us promptly — section 14 says how.
Email we send you.
Two different things, and only one of them is optional.
Service email is part of providing the service, and you cannot opt out of it while you hold an account. It includes account verification, password resets and email changes, plus contact notifications and meeting invitations or cancellations generated by your requests. Each message is sent because of something you did.
Marketing email is separate and optional, and silken sends none today. If that changes, marketing mail will be sent only to people who asked for it and every message will carry an unsubscribe link.
Consent to marketing is never a condition of holding an account or being issued a key, and nothing on the signup form asks for one. Signing up is not agreement to receive marketing, and this clause is here so that it cannot later be read as though it were.
silken will never ask you for a password, an API key or a presigned URL by email. A message that does is not from us. What the mail contains, and how the addresses behind it are handled, is in the privacy policy.
What silken does.
Converts video you hold, on storage you control, and tells you when it is finished.
You presign a GET URL for a source file and a PUT URL for the result, both on your own object storage, and submit them with a profile. silken fetches the source, converts it, writes the result to the destination you supplied, and — if you have configured one — sends a signed webhook telling you the job is done and how long the output it produced is. That figure is the output duration, not a charge. It is measured before your free allowance is applied, so a job covered entirely by the allowance still reports a positive number of minutes while costing nothing. What you owe is what section 08 describes and what appears on your invoice.
silken never holds credentials to your storage. Your presigned URLs must remain valid long enough for the job to run; if a destination URL expires before delivery, the job waits for a replacement rather than failing, for as long as the published destination window allows.
The service enforces operating limits, configured for your account and workload, as section 02 describes.
Promotional sample. A new account may run one free demonstration conversion on a sample file we provide or on an MP4 you upload for the purpose. It is limited to a few seconds of output, and one success is all there is: a sample that fails can be tried again, but once one has completed it cannot be repeated. A download link for its result stops working 15 minutes after it is issued and can be reissued while the file is still held; a demonstration object, including an upload of your own, expires 24 hours after it is created or the sample job is accepted. The privacy policy says exactly when the file behind that link is removed. The sample exists so you can see the service work before you are asked for payment details.
The URLs you give us.
Every byte silken fetches, it fetches because you told it to. That is worth its own clause.
silken has no catalogue and no crawler. It reads exactly the source URL you submit and writes to exactly the destination URL you submit, and both are addresses you chose and signed. A job is an instruction to make a request on your behalf, so what you may instruct is a term of this agreement rather than a matter of etiquette.
What you promise when you submit one
- You have the right to the content. You own the video at the source URL, or you are licensed to use it, and converting it and storing the result infringes nobody's rights.
- You are authorised to direct the request. The source URL and the destination URL are on storage you control, or that you have permission to read from and write to. Handing us a signed URL you were not entitled to sign, or that you obtained from someone who did not intend you to use it this way, is a breach of this section.
- You accept what a destination write does. silken writes the converted file to the object you named. If that object already holds something, the write replaces it, and silken cannot tell the difference between an intended overwrite and a mistake.
- The URLs and their expiry are yours to manage. A window too short for the job to finish is not a service failure, and silken cannot recover a result that was written to a destination you later deleted.
You indemnify us for the consequences of an instruction you were not entitled to give. If a third party brings a claim against silken because of content you directed us to fetch, or because you had no right to direct a request to an address you gave us, you will cover the loss, the liability and the reasonable legal costs that claim causes us. That is the whole of the indemnity: it is limited to your content and to your authority over the addresses you supply, and it does not extend to anything silken does of its own accord.
Where silken will not go
The fetch path refuses more than this agreement forbids, and refuses it in software rather than on trust. A submitted URL must be HTTPS, and the address it resolves to must be ordinary public unicast space: loopback, private ranges, link-local — which includes the address cloud providers answer instance-metadata requests on — multicast and unassigned space are all refused. The check runs at connect time rather than at submission, and again on every redirect, so a name that resolves publicly once and privately a moment later does not get through either.
Two things follow. Pointing silken at a host that is not reachable from the public internet does not work, so it is not a way in. And attempting it is a breach — using the service to probe, scan or reach anything you do not control is forbidden by the acceptable use policy whether or not the guard stops it. A refusal is not a scorecard.
The rule is stated in full at section 03 of the acceptable use policy.
The video stays yours.
We convert it. We do not acquire it, and we do not use it for anything else.
You keep all rights in the video you submit and in the converted result. We acquire no ownership of either, and nothing in this agreement transfers any.
What you permit us to do
You permit silken to fetch and process your source file and to deliver the output you select. For hosted output modes, or a demonstration that uses your own upload, this permission also covers storage and serving to authorised recipients for the retention period stated in the privacy policy. It ends when those copies are removed, subject to any retention required by law. We do not use your media for unrelated purposes. In particular:
- We do not use your media to train, evaluate or improve any model.
- For file delivery to your own storage we keep no copy of it beyond the working files a running job needs, except the preview images you explicitly request. Requested file thumbnails and sprite sheets are hosted for seven days for authenticated download. We produce no fingerprints. Hosted outputs and demonstration uploads follow the retention periods in the privacy policy.
- We do not share your media with another company for its own purposes. For file delivery, the only place a converted file is delivered is the destination you signed.
- No one at silken watches your content in the course of running the service. The software reads the technical properties it needs to convert the file correctly; that is the only reading of your media the service performs.
What happens to files on our machines while a job runs, and the cases in which a scratch file can outlive a job, are described precisely in the privacy policy. Read that clause rather than this one for the exception: removal at the end of a job is an attempt rather than a guarantee, and the policy says why.
Confidentiality
Each side keeps the other's confidential information confidential. Confidential information is non-public information that one party (the discloser) gives the other (the recipient) in connection with this agreement and that is marked confidential or would reasonably be understood to be. Your media, your job data and your storage locations are your confidential information. Our non-public pricing, security documentation and technical material are ours.
The recipient uses the discloser's confidential information only to perform or use the service, discloses it only to employees, contractors and advisers who need it and are bound by obligations at least as protective, and protects it with at least the care it gives its own, and never less than reasonable care. The obligations last for as long as the information stays confidential, and in any case for three years after this agreement ends; for your media and personal data they last for as long as we hold it.
The obligations do not apply to information that is or becomes public without the recipient's breach, that the recipient already knew or learned from a third party without restriction, or that the recipient developed independently. A recipient may disclose confidential information where a court, regulator or law requires, after giving the discloser prompt notice where the law allows. Where an order form or master agreement contains its own confidentiality terms, those apply instead.
Acceptable use.
Stated in full on its own page, because a service that fetches addresses you name needs more than a paragraph.
The acceptable use policy is part of this agreement and is the operative statement of what you may and may not do with silken. It is a separate page because it is longer than a clause and because it is cited on its own — an abuse report, a suspension notice and a takedown answer all point at a URL. In summary, you may not use silken to:
- process content that is unlawful, or that you do not have the rights to process — including material that sexually exploits or abuses children, which we report and act on without notice;
- infringe copyright, trademark, privacy or publicity rights — the copyright policy sets out how a rights holder tells us about an infringement and what we are able to act on;
- point the service at hosts you do not control, as section 05 describes;
- work around the operating limits, the free allowance or the promotional sample, including by opening multiple accounts;
- attempt to gain unauthorised access to the service, another customer's data, or the infrastructure it runs on; or
- resell or provide the service in a way that presents silken's limits or availability as commitments we have not made.
Where this summary and that page differ, the page governs. What we do about a breach is section 10.
Fees, billing and cancellation.
Metered from the file we delivered — not from your source, and not from how long it took.
Who sells silken to you
The seller for every silken account is Velvet Software Limited. No other company sells silken on our behalf and no reseller stands between you and us. We issue the receipt or the invoice, we remain responsible for providing the service and for supporting it, and a question about a charge is answered by us.
silken is delivered electronically as a hosted API and dashboard: nothing is shipped and no licence key is issued. Payment is by card, taken by a regulated payment provider on its own hosted pages — silken never sees your card details and never stores them. Prices are quoted per output minute on the rate card and exclude tax.
One exception, and it is a real one: if you buy through AWS Marketplace, AWS is the seller of that subscription. AWS takes the payment, AWS issues the bill, and silken's part is to report your metered minutes to it.
Everything in this section about our payment provider, the billing portal, refunds and cancellation describes the card rail and not that one; where a paragraph below applies only to one rail, it says so.
How a job is measured
- Video conversion uses the duration of the output file, measured after it has been written to your destination. Job-wide audio extras use source minutes as described below; neither charge depends on processing time.
- silken's own ledger records that duration exactly. There is no per-job minimum and no rounding: a two-and-a-half-second output is recorded as two and a half seconds, and that is the figure your usage screen and your spend cap are computed from. How it reaches your invoice is a separate question, and card billing and AWS Marketplace, if you buy there, answer it differently — see how usage is reported below.
- The first 1,000 output minutes each calendar month are free, per account, measured in UTC, for standard SDR H.264 outputs at up to 30 fps at Economy or Standard speed, including outputs converted from HDR; there is no video input fee. Audio extras remain chargeable. Fast outputs, HEVC, VP9 and AV1 outputs, outputs above 30 fps, and outputs using Highlight detail or DRM remain chargeable. The allowance is applied automatically and only the excess is metered. A new month starts a new allowance; unused minutes do not carry over. Nothing stops or warns when the allowance runs out: the job that crosses the line is metered for the part above it and every job after it is metered in full, at the rate for its profile.
- Video rates are quoted per output minute and depend on the profile. The price book in force when a job is accepted is recorded on that job. Its rates govern silken's ledger, your usage screen, spend cap and settled charges sent to the billing provider; a later book does not change work already submitted.
- Job-wide audio extras use source minutes. Each audio track beyond the first stereo track costs $0.004 per source minute; each AAC or E-AC-3 5.1 surround track costs $0.008 per source minute instead of the extra-track rate. These charges apply once per job across video renditions, take the accepted speed multiplier, and receive neither free allowance nor output-volume discounts. A watermark carries no charge.
- A failed file-delivery job records no conversion usage. Progressive jobs can accrue usage for the published portion even if they later fail, and complete-file ladders charge for the successful delivered renditions, including those in a partially completed job. Usage is recorded once per job: if the service retries internally, you pay for the one output you receive, not for the attempts. Check the job’s recorded usage.
- The promotional sample meters zero, and does not consume your free allowance.
Price changes
A price does not change under you without notice. We change the rates on the rate card only in one of two ways. Where you hold a committed term or an order form, a rate changes only when that term renews, and we tell you in writing, at the contact named in the order form, at least 60 days before the renewal date. Where you pay as you go, a changed rate applies only to work submitted at least 60 days after we publish it on the rate card with the date it takes effect. Work submitted before that date is priced at the rate in force when it was accepted. A change that lowers a rate takes effect when it is published.
The automatic service mail described in section 03 does not carry announcements, so for pay-as-you-go accounts the rate card is the notice, and its date is the date the 60 days run from.
If you do not accept a changed rate, you may cancel as section 08 describes before it takes effect, and the change does not apply to you. An order form that fixes a rate for its term keeps that rate until it renews.
How usage is reported
The ledger above is the same for every account. What differs is what is then sent to whoever invoices you, and the two rails do not round the same way.
- Card subscriptions. Completed charges are reported to Stripe as integer microdollars (one millionth of a US dollar), using the job's accepted price book and measured durations. Durations round to microseconds and charges to microdollars; itemized amounts reconcile to the settled total after eligible allowance and volume discounts.
- If you buy through AWS Marketplace. AWS meters in whole units. Your charges, priced on the same rate card as card billing, are therefore accumulated per UTC hour, and the hour's total is rounded up to a whole unit of $0.00001 before it is reported — once for the hour, not once per job, so an hour is never more than $0.00001 above its exact charge. A job that finishes after its own hour has already been reported is carried into the next hour that has not, so nothing is reported twice and nothing is dropped.
Our ledger is the record we answer from. If a figure looks wrong, tell us with the job id and we will check it against the job records rather than against the invoice. Where our ledger and the provider's disagree, the difference is reconciled by a signed correction applied in whichever direction the evidence points; that tool exists to make the two agree and is not a discretionary credit.
Payment and non-payment
Billing must be set up before your first job. Apart from the promotional sample, silken refuses to accept a job from an account without an active subscription, and says so with a clear error rather than accepting the work and charging later. Payment details are entered on our payment provider's hosted pages; silken never sees them.
Metered usage is billed monthly in arrears by our payment provider, which issues the invoice. If you buy through AWS Marketplace, your usage is reported to AWS and appears on your AWS bill instead; the invoice list in the dashboard stays empty, because we do not issue those invoices.
If a payment fails, your account enters a seven-day grace period during which jobs continue to run. After that, and in any case where the subscription is unpaid, cancelled or suspended, new jobs are refused until the account is brought back into good standing. How you do that depends on how you subscribed: a card subscription can be put right by you through the billing portal; an AWS Marketplace subscription is managed in AWS, and no silken billing portal exists for it. A suspension that followed a payment dispute is the exception on either rail — it is cleared by us, and no self-service route lifts it. Jobs already running are not stopped, and they are billed normally.
Cancelling
You may cancel at any time, from your account, and nothing about it goes through us. A card subscription is cancelled in the billing portal, which you open from the Billing screen of the dashboard; an AWS Marketplace subscription is cancelled in AWS Marketplace. There is no notice period to serve and no cancellation form to submit.
Cancelling stops future work being accepted; it does not void usage already recorded, which remains payable and appears on the final invoice for the period in the ordinary monthly-in-arrears way. There is no grace period on cancellation — the seven days above belong to a failed payment, which is a different state. A job already running is not stopped, is delivered, and is billed.
Refunds and cancellation sets all of this out at length; where that page and this section differ, this section governs.
Simply stopping does not cancel anything. An account that submits no jobs still holds a subscription, and a subscription that is not cancelled continues.
Refunds and your statutory rights
If silken is not what you expected, tell us within 14 days of a payment and we refund that payment in full. This applies to a monthly metered invoice as much as to a first charge, so a renewal is covered and not only a purchase. Ask as section 14 describes; we approve it and return the money to the payment method the charge was taken from.
Two limits on that promise, both stated because the alternative is a commitment we cannot keep.
It is handled by a person: the refund is issued by us through the payment provider rather than by anything you can click.
On AWS Marketplace it works differently, and you still ask us. AWS collected the payment on a payment method silken never sees, so AWS is the only party that can reverse the charge; what we do is request the refund from AWS on your behalf, within the same 14 days. AWS issues it on its own timetable — to the card that paid the invoice, or as a credit memo where your AWS account is on invoicing terms.
If you buy as a consumer rather than for a business, the Consumer Rights Act 2022 gives you 14 days from the day the contract is concluded to cancel a distance contract for a digital service. Velvet Software Limited is the seller under that contract, so a statutory cancellation is exercised against Velvet Software Limited; write to us and we will action it.
You can be charged for what you used before cancelling only where you expressly asked for the service to begin inside that period and we had given you the cancellation information the Act requires. Where either is missing, no usage charge is due — and today silken asks for no such express request and serves no such notice, so a consumer cancelling inside the 14 days should expect the payment back in full.
That same omission lengthens the statutory window. Where the required cancellation information was not provided, the Act extends the cancellation period by 12 months, ending 14 days after we provide it if we start doing so sooner. A consumer's statutory right therefore outlasts the 14-day commitment above, and nothing in this agreement narrows it.
The 14-day commitment above is a separate promise, made in addition to that statutory right. It applies to business and consumer purchases alike.
Where the two differ, the one more favourable to you applies. Nothing here reduces a right the law gives you and does not permit to be excluded.
What is not billed in the first place — a failed file-delivery job, a job that never completed, the promotional sample, the free allowance — needs no request and is listed on the refunds page.
Taxes are your responsibility unless we are required to collect them, in which case they are added to what you pay.
Invoices are issued in US dollars unless an order form says otherwise. By subscribing with a card you authorise our payment provider to charge that card for usage as it is reported and for any subscription fee. Where an order form applies, invoices are payable within 30 days of the invoice date. A usage figure you dispute should be raised within 60 days of the invoice that contains it; we will review it against the job records, and correct the invoice if the record shows the figure is wrong. An unpaid balance stops new jobs as section 10 describes, and we may charge interest on an overdue invoice under an order form at the rate the order form states.
Availability and support.
Paid Standard and Fast usage includes a 99.5% monthly API availability SLA.
Paid Standard and Fast usage includes the service level agreement: 99.5% monthly public API availability, excluding scheduled maintenance announced 48 hours ahead. Credits are 10% of that month's fees below 99.5% and 25% below 99.0%, are the sole remedy, and must be claimed within 30 days after the end of the month.
Economy tier and free usage have no SLA. An enterprise order form may select 99.9% availability with credits of 10%, 25% or 50% below 99.9%, 99.0% or 95.0%, respectively. There is no turnaround or processing-time guarantee.
We may take the service down for maintenance, and we may change or withdraw parts of it. Where a change would break a working integration, we will publish it in the API reference before it takes effect.
Support is by email. Support requests go to the address in section 14. Security reports use the same mailbox, as set out on the contact page. Where your use involves personal data, the data processing agreement applies, and the providers who process data for us are listed on the sub-processors page.
Suspension and termination.
What stops the service, and what happens to what is left.
Ending it from your side needs nothing from us. Stop using the service, and cancel the subscription as section 08 describes so that it stops renewing. Usage already metered remains payable.
What stops by itself
New jobs are refused automatically when your subscription is unpaid, cancelled or suspended, or when a payment failure has gone beyond its grace period. A payment dispute suspends the account, and that suspension is cleared by us rather than automatically. None of that is a decision anyone takes about you; it is the entitlement check refusing a job it is not allowed to accept.
When we end it, you hear about it first
We may suspend or terminate your account where you breach these terms or the acceptable use policy, where a payment due to us is not made, or where we are required to do so by law. Except where the breach or a legal requirement makes it impossible, we will tell you first and give you a reasonable opportunity to put the matter right. That is the ordinary path, and it is the one we intend to use.
The exceptions are narrow and named rather than left to discretion: content or conduct that has to stop immediately — child sexual abuse material is the clearest case, and the policy says we act on it without notice — an active attack on the service or on another customer, and an order or legal obligation that leaves us no choice. In those cases we act first and tell you afterwards where we are permitted to.
Before access ends you can take your records with you. For file delivery your converted files are in your own storage; what is here is the account's own record: your jobs, your usage and your invoices, readable in the dashboard, with the usage figures exportable as a CSV per accounting period. Where we end the agreement on notice, that notice is the window; where you end it, cancelling does not close the dashboard, so take what you need before you stop paying attention to it.
What the product can and cannot export is set out in the privacy policy.
Termination does not affect a refund already due to you under section 08. Cancellation does not remove copies in your storage, and hosted outputs and demonstration uploads follow the retention periods in the privacy policy.
What is kept about an account after termination, and whether the product can delete an account by itself, are described in the privacy policy. To ask about closing an account or removing its records, contact us as section 14 describes. You may end the agreement at any time by cancelling as section 08 describes. A committed term under an order form runs to its end date, and the order form says whether the unused part is payable.
Warranties and liability.
What silken answers for, and what it does not.
What we can state factually, in the two places it is easy to overclaim:
- Delivery. silken bills a job only after your storage has accepted the converted file. On the ordinary path that acceptance is your storage's own success response to the upload; silken does not read the object back to confirm it. Where the upload's outcome is ambiguous — the connection drops, or no answer arrives — the job is not completed or billed until the object has been confirmed at the destination.
- Determinism. Conversion depends on the selected profile, tuning and engine build. It is deterministic for a given input, profile and tuning on a given build of the conversion engine, and not across builds or hosts. For the shipped HDR→SDR profiles, the required tone-mapping support must be available; if it is unavailable, the job fails rather than silently substituting a different conversion recipe. Evaluate output on the build used for your workload.
You are responsible for your storage, your presigned URLs and their expiry, and your webhook endpoint — section 05 sets out what that responsibility covers.
The service is provided as it is
Your use of the service is at your own risk. The service is provided on an "AS IS" and "AS AVAILABLE" basis, without warranties, conditions or representations of any kind, whether express, implied or statutory — including, but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement and course of performance, and any implied condition of satisfactory quality or of title.
To the fullest extent the law permits, every warranty, condition and representation that would otherwise be implied into this agreement by statute, at common law or otherwise is excluded from it.
In particular we do not warrant that the service will run uninterrupted, secure or available at any particular time or in any particular place; that errors or defects will be corrected; that a conversion will be fit for any particular purpose; that a result will satisfy a downstream specification; or that the results of using the service will meet your requirements. You are responsible for checking output before you publish it.
Limit on liability
Each party's total liability to the other arising out of or in connection with this agreement is limited to the fees you paid to silken for the service in the 12 months before the event that first gave rise to the claim. The limit applies to all claims taken together, however they are framed: in contract, in tort including negligence, for breach of statutory duty, under an indemnity or on any other footing. It does not limit your obligation to pay fees that are due.
Subject to the exceptions listed below, neither party is liable to the other for indirect or consequential loss, or for loss of profit, revenue, goodwill or anticipated savings, whether or not it was foreseeable and whether or not it was told the loss was possible. The limit and the exclusion protect each party's directors, employees and suppliers as well as the party itself.
Data protection has its own, higher limit. Each party's total liability for breach of its data-protection obligations under this agreement and the data processing agreement is limited to three times the fees you paid to silken in the 12 months before the event that first gave rise to the claim. That amount is separate from, and does not reduce, the limit in the first paragraph above.
One thing the limit is not. The refund commitment in section 08 is a promise to return a payment, not an acceptance of liability for loss, and the clauses above neither create it nor take it away. A service credit under the service level agreement is likewise a payment adjustment, and it counts towards the limit.
What is not limited
Nothing in this agreement excludes or limits any liability that the law does not permit to be excluded or limited. In particular, the limit and the exclusion above do not apply to, and this agreement does not limit, any of the following.
- Death or personal injury caused by our negligence, or by the negligence of anyone acting for us.
- Fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, and wilful misconduct.
- Breach of confidentiality under the confidentiality clause in section 06.
- Third-party intellectual property claims covered by the defence and payment obligations below, which are uncapped, except for claims about codec patents, which are excluded from them.
- Compensation under Article 82 of the General Data Protection Regulation for material or non-material damage caused by processing that infringes it, so far as a data subject is entitled to it from either of us.
- A consumer's statutory rights that cannot lawfully be excluded, including the right to cancel a distance contract and the extended cancellation window that applies because silken serves no cancellation notice.
- Anything else that the law applying to you does not permit a trader to exclude or limit.
The cancellation right, and the twelve-month extension of it that applies today, are set out in section 08. Nothing in this section shortens either, and nothing in this section is a defence to a claim listed above.
If a court holds any part of this section invalid or unenforceable, that part is severed and the rest continues in force, so far as the law applying to you allows. Where the law applying to you does not allow a term to be read down, the part that cannot stand does not apply to you at all, and the rest of this agreement is read without it.
Intellectual property claims
silken will defend you against a third-party claim that the service, as silken provides it, infringes that third party's copyright or trade secret rights, or a patent other than a codec patent, and will pay the damages and costs a court finally awards or that silken agrees in settlement. This applies only if you tell us about the claim promptly in writing, let us control its defence and settlement (we will not settle in a way that admits fault for you without your consent), and give us the help we reasonably ask for at silken's cost.
It does not apply to a claim that arises from your media or other content, from a use that breaches this agreement, from a modification or combination that silken did not make or approve, or from a codec patent. If the service becomes, or in our view is likely to become, the subject of such a claim, we may change it so that it does not infringe, obtain the right for you to keep using it, or end the affected part and refund fees paid for the period after it ends. This clause and the preceding one state the whole of silken's responsibility for intellectual property claims about the service. Your own obligations to silken for the URLs and content you submit are in section 05.
Codec patents
silken gives no indemnity for codec patents. Video codecs such as H.264 (AVC), H.265, VP9, AV1 and VVC are covered by patents held by licensing pools and individual companies, and the licences that matter are generally owed by the party that distributes or streams encoded video. silken encodes with the codecs you select, and does not defend you against, or pay, any claim that a codec, a codec standard or its use infringes a patent, nor does it take on any royalty or licence fee for them. You are responsible for any licence your own distribution of the output requires. This is the position of the large encoding providers generally.
Governing law.
Irish law, and the courts of Dublin.
These terms are governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of Ireland, without regard to its conflict-of-law provisions. The trademarks and the properties behind this service are owned by Velvet Software Limited, Dublin, Ireland.
Our failure to enforce a right or a provision of these terms is not a waiver of it. If a court holds any provision invalid or unenforceable, the remaining provisions stay in effect. These terms, together with the privacy policy and the acceptable use policy, are the entire agreement between us about the service, and they supersede any earlier agreement between us about it. If you have a signed order form or other written agreement with Velvet Software Limited, section 01 says how it relates to these terms.
The courts of Dublin, Ireland have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising out of or in connection with these terms, and each party submits to them. Either party may apply to any court for urgent relief to protect its confidential information or its intellectual property. These terms contain no arbitration clause and no class-action waiver.
Nothing in this section affects a mandatory right you have under the law that applies to you, and nothing in it limits where a consumer may be entitled to bring a claim in the courts of the place where the consumer lives.
When these terms change.
Thirty days for anything material, and every section has an address.
We may modify these terms. Where a revision is material, we publish it here at least 30 days before it takes effect. A change that is not material — a correction, a clarification, a link that moved — takes effect when it is published.
While a material revision is pending, this page carries both texts: the terms in force, marked as the ones that bind you today, and the revision beneath them with the date it takes effect. That date is its own, separate from the "last updated" date at the top — so a small correction made in the meantime moves the second and never the first. When the effective date passes, the superseded text comes down.
Publication is the notice, because publication is the only notice silken can give. The service sends no announcement mail for changes; the messages it sends are those described in section 03. So the 30 days are 30 days of the revised text being on this page before it binds you, not 30 days after something arrives in your inbox, and this clause says so rather than letting you assume you would be told.
Every numbered section has a stable anchor — #fees, #acceptable-use and so on — as do the named sub-clauses listed in the contents, so a clause can be linked to and quoted exactly, and a revision can be described precisely rather than as "the terms changed". Individual paragraphs and list items do not have anchors of their own.
Continuing to use silken after a change takes effect means you accept the revised terms. If you do not accept them, stop using the service and cancel as section 08 describes.
Changes to these terms are notified by publication on this page as described above. Changes to prices follow their own rule in section 08, which gives 60 days' notice. This page shows the terms in force and any pending revision; earlier revisions are not published at their own addresses. Where you have a signed order form, these terms change for you only as the order form provides.
Contact and complaints.
One address, and somewhere to go when the answer it gives you is not good enough.
Questions about these terms, about your account or about a specific job go to support@silken.io. Please include the job id where there is one; it lets us find the job.
If our answer does not settle it
Say so in the same email and ask for it to be escalated. An escalated complaint is handled by Velvet Software Limited at its registered office, 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, D02 AY28, Ireland. A question about an invoice, a payment or a refund is answered by us at that same address. Escalating costs you nothing and does not require a particular form of words.
None of this affects your right to dispute a card payment with your bank. Raising a complaint with us is not a precondition of doing so, and nothing in this agreement asks you to give that right up.
Do read what a dispute does to the account first: it suspends it, and clearing that suspension is the one thing no self-service route can do.
A copyright notice goes to that address too, but not in any form. Notices and counter-notices have to contain specific things before we can act on them, and what those are — together with what silken is and is not able to do about an infringement — is set out in the copyright policy.
How silken handles the data behind all of this is described in the privacy policy. The company you are corresponding with is Velvet Software Limited, of Dublin, Ireland, identified in full in section 01.