Plain English Foundation

User terms

11 August 2022

Plain English Foundation Pty Ltd (PEF/we/our/us) owns and runs the www.plainenglishfoundation.com website (our website/site).

As a website user (you/your), you agree to:

these User terms, including our disclaimers
our Copyright policy and intellectual property terms
our Privacy policy.

You accept our terms, policies and disclaimers when you use our site and buy or use our products, so please read them carefully. If you don’t agree with them, please don’t use our site.

Amendments apply from the date we publish them, so please also check our terms and conditions before you buy or use our products.

These terms have the following sections:

What is a registered user?
How can I use your training and skills test material?
How do I make a purchase?
What fees apply when I buy, change or cancel training?
What are the rules for site conduct?
What happens if I post or comment on the site?
What are the disclaimers?
What about liability and indemnity?
Any feedback or complaints?

1. What is a registered user?

Securely accessing our products and site

When you're a registered site user, you will have an account and sign into our site to:

buy our products
access restricted areas of the site
download or view our writing tools and other resources we make available to you
download or view our online products and offers.

Keeping your account confidential

We need some basic information from you, like an email address, to set up your account. Our Privacy policy explains how we will handle any information we collect.

You'll also have a user password, which you'll need to keep confidential.

You cannot assign or transfer your user rights or obligations.

Using a corporate account

You must keep your corporate account code and linked user account details secure.

We are not liable for any loss or damages if someone other than you uses your account, except to the extent that we contributed to this misuse. Loss or damages could include the loss of funds in a corporate account linked to your user account. If any loss or damage occurs and we accept that we contributed to it, our liability is limited to the value of the lost funds.

Having a corporate account does not change any of these User terms.

2. How can I use your training and skills test material?

Understanding our copyright

We own the intellectual property rights in our Getting to the point^® training material, Writing Skills Test, free writing tools and other resources, unless these state otherwise.

We also cover this in more detail in our:

Intellectual property rights means all intellectual and commercial property rights throughout the world including:

copyright
trademarks whether registered or unregistered
designs and patents
the right to keep confidential information confidential
know-how and trade secrets, whether or not now existing
registered or registrable related applications, including the right to apply to register such rights and all renewals and extensions.

Our training intellectual property (IP) is for personal use only

When you buy a public training enrolment, we will supply the enrolled participant with related training material when they attend the training workshop. As part of your purchase agreement with us, you agree that you and/or your participant will:

only use our training material to participate in the training and for subsequent personal reference
not screenshot, copy, record, stream, distribute or assign our training material in any form to another person or entity.

We grant you and/or the participant a non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to use our Getting to the point® training material only:

to participate in the training that you purchased from us
for subsequent personal reference.

You cannot use our IP for anything other than personal reference

This licence does not give you and/or your participant the right to amend or adapt our training material for any commercial or other purposes including:

printing, changing, repurposing or adapting it
using it to develop any work or product with the same primary function
quoting from it
referring to it without attributing our ownership to us unless it is impracticable to do so
communicating or publishing it to a third party, including the public, you and/or your participant's employer or a related body
recording, taking screenshots of it, photographing or streaming it in any domain
posting it on a website or on social media
displaying it on a screen for training or instruction
adding it to a database
manufacturing or selling it, or hiring it out
otherwise exploiting it or performing an act that would infringe our intellectual property rights.

If you breach our terms or policies, we can cancel your site registration and take action against you for breaching our intellectual property ownership rights.

Also see our Copyright policy and intellectual property terms.

3. How do I make a purchase?

You have 2 options for buying online.

Option 1: Pay by credit card – for immediate purchase

A credit card payment will allow you to immediately:

enrol in and buy a confirmed place in a public training workshop on an available date
buy a Getting to the point® Writing Skills Test.

We take Visa and Mastercard payments. The merchant transaction fee for a credit card payment is currently 3%, although this may change over time.

We use the site to process electronic payments for our products, but we don't store your credit card details on our site or make them public. Our security controls protect our site from unauthorised access.

We also protect communication between your computer and our site with SSL encryption (shown as a padlock icon on your browser).

Option 2: Pay by electronic funds transfer (EFT) – for organisations who open a corporate account and purchase on invoice payment

This is a 2-step process. First you need to open a corporate account, which allows us to issue you an invoice to pay a deposit.

Once the invoice is paid, you can use the corporate account to:

enrol in and buy a confirmed place in a public training workshop on an available date
buy a Getting to the point® Writing Skills Test.

How a corporate account works

Log in to your user account.
Go to the My account page.
Give us your organisation information, including an ABN and full billing details.
Apply for a corporate account, which allows you to generate an invoice for a value you nominate – be sure to include the GST.
When your corporate account is approved, we will send you a notification confirming the approval and a tax invoice for your selected purchase.
You pay this invoice.
Once we receive your payment, we credit your corporate account (which you can see in your user account) and notify you that funds are available to use.
You can then log into our Store as a registered user and buy the product/s and choose the corporate account payment option at checkout.

Only our own terms and conditions apply for all online purchases

Your organisation's own purchase order terms and conditions do not apply to any of our online products. Only our site terms and conditions apply. We cover this in:

4. What fees apply when I buy, change or cancel training?

We apply the goods and services tax (GST) on all our services to Australia-based customers. GST is an extra 10% on our stated prices and will be added before you finalise your purchase.

If the Australian organisation you represent is GST exempt, then it can claim a refund of any GST paid to us from the Australian Taxation Office.

Prices are shown in Australian dollars and are correct when published, but we may change them at any time. You pay the price as published on our Store page when we process your payment.

When you buy a product from our Store

The total amount you need to pay will include GST.
We will add your purchase details to your user account.
We will issue a tax invoice/receipt (that you can also view or print from your user account).
We will email your enrolment confirmation.

You must pay in full when you place an order. If you pay by credit card and the bank or card issuer does not receive or declines your payment, your order may be cancelled. If we issue you an invoice for payment that you do not pay by the due date, any ensuing payment you make may attract a subsequent fee. If so, we will advise you of this.

When an extra service administration fee can apply

We charge a service administration fee of $120 plus GST for each extra or non-standard service request we process for you. If a fee applies, we will tell you.

Changing a public training enrolment

You can change or cancel a public training enrolment up to 3 weeks beforehand and if an advertised optional date is available on our Store. But if you want to change it after then, we will apply a service administration fee.

Types of changes that we charge a service administration fee for include, but are not limited to you:

rebooking an enrolled participant on another workshop date
replacing one enrolled participant with another enrolled on a different date
cancelling an enrolment at any time.

You can replace one enrolled participant with another up to 5 working days before the training event at no cost. We will charge a service administration fee for replacements less than 5 working days before the event.

We do not rebook or refund no-shows. So please always contact us before the workshop if you are not going to attend for any reason.

A merchant fee also applies for a credit card transaction for each service administration fee.

Cancelling a public training enrolment

If you cancel a public training enrolment:

15 or less business days from the workshop date: there is no refund and we charge a service administration fee per enrolment
16 to 31 business days before the workshop date: we refund 50% of your payment, less a service administration fee per enrolment and any applicable merchant transaction fee
32 or more business days before the workshop date: we refund your payment, less a service administration fee per enrolment and any applicable merchant transaction fee.

In the rare event that we cancel a workshop, we’ll give you a full refund.

To cancel a booking, please contact us.

5. What are the rules for site conduct?

Avoiding harmful content

You agree that you will not use our site to upload, post, email or otherwise transmit:

content that is illegal, threatening, abusive, defamatory, libellous, harmful, obscene, actionable or legally objectionable
content that invades PEF's or another's privacy
content that breaches intellectual property rights, including PEF's or another’s patents, trademarks, trade secrets, moral rights, copyright or publicity
unsolicited promotional material, junk mail, spam, chain letters, pyramid schemes, or political campaigning material
content with software viruses or computer codes, files or programs designed to interrupt, destroy, limit, compromise, delay or divert the functionality of ICT software or hardware.

Protecting our site's functionality

You also cannot:

copy, store or host material with, or linked to, malicious computer software such as spyware, computer viruses, Trojan horses, worms, keystroke loggers or rootkits
subvert our website functionality or not follow its requirements, procedures and policies or those of the networks it’s connected to
do any systematic or automated data collection like scraping or data mining, extraction and harvesting without our written consent.

Using email appropriately

In supplying our email addresses on our site, we do not consent to you sending unsolicited emails to us.

You also cannot:

use a false email address, impersonate any person or entity on our website, or otherwise mislead others as to the origin of our website content
falsely state or misrepresent an affiliation with us or another
harass our executive, our staff or another user of our website
impersonate a person or an entity, including impersonating our executive, affiliates, staff, contributors, independent contractors, representatives, third party content providers and licensors.

6. What happens if I post or comment on the site?

Managing your content

You agree that:

you own or control the rights to any content you post on our site
the content is accurate
the content doesn’t breach our terms.

If you post anything on any public areas of our site, that gives us a non-exclusive, royalty free, perpetual, irrevocable right and license (and consent) to use, reproduce, adapt, publish, translate, distribute, display and remove that content.

Monitoring posted content

We may not regularly review posted content. We can monitor our site, including any forum, but you agree that we are not obliged to do this.

We’re not obliged to keep any public postings, comments or entries confidential. We’re also not liable for any such use or disclosure worldwide.

Submitting content as a registered user

User content is material you submit to our website like a document, text or image. We can remove such material without telling you.

You cannot submit material to our website that is or has been the subject of any threatened or actual legal proceedings or other similar complaint.

Linking to our site

Please contact us if you’d like to link to our site. However, you can’t use our trademarks unless we agree in writing.

You also can’t modify our website, or frame or reformat its files, pages, images, information and materials on another site.

We’re not liable for, and you indemnify us against, any loss, damage or expense from you linking to our website.

We can stop linking by letting you know we’re going to do so.

7. What are the disclaimers?

Using the site at your own risk

You use our website at your own risk. While we make every effort to ensure our site material is current, accurate and reliable, we cannot guarantee this and are not liable if it is not. We also don't endorse material on a linked or mentioned site.

We can change our site at any time, even if it means you will need to change your equipment to access it.

We’re not liable for any loss or damage of any kind, however caused (including by negligence), through you using our site and its products and material.

We're also not liable if your computer system, software or data is damaged or interfered with because you use our site.

This disclaimer applies to PEF, our executive, affiliates, staff, contributors, independent contractors, representatives, third party content providers and licensors of our website content, products and services.

Accepting loss or damage

This disclaimer covers loss or damage because:

you rely on our website and any third party material to be suitable, accurate and reliable
there is a website failure, error, omission, interruption, deletion or defect; we do not correct a defect; a computer virus or a component causes damage; or data is lost
there is a delay in site operation or transmission, or a communication line fails
issues arise from e-commerce transactions such as wrong credit card details, unpaid corporate account invoices or otherwise incomplete or delayed transactions.

It also covers loss or damage because:

a third party acts illegally, such as by hacking, stealing, destroying content, or accessing or altering records
you access a third party site or server through our email or website (linking to a third party like a social media site is at your own risk)
a third party's conduct is defamatory, threatening, offensive or illegal, or material is published about or causes such conduct
we breach our Privacy policy, other than doing so wilfully.

8. What about liability and indemnity?

Accepting liability

Our total liability to you (if any) under our website terms and conditions for loss, damage or reliance is limited to resupplying our website information or the resupply of any faulty products you buy through our site.

We are not liable for a product or service we supply to you for free or if you buy a product that does not suit your needs.

We will not be liable for lost profits, lost data, business interruption or other damages including consequential, special or indirect damages.

Indemnifying us against loss

You agree that you indemnify us from and against any action, liability, cost, loss and damage (including legal fees) that you, we or a third party suffers because you or your agents:

breach our website terms, disclaimers and policies
infringe our intellectual property rights or those of a third party linked on our website
have a dispute with a third party from using our website
break the Australian laws and regulations that apply.

Complying with the law

The laws of New South Wales and Australia govern our terms and policies. If any part of them is found to be invalid or unenforceable, it will be removed without affecting the rest.

9. Any feedback or complaints?

Please contact us with any comments or complaints. We really appreciate your feedback.