1. Acceptance
These Terms of Use govern your use of The Ontario Buzz website and content ("TONB", "we", "us"). By using the site you accept them. If you do not agree, do not use the site.
2. Our content
TONB publishes news, events, memes, and community stories for general information. We verify before publishing where possible, but we do not guarantee that content is complete, current, or error free, and content is not professional, legal, financial, or safety advice. In an emergency, call 911; do not rely on this site for emergency information. Event details can change after we publish them. Check with the organizer before you head out.
3. Corrections
When we get something wrong, we correct it visibly. If you spot an error, tell us through the contact page.
4. Intellectual property
The TONB name, logo, and original site content are owned by The Ontario Buzz. Submitted content remains the property of its creators, licensed to us under the Submission Terms. Site fonts are used under the SIL Open Font License. You may share links to our pages; do not republish substantial portions of our content without permission.
THE ONTARIO BUZZ, TONB, and our badge and wordmark are our trademarks. Do not use them, or anything confusingly similar, in a way that suggests we made your content or endorse you, without our written permission.
You are welcome to link to any page on this site. Do not frame or mirror our pages, hotlink our images or files so they load inside your own site, or present our content in a way that hides where it came from.
You may share our social posts using a platform's official share and embed tools for personal, non-commercial purposes, as long as the post stays unedited and credited to TONB. If we ask you to remove an embed, remove it.
5. Acceptable use
You agree not to misuse the site, including by attempting to disrupt it, scraping it (see section 20), misrepresenting your identity or affiliation with TONB, or using it for any unlawful purpose.
6. Submissions
Anything you send us is governed by the Submission Terms.
7. Third-party material and our role
A large part of what appears on this site and on our channels is material sent to us by members of the public. When we host and publish that material we do so in reliance on the promises the sender makes to us in the Submission Terms, which require the sender to confirm that they created the material and that it infringes nobody's rights.
We do not pre-screen or independently clear every item we receive, and we are not able to. Where we act as a provider of services related to the operation of the internet or a host of material stored at the direction of a user, we rely on the intermediary provisions of the Copyright Act (Canada), including sections 31.1 and 41.27. We act on properly made complaints promptly, as set out below. If you believe we have published something of yours, tell us and we will deal with it; we would rather fix it than argue about it.
8. Copyright complaints
We respect intellectual property rights and comply with Canada's notice-and-notice regime under the Copyright Act. If you own or control copyright in material published on this site or on our channels and you did not authorize its use, send a notice to hi@tonb.ca with the subject line "Copyright notice", including:
- your name, address, telephone number, and email address;
- identification of the work you own, and evidence of your ownership or authority to act for the owner;
- the exact location of the material you are complaining about, such as the page address or the post link;
- the date and time of the alleged infringement, if known;
- a statement that you believe in good faith that the use is not authorized by you, your agent, or the law; and
- a statement that the information in your notice is accurate.
On receiving a complete notice we will acknowledge it, forward it as required by law, and review the material. Where a complaint appears well founded we will normally remove or restrict access to the material while we review it, which is not an admission of liability. We will tell the person who submitted it and ask them to substantiate their rights. Knowingly sending a false or misleading notice may make you liable for the resulting damages.
9. If we removed something of yours
If your material was removed after a complaint and you believe the complaint was wrong, write to hi@tonb.ca with the subject line "Reinstatement request", identifying the material, explaining why you have the right to it, and providing the original file and the account or device it came from. We will consider the response and may restore the material. We are not obliged to restore anything, and we may decline to publish material that is the subject of an unresolved dispute.
10. Repeat infringers
We will stop accepting submissions from, and may block, any person who repeatedly sends us material they do not have the right to send. We keep a record of complaints for this purpose.
11. Privacy, personality, and other complaints
Not every complaint is about copyright. If you appear in published material and did not consent, if published material discloses your private information, if you say something published about you is inaccurate or defamatory, or if you have a safety concern, write to hi@tonb.ca with the subject line "Content complaint" and tell us what the material is and what the problem is. We will review it promptly on the same basis set out in section 8, and we may remove or restrict access to material while we do. Where a complaint raises a safety risk we will act first and review afterward.
12. Third-party links
The site links to third-party sites and platforms. We are not responsible for their content or practices.
13. Disclaimer of warranties
The site and its content are provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, express or implied, to the maximum extent permitted by law. We do not warrant that material submitted by others and published here is accurate, cleared, or free of third-party rights.
14. Limitation of liability
To the maximum extent permitted by the laws of Ontario, TONB and its operators are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for loss of profits, data, or goodwill, arising from your use of the site or from material published on it. Our total aggregate liability to you for all claims connected to the site is limited to one hundred Canadian dollars (CAD $100). Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law.
15. Indemnification
You agree to indemnify TONB against claims and reasonable costs arising from your breach of these terms or misuse of the site. If you send us material, the broader indemnity in section 13 of the Submission Terms also applies.
16. Disputes between users
If a dispute arises between you and another person over material published here, including who owns it or who appears in it, you resolve it between yourselves. We will cooperate with a lawful request for information and will act on a well founded complaint, but we are not a party to your dispute and do not adjudicate it.
17. Advertising and sponsored content
Advertising keeps TONB free to read. Some content on the site and on our channels is paid for by advertisers, including sponsored posts and partner features. When content is paid, we label it so you can tell it apart from our editorial work, and advertisers do not decide what our editorial content says. Your dealings with an advertiser, including anything you buy, are between you and them. We are not a party to those dealings and are not responsible for them.
18. Comments and interactions
The site itself does not host comments. On our social channels you can comment, message, and react, and we want you to. Keep it lawful and keep it decent: no harassment, hate, threats, sharing anyone's private information, spam, or pretending to be someone you are not. We may hide or delete comments, block or restrict accounts, and report serious conduct to the platform or to police. Each platform's own terms also apply to everything you do there.
19. Contests and promotions
We sometimes run contests, giveaways, and promotions. Each one has its own rules, posted with it, and those rules govern it. Unless the posted rules say otherwise: no purchase is necessary, entrants must be Ontario residents who have reached the age of majority, winners may need to answer a skill-testing question, and our decisions on entries and winners are final. Contests are void where prohibited by law, and social platforms do not sponsor or endorse them.
20. No scraping, no AI training
Our pages are for people. You may not use robots, scrapers, crawlers, or any other automated tool to collect content or data from the site, and you may not use our content, or allow anyone else to use it, to train, develop, fine-tune, or improve any artificial intelligence model, machine learning system, or similar technology. Both prohibitions apply however the content was obtained. Search engines may crawl the site for the sole purpose of directing readers to it. If you want to use our content for research or another automated purpose, ask first at hi@tonb.ca. We say this plainly because our work has value, and handing it to a machine without asking is taking it.
21. Accessibility
We want every Ontarian to be able to read TONB. We build the site with accessibility in mind and work toward the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. If something here is hard for you to use, tell us through the contact page and we will try to fix it, or to get you the content in a format that works for you.
22. Suspension and blocking
Most readers will never need this section. If you breach these terms, attack the site, or harass our team or our community, we may block your access to the site and our channels and refuse your submissions, without notice. The parts of these terms that should outlast your use of the site, including the licences, disclaimers, liability limits, and indemnities, survive any blocking, suspension, or termination.
23. Events beyond our control
We are not responsible for failures or delays caused by events beyond our reasonable control, including power or internet outages, hosting or platform failures, strikes, severe weather, or government action. If the site goes down, we will bring it back as soon as we reasonably can.
24. Notices
Legal notices to us must be sent by email to hi@tonb.ca. They take effect when they reach that inbox, and we will confirm receipt. Complaints under sections 8, 9, and 11 follow the steps in those sections. We give you notice by posting on the site or, where we have your email address, by emailing you. Routine questions belong on the contact page.
25. Changes
We may update these terms at any time by posting the revised version here. Continued use after changes means you accept them. The date at the top tells you when these terms last changed. If a change is significant, we will make it reasonably visible, such as a note on the home page.
26. Governing law
These terms are governed by the laws of the Province of Ontario and the federal laws of Canada applicable in Ontario. Disputes are subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of Ontario. The site is made in Ontario, for Ontario. If you use it from somewhere else, you are responsible for complying with your local laws.
27. General
If any provision of these terms is found unenforceable, the rest remain in effect. If we do not enforce a part of these terms right away, we are not giving up the right to enforce it later. You may not assign your rights or obligations under these terms. We may assign ours, for example if TONB changes ownership or corporate form, and these terms bind whoever takes over. These terms, the Submission Terms, and the Privacy Policy are the entire agreement between you and TONB about the site.