Effective date: 2026-09-27
This license governs contributions to GrailSociety, operated by GrailSociety LLC, a limited liability company with its principal address at 4030 Wake Forest Road, Ste 349, Raleigh, NC 27609, US. It supplements the Terms of Service and applies only when you expressly select identifiable content for contribution and accept this license. Our Privacy Policy continues to apply to personal information. Get in touch: hello@grailsociety.co, or reach the operator through our Legal & Privacy contact page.
1. What you are contributing
A "Contribution" consists of the specific collectible photos and reference information you select for the shared catalog. A contribution can include title, year, manufacturer, set, subject, item number, parallel, condition-related descriptions, and other submitted reference details. It excludes your private messages, identity or possession evidence, private collection notes, unrelated profile content, and photo metadata that is not needed for the catalog.
The contribution interface identifies the selected files and records your permission. Taking a photo, saving a private draft, adding an item to your collection, or accepting the general Terms alone does not submit all your files under this license. Existing reference images with narrower or undocumented permissions do not automatically receive this license.
2. Ownership and the license you grant
You retain any copyright or other intellectual property rights you own in the Contribution. In exchange for our making the contribution feature and related Service available to you, you grant GrailSociety a nonexclusive, worldwide, fully paid-up, royalty-free, transferable license, sublicensable through multiple tiers, to use the Contribution for the purposes below, in any existing or future media or technical format.
To the fullest extent permitted by law, the license is perpetual for the duration of the rights you can license and irrevocable except where mandatory law or an express written agreement requires otherwise. You may continue using your own photos and licensing them to others. You do not assign ownership of the collectible, the manufacturer's artwork, or someone else's rights.
3. Commercial uses expressly included
The license permits us and authorized sublicensees to:
- Host, archive, reproduce, display, publish, communicate, distribute, crop, resize, restore presentation, remove backgrounds, annotate, translate, and create derivative reference images and records.
- Combine Contributions with other lawfully obtained material to build, maintain, enrich, and improve catalogs, image libraries, search indexes, recognition datasets, and data products.
- Make Contributions available individually or in collections through paid or free APIs, data feeds, downloadable datasets, reference-image libraries, integrations, syndicated catalogs, and other commercial products.
- License those uses to marketplaces, collecting applications, catalog providers, researchers, technology companies, and other business customers for their own permitted catalog, identification, search, analytics, and product-display functions.
- Develop, train, evaluate, and improve systems for collectible identification, label reading, edition matching, image-quality assessment, catalog search, and related collectible data services, including with partners authorized for those purposes. This does not authorize facial recognition or sale of private user information as training data, or an unrestricted general-purpose AI training license unrelated to collectibles.
- Promote GrailSociety and its catalog or data services through demonstrations, advertising, social media, presentations, and other marketing, without representing that you endorse an unrelated product.
- Transfer the Contribution license with the business or relevant assets and permit successive sublicensees to exercise the rights granted here within the same scope and restrictions.
We may charge for these uses and retain the resulting revenue without compensation, revenue sharing, accounting, or royalties to you unless we separately agree otherwise in writing. This license does not give you ownership in our database or business. Attribution is not guaranteed unless required by law or an express agreement. We will not intentionally misattribute authorship. To the extent legally permitted, you consent to the described modifications and agree not to assert waivable moral rights to prevent those authorized uses; nonwaivable rights remain unaffected.
4. Limits and your confirmation
You confirm that you took the photos or otherwise have authority to grant this commercial license, and that the reference information is honestly provided. If someone else owns the photography, obtain permission that covers the uses above. Do not contribute content subject to an incompatible marketplace, API, photographer, or database restriction. This standard contribution flow accepts the license as written; adding a note does not change its scope. If you need different restrictions, do not submit through this flow. A separate written agreement and a separate rights-review process must be established first.
You grant only rights you own or can authorize. Card artwork, package art, logos, athlete likenesses, and similar third-party material may require additional analysis or permission for particular downstream uses. We and our partners must independently respect those rights. This license is not evidence that every depicted element has been cleared, that a photo is independently copyrightable, or that the collectible is authentic.
Do not include private addresses, receipts, contact details, faces of bystanders, or private verification material in a reference contribution. Printed numbers inside a photo may remain visible; confirm that the selected image is appropriate for public and commercial reference use. Private original files and their EXIF data are not included unless a separate contribution screen expressly identifies a sanitized reference file derived from the original for contribution. The default contribution is the selected display derivative, with identifying metadata removed by our image processing.
5. Review, persistence, and removal
Submission does not guarantee publication or a reward. We can reject, edit, merge, replace, or remove a Contribution, and we can correct or reverse an award. We retain a record of the selected file, license version, scope, and acceptance to document our authority.
An accepted catalog reference can remain in the shared catalog and licensed products after you remove your personal copy, make your profile private, or delete your account. Previously issued valid sublicenses are not terminated solely by those actions. This continued license is for the Contribution; it is not an indefinite right to keep using your private account information.
Use our Legal & Privacy contact page for a mistaken contribution, infringement, privacy concern, or removal request. We will investigate and remove or restrict material where required by law or justified by the evidence. We may also choose to honor other requests. Where downstream action is legally required, we will take appropriate steps with affected licensees; we cannot promise to retrieve every independently distributed copy. Mandatory copyright termination, privacy, consumer, and other legal rights take precedence over any contrary wording here.
6. Data protection and successors
Catalog product licenses do not authorize selling our member email list, private holdings, messages, verification evidence, or account-linked behavioral profiles. We may separate catalog references from an account and retain limited permission records to substantiate rights, resolve disputes, and honor restrictions. Removing a public attribution does not necessarily make an image or its associated record anonymous.
If personal information would be included in a proposed new distribution, we will apply the Privacy Policy, appropriate legal grounds, required notices and choices, and any applicable opt-out or deletion obligations before that distribution. A successor to GrailSociety receives only the rights and obligations we can transfer, including these restrictions. The Terms govern issues not specifically covered here.