Terms of Use

01. Acceptance of Terms

By accessing, browsing, scraping, or utilizing any portion of Capitol Ledger (including the website hosted at capitolledger.org, pages.dev domains, and underlying JSON/API data feeds), you acknowledge that you have read, understood, and agreed to be legally bound by these Terms of Use and all applicable laws and regulations. If you do not agree with any of these terms, you are prohibited from using this platform.

02. Civic Purpose & Primary Source Integrity

Capitol Ledger is designed exclusively for civic accountability, transparency research, investigative journalism, and academic study. Our platform automatically aggregates publicly available records filed with:

• The Office of the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives;
• The United States Senate Office of Public Records;
• The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC EDGAR);
• The Federal Election Commission (FEC);
• The Senate Office of Public Records Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) database; and
• USAspending.gov prime award procurement records.

We do not alter, forge, or fabricate statutory disclosures. All records represent the information as officially recorded by the respective government reporting entity.

03. "As-Is" Data Provision & Latency Disclaimers

Capitol Ledger and all associated content are provided on an "as is" and "as available" basis without warranties of any kind, either express or implied, including but not limited to warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, or accuracy.

Government reporting systems frequently suffer from filing delays, OCR scanning artifacts, amended forms, and retroactively corrected data. While Capitol Ledger employs automated validation heuristics, we do not warrant that all records are complete, error-free, uninterrupted, or synchronized in real time with legislative or market movements.

04. Acceptable Use & Automated Access Guidelines

Users of Capitol Ledger agree to use the site and its data feeds responsibly. You agree that you will not:

• Deploy automated scripts, bots, or scrapers in an abusive manner that degrades site performance, overwhelms edge caches, or attempts Denial of Service (DoS) attacks;
• Attempt to circumvent security controls, rate limiters, or server firewall protections;
• Falsify, misattribute, or tamper with source filing metadata when reproducing Capitol Ledger graphs or indices;
• Use the platform for any unlawful, defamatory, harassing, or fraudulent purpose.

05. Intellectual Property & Open Data Licensing

Under United States copyright law, official government filings and public records produced by federal agencies remain in the public domain.

However, the proprietary software codebase, database schema architectures, algorithmic scoring heuristics (such as the Risk Index formulation and Contractor ROI ratios), responsive design assets, logos, and custom interface code of Capitol Ledger are protected by copyright, trademark, and intellectual property rights. You may reference, cite, and utilize data exports for non-commercial journalistic and educational use with proper attribution to Capitol Ledger.

06. Limitation of Liability

In no event shall Capitol Ledger, its creators, maintainers, contributors, or affiliated hosting providers be held liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages (including, without limitation, loss of capital, profits, business interruption, or loss of information) arising from the use of, or inability to use, the platform, even if advised of the possibility of such damages.

07. External Links & Third-Party References

The site provides outbound links to external third-party portals, including government databases (sec.gov, clerk.house.gov, senate.gov, usaspending.gov) and market data providers. Capitol Ledger exercises no editorial control over third-party domains and assumes no responsibility for their content, policies, or availability.