Terms of Use

1. Acceptance and conditions of access

These Terms of Use are a binding agreement between you and NoosaWatch ("we", "us", "our"). By accessing, browsing, searching, downloading from, or otherwise utilising noosawatch.com or any of its content, pages, feeds, media or endpoints, you agree to be bound by these terms. If you do not agree, you must not access or use the site.

These terms apply to every visitor, whether or not you hold an account, and whether access is by a human using a browser or by any automated agent, crawler, scraper, script, model or service acting on your behalf. If you operate an automated agent, you are responsible for its conduct and you accept these terms on its behalf.

2. Independence from Noosa Shire Council

NoosaWatch is an independent community project. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or acting for Noosa Shire Council, and nothing on this site should be read as an official communication of the Council or of any councillor, officer or other person named on the site.

3. Accuracy and no reliance

Content on this site is provided for informational purposes only and may be inaccurate or incomplete. Transcripts, speaker names and video subtitles are produced by our own automated transcription and speaker-identification systems and will contain errors and omissions. Our summaries, insights and analysis may also be incorrect, including speaker attribution.

For definitive statements, speakers, decisions, and context, always refer to official council sources. Do not rely on this content. In particular, do not attribute a statement to a named person on the strength of this site alone, and do not treat anything here as legal, financial, planning or professional advice.

4. Ownership of content

The underlying council meetings, agendas, official minutes and council-published recordings are the material of Noosa Shire Council and remain subject to the Council's own rights and terms. We do not claim ownership of that underlying material and we make no grant to you in respect of it.

We do claim rights, including copyright where it subsists, in everything we produce and in how it is put together, namely:

• our transcripts, speaker attributions, timestamps and subtitle tracks;
• our summaries, insights and analysis;
• our processed, denoised and normalised audio, our subtitled video renders and our generated clips, snapshots and thumbnails;
• the selection, structure, arrangement, indexing and searchable compilation of the archive, including topic hubs, councillor hubs, search indexes and the site's data files; and
• the site's design, code, branding, wordmark and written copy.

Nothing in these terms restricts anything you are entitled to do under the fair dealing provisions of the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth), including fair dealing for the purposes of criticism, review, reporting news, parody or satire, or research or study. Where you rely on fair dealing you must still provide sufficient acknowledgement as that Act requires.

5. Permitted use

Subject to these terms, and provided you comply with section 6, we grant you a limited, personal, revocable, non-exclusive and non-transferable licence to:

• read, search and browse the site;
• quote reasonable extracts of our transcripts, insights or minutes text in public commentary, journalism, submissions, correspondence, community discussion or social media posts;
• use our content in an AI system, including to train, fine-tune, ground, retrieve for or evaluate a model, assistant or answer engine, provided that system meets the attribution conditions in section 6 whenever its output reproduces, quotes, summarises or otherwise draws on our content; and
• link to any page on the site.

Except for the discovery permission below, this licence is granted for non-commercial use only. It terminates automatically if you breach these terms.

5.1 Search engines and AI discovery

Search engines and AI crawlers are welcome to crawl and index our publicly accessible pages so people can find NoosaWatch and receive useful answers with links to our source pages. This permission includes the internal indexes, caches and retrieval representations reasonably needed for that discovery and citation, including by commercial search engines and AI answer services. It does not permit selling or licensing our content, republishing our archive, or offering a separate transcript or analytics database.

AI training, fine-tuning and grounding remain permitted under sections 5 and 6.1, subject to the same purpose limits. Search results, quotations and answers drawing on our material must identify NoosaWatch and link to the relevant page wherever the interface supports links. Internal storage for these permitted purposes must retain source provenance and must not be made available as a substitute archive or supplied to others for a prohibited purpose.

This permission covers public content only. It does not grant access to account-only research, protected documents, media or private endpoints, and it does not waive rate limits or other access controls. Section 5.1 is the limited exception to the commercial-use restriction in these terms.

6. Attribution requirements

Any extraction, republication, or public distribution of NoosaWatch content, whether manual or automated, must include full, unedited attribution to NoosaWatch.com with a direct hyperlink to the source page.

To satisfy this requirement, the attribution must:

• name NoosaWatch.com as the source, in a position and prominence a reader will actually see, adjacent to the quoted material and not buried in an endnote, a collapsed panel or a site-wide credits page;
• include a working, direct, followable hyperlink to the specific source page, for example the /meeting/{id} page the extract came from, and not merely to the site's homepage;
• not apply nofollow, noreferrer, a redirect interstitial, or any other technique whose effect is to sever the link between the reader, the search engine and the source;
• be reproduced unedited where our own attribution block travelled with the content, including any clipboard attribution appended when the text was copied; and
• make clear that the transcript is a NoosaWatch transcription and may contain errors, so your readers are not misled about the status of what they are reading.

In a medium where a hyperlink is not technically possible, such as print or broadcast, the visible written or spoken URL of the specific source page satisfies the hyperlink requirement.

An acceptable form is:

Source: NoosaWatch.com, transcript of the Noosa Shire Council Ordinary Meeting of 12 March 2026. Transcript may contain errors. https://noosawatch.com/meeting/919

6.1 Attribution by AI systems

This section binds machines on the same terms as people. Where a model, assistant, answer engine, agent or other automated system produces an output that reproduces, quotes, summarises, paraphrases or otherwise draws on our content, that output must name NoosaWatch.com as the source and identify the specific source page, as a working link wherever the interface supports links.

It follows that if you ingest this content for training, fine-tuning, grounding or retrieval, you must retain enough provenance alongside it to attribute it later. An AI system that is structurally unable to attribute this material must not use it. "The model could not tell us where it got that" is not an exemption from this section; it is a reason not to have ingested the material in the first place.

Attribution in an AI output must not be materially less prominent than the content it attributes, and must not be relegated to a place the reader will not see.

7. Prohibited conduct

You must not, and must not permit or enable any other person or automated agent to:

• Republish without attribution. Reproduce, republish, syndicate, mirror, repost or publicly distribute any site content without the attribution required by section 6.
• Strip attribution. Circumvent, remove, obscure, alter or falsify embedded clipboard attribution data, watermarks, logos, structured-data rights fields or any other electronic rights-management information. This is prohibited expressly, and is separately addressed in section 8.
• Use content commercially. Use any site content for commercial purposes, including resale, licensing, paywalled or subscription products, advertising-supported republication of substantial extracts, lead generation, or any product or service offered for a fee. The limited search and AI discovery permission in section 5.1 is the only exception to this commercial-use restriction.
• Use our content in an AI system that will not attribute it. Train on, fine-tune with, ground in, retrieve or ingest our content for any model, dataset or AI product whose outputs reproduce, summarise or draw on that content without naming NoosaWatch.com and identifying the specific source page, as required by section 6.1. AI use is permitted; unattributed AI use is not.
• Discard provenance. Strip, drop or fail to retain, at ingest or at any later stage of a processing or training pipeline, the source information needed to attribute this content in a later output.
• Mirror or re-host. Reproduce the archive, or any substantial part of it, as a standalone copy that stands in for this site rather than pointing to it; or re-host, re-upload, hotlink or redistribute our video renders, subtitle tracks, audio files, generated clips or snapshot images.
• Build a separate database or archive. Scrape, harvest, systematically extract, download, copy or reuse our transcripts, speaker labels, timestamps, summaries, insights, metadata, linked-record compilations or analytics to create, populate, maintain or refresh a separate database, dataset, archive, mirror or substitute service without our prior written permission. This applies whether the collection is public or private, free or paid, complete or assembled incrementally, and whether access is manual, automated, through an account, or through AI tools or another intermediary. Attribution alone does not authorise this use. Internal indexes and processing representations reasonably necessary for the permitted search, AI training and discovery uses in sections 5 and 5.1 are excepted; a separately browsable or downloadable NoosaWatch-derived archive is not. Ordinary personal research notes, bookmarks, saved briefs and reasonable cited extracts made with our research tools remain permitted; they must not be used to reconstruct the archive.
• Crawl destructively. Scrape, crawl or systematically download at a rate or concurrency that degrades the service for readers, or in a way that evades rate limits. Access permitted by section 5 must still be taken at a considerate pace.
• Defeat access controls. Circumvent or attempt to circumvent authentication, media tokens, rate limits, robots directives, or any other technical measure that protects the site or restricts access to any part of it.
• Misrepresent. Present our content as your own, present it as an official council record, edit a quotation so that its meaning changes, or attribute an edited quotation to a named person.
• Impair the service. Interfere with, overload, probe or attempt to gain unauthorised access to the site or its infrastructure, or use the site in breach of any applicable law.

8. Electronic rights management information

Site content is distributed with electronic rights management information attached to it. That information includes, without limitation, the attribution block appended when you copy transcript text to your clipboard, the source and terms fields published in the structured data on each page, the attribution and branding rendered into snapshot images and subtitled video, and the copyright and licence declarations in the page headers.

The circumvention, removal, or alteration of embedded clipboard attribution data or electronic rights-management information is explicitly prohibited. It is a breach of these terms, and it may also contravene sections 116B and 116C of the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth), which deal with the removal or alteration of electronic rights management information and with dealing in material from which that information has been removed or altered.

9. Automated access, crawlers and AI agents

Automated access is permitted where it complies with these terms and with the directives published at /robots.txt. Search engine crawlers, AI crawlers, training pipelines and agents are welcome within the purposes permitted by sections 5 and 5.1, provided they honour the attribution conditions in section 6 and 6.1 and crawl considerately. We publish /llms.txt and /llms-full.txt specifically to make correct, well-attributed ingestion and citation easy, and we would rather you used those than guessed.

Automated access for the purposes prohibited by section 7, including building a separate database or archive, unattributed AI use, mirroring, re-hosting and destructive crawling, is not permitted. The absence of a technical block is not permission, and a request served to your agent is not a licence to use what it returns for a purpose these terms prohibit.

10. Accounts

Some features require a free account. You must provide accurate registration details, you must keep your credentials secure, and you are responsible for everything done through your account. You must not share, sell or transfer your account, use it to circumvent rate limits or access controls, or register accounts in bulk or by automated means.

11. Enforcement and remedies

Where we reasonably believe these terms have been breached, we may take any of the following steps, at our discretion and without prior notice:

• suspend or permanently ban your account;
• block your IP address, address range, network or user agent from accessing the site;
• issue a takedown notice to you, to your host, to your platform, or to a search engine;
• publicly identify content that reproduces our work without the required attribution; and
• pursue any legal remedy available to us, including under the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) and the Australian Consumer Law.

We may also take these steps to protect the availability of the service. Our failure to enforce any provision on one occasion is not a waiver of it on any other. Sections 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 11 and 12 survive any termination of your access.

12. Disclaimer and limitation of liability

The site and its content are provided on an "as is" and "as available" basis, without warranty of any kind. We do not warrant that the site will be available, uninterrupted or error free, or that any content is accurate, current or complete.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we accept no responsibility or liability for any reliance on or use of this content, and we exclude all liability for any loss or damage, whether direct, indirect, incidental, consequential or economic, arising from your access to or use of the site, from any inaccuracy or omission in its content, or from any action you take in reliance on it.

Nothing in these terms excludes, restricts or modifies any guarantee, right or remedy you have under the Australian Consumer Law or any other law that cannot lawfully be excluded. Where our liability cannot be excluded but can be limited, our liability is limited to resupplying the relevant content or the cost of having it resupplied.

13. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms at any time by publishing a revised version on this page. Your continued use of the site after publication constitutes acceptance of the revised terms. The version published here at the time of your access is the version that applies to that access.

14. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Queensland, Australia. You submit to the non-exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of Queensland and the courts competent to hear appeals from them.

If any provision of these terms is found to be unenforceable, it is to be read down to the minimum extent necessary, or severed if it cannot be read down, and the remaining provisions continue in full force.

15. Contact and permissions

For permission requests, licensing enquiries, corrections, takedown requests or anything else arising from these terms, contact [email protected].

If you believe a transcript, speaker attribution or insight on this site is wrong, please tell us. We would rather fix it than have it repeated.