Terms of service
This page describes the service and the conditions on which it is provided. The parts that bind still have to be approved by whoever answers for them, and until they are, this page declares them missing instead of filling them in.
The status of this document
These terms are not yet in force.
The binding text has not yet been drafted or approved. What follows is the structure, with the facts the system already enforces inside it. While it stays this way, none of the acceptance boxes on the site can produce a valid acceptance, and this has to be resolved before the service opens to the public.
Who provides the service
Company name, registered office, VAT number, company register entry and the address for notices are missing. They are the same details missing from the privacy policy and from the foot of every page.
What the service is
Artheia keeps a register of declarations of authorship. The author of a work declares that they are its author, Artheia checks their identity, collects the photographs and the data of the work, and binds the signed declaration to a chip applied to the object.
Authorship is declared by the author, not established by Artheia. Artheia carries out no expert appraisals and expresses no opinion on the authenticity or the value of a work.
The exact list of what the service proves and of what it does not prove has a page of its own, and it is part of these conditions.
The nature of the serviceThe obligations of whoever declares
Whoever registers a work takes on three responsibilities, and they are theirs, not Artheia’s.
The truth of what they declare
The data of the work, the authorship and every other piece of information entered are declared under their own responsibility. Artheia checks that the filing is complete and consistent, not that it is true.
The rights in the images uploaded
Whoever uploads a photograph declares that they have the right to use it and to allow it to be published on the record of the work.
Signing
The confirmation given on the platform before filing is a confirmation of having read the declaration, and is not a signature. The actual signature is applied after approval, on a document Artheia prepares, and it is applied outside Artheia at the trust service provider chosen by whoever signs.
The consequences of an untruthful declaration are missing, and they have to be written inside the declaration itself, not only here: whoever declares must know what they are risking at the moment they declare. It is the cheapest defence of all, because it acts before rather than after.
The gallery mandate
A gallery can declare on behalf of an artist only after filing a mandate and having it approved. The mandate is filed as a PDF document, together with the VAT number, and a person at Artheia examines it: there is no automatic approval, and a refusal always carries a written reason.
Until approval, the account remains an artist account and cannot declare for anyone else. A work declared under a mandate stays visible both to the gallery and to the artist it was declared for.
What the mandate must attest in order to be accepted is missing, and so are how long it lasts and what happens to works already declared if it is withdrawn.
What Artheia does not guarantee
- That a work is authentic, or that it can be attributed to whoever declares it. Artheia records a declaration, it does not check its substance.
- The value of a work, in any form and at any time.
- The absence of copies. The chip cannot be duplicated without its keys, but Artheia does not detect the existence of a duplicate and would not notice one.
- That the signing applied to the document is effective. Artheia checks that the document returned contains the draft unchanged, not who signed it.
- Continuity of service, retention of files beyond what the privacy policy states, and the working order of the chips applied to objects, which are physical things and do break.
Suspension of accounts and revocation of certificates
Suspension of an account
A suspended account loses access to the whole platform for as long as the suspension lasts. Works already published stay public: suspension concerns whoever operates, not what has been registered.
Revocation of a certificate
A revoked certificate stays readable, and reads as revoked: the chip stays bound to that work and keeps answering, saying that the certificate has been revoked. Revocation cannot be undone, and there is no route that brings a revoked certificate back to what it was. Correcting an already published certificate means revoking it and registering a new one.
The page of a revoked certificate is a public statement about a work and about whoever declared it.
The procedure is missing: who can ask for a revocation, how it is decided, what the public page may say without harming whoever declared, and in which cases an account is suspended. It is the only act of the platform that can harm a third party, and today it has no written procedure.
Liability, governing law, jurisdiction
Limits of liability, governing law and jurisdiction are missing. So is the position of whoever buys a work: they are not a customer of Artheia, the contract is with whoever declares, and what they can claim and from whom has to be settled.
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