1. Description of Service

aka-aki (www.aka-aki.com, www.aka-aki.de, www.aka-aki.net) is an interactive online and mobile service provided by aka-aki networks GmbH (referred to in following as aka-aki, the Operator, we/us). The operator provides users of the aka-aki service with access to a technical platform for the exchange of data on the Internet via a suitable mobile end device.
The service includes, but is not limited to, services in the area of mobile communication through which users are given the opportunity to register, create a profile, publish information about themselves that is visible to all other users of the service, create or join groups (based on so-called “stickers”), invite friends to these groups, search for other users within groups, publish information about themselves on their own mobile telephone for others to access, provided a certain spatial proximity between the mobile phone users exists.
Members may view the profiles of other members and contact them. Certain data pertaining to the contact established between members is stored and made accessible to the users.
aka-aki is exclusively intended for personal-private use by its members and must not be used for commercial purposes unless this has been explicitly consented to by aka-aki in writing.

2. Validity of these Terms of Service

2.1. Terms of Service

These General Terms of Service shall apply exclusively in their respective current version, including our Data Protection Notice and the Appendix “Member Conduct, Prohibited Activities and Content on the aka-aki Network” (together with these Terms of Service) to the relationship between us and the users of aka-aki.
With the use of, and your registration with, aka-aki, you declare your agreement with these Terms of Service. It is therefore important that you read through these Terms of Service carefully. You can view and print out these Terms of Service anytime at http://www.aka-aki.com/info/tos.
If you do not agree to these Terms of Service, you must immediately leave the aka-aki site and immediately discontinue use of aka-aki. In order to utilise specific services of aka-aki, it is possible that you will also need to download software or content and/or agree to additional Terms of Service.

2.2. Changes in the Terms of Service From time to time, we might need to adapt the Terms of Service to new developments in legislation, jurisdiction, technology, our service and/or for other reasons. We shall announce all changes on the aka-aki website, and members of aka-aki will also be notified of changes to the Terms of Service directly after logging on. The use of aka-aki after the announcement of changes will then be subject to the new/modified Terms of Service.
If you should not agreed to the changes in the Terms of Service, you must immediately terminate your membership with aka-aki. By continuing to use aka-aki after the expiry of one month following the announcement of such changes to the Terms of Service, you consent to the modified Terms of Service. Therefore, please regularly inform yourself about the valid Terms of Service.

3. Membership and Cancellation; Deletion of your Data

Only the following people may become a member of aka-aki:

• anyone who has truthfully provided all required details within the context of the registration process,
• anyone whose use of aka-aki does not violate any valid laws or regulations and
• anyone who acknowledges these Terms of Service and commits to their compliance. Members are only permitted to use their own account/their own profile, user name and/or password and may not give these details to other persons (members or third parties) for use, or disclose their account details (password) to any third party. The respective member shall exclusively be responsible for his or her account use and for maintaining password confidentiality. Please also refer to our Data Protection Notice.
  Each member shall be obligated to immediately notify aka-aki of any suspicion regarding the unauthorised use of an account, access or a password.
  The user is entitled to cancel membership at any time, without providing reasons, in the menu “my aka-aki > membership” by clicking on the “delete my profile” button. With the cancellation, the entire dataset stored for the user’s profile will be fully deleted or, if further storage by aka-aki is legally stipulated for a specific time period, it will be blocked and then deleted. The user relationship will thereby end.

4. Fees

4.1 Registration, membership and the use of aka-aki are free of charge.

4.2 For accessing and using aka-aki, the standard connection rates of the user’s respective telecommunications suppliers, e.g. Internet or mobile communications provider, are applicable.

5. Use of Data and Data Protection

Please refer to our separate privacy policy.

6. Liability of aka-aki

6.1 aka-aki shall not be held liable for content published by users or any other publications/disclosures by its users; this particularly applies to cases in which the content uploaded by users violates ancillary copyrights (e.g. trademark rights, copyrights, etc.) or the personal rights of third parties. This non-liability also applies to the content of Internet sites, which have been linked to by users of aka-aki.
As soon as we become aware of illegal offers/contents/activities on aka-aki or linked sites, we shall undertake all technically and financially possible and feasible measures in order to prevent such activity. However, due to the open character of aka-aki, which has constantly changing offers and contents, an ongoing control of the offers/contents on aka-aki or linked sites is not possible or reasonable for us unless any concrete indications of legal violation have been called to our attention. If you should notice such illegal contents, you can report it to us by using the appropriate button on the profile page and the sticker profile page.

6.2 aka-aki shall not be held liable for the accuracy, completeness, precision and content of the details provided by its users in the registration/profile data of the users or for any other content on aka-aki which has been generated by users.

6.3 aka-aki shall not be held liable for commercial, physical or intangible losses resulting from the use of this networking and communication platform, to the extent that the loss is not verifiably due to deliberate action or gross negligence by aka-aki or its employees. aka-aki shall not assume any liability for the possible misuse of information.

6.4 aka-aki shall always endeavour to ensure proper operation of the aka-aki network at all times. However, aka-aki shall not be held liable for the disrupted usability/accessibility of aka-aki or for any technical transmission delays or failures. A temporary disruption of the aka-aki service can result, for example, through technical interferences or necessary maintenance work.

6.5 aka-aki shall not be held liable for the unauthorised access to personal data by third parties (e.g. through any unauthorised access to the database). aka-aki shall also not be held liable for the details and information users have made accessible to third parties themselves, which are subsequently misused by these third parties.

6.6. Each user must solely assess and bear the risk associated with the use of contents, including the risks resulting from his or her relying on the accuracy, completeness or usability of content for his or her purposes. To this extent, the user acknowledges that he or she cannot rely on content that has been created by aka-aki or provided by other users or third parties to aka-aki.

7. Duties, Responsibilities and Liability of the User

7.1. aka-aki provides a technical platform and service that allows its users to make content available on aka-aki and establish contact with one another.
Each user is legally responsible for his or her own activities on aka-aki. aka-aki cannot monitor these activities and has no control over them. Content, information, activities, etc. are not checked by aka-aki prior to their publication/disclosure by the user on aka-aki and do not reflect the opinions, views and convictions of aka-aki. aka-aki is not responsible for this content.

7.2. The responsibility for all information, data, texts, photographs, images, messages or other materials (content), which are generally or publicly communicated or published, lies solely with the person who has uploaded or entered such content. Not aka-aki, but rather, the user, bears the responsibility for any content that he or she enters, publishes or sends within the context of this service.

7.3. The user exempts aka-aki from all claims asserted by third parties against aka-aki due to contents published by the user. The right to legal defence against such claims is reserved by aka-aki. The user shall support aka-aki with the defence of such claims, particularly by providing all information necessary for defence. The user is obligated to compensate the losses incurred to aka-aki for any justified claims by third parties, including the costs of legal prosecution. aka-aki fundamentally reserves the right to remove content entered by any user.

8. Prohibited Activities on aka-aki

8.1. The following contents and activities are generally prohibited on aka-aki:

• through which the other users and/or third parties and/or employees of aka-aki and its sub-contractors and partners could be endangered, offended, injured or otherwise harmed,
• through which laws or other regulations are violated,
• through which the ancillary rights of third parties are infringed,
• which are of a commercial nature, unless this has been explicitly consented to by aka-aki in writing; commercial offers are, in any case, to be clearly identified as such.

9. Consequences of Violating These Terms of Service

aka-aki shall reserve the right to exclude users who violate these Terms of Service, temporarily or permanently, by blocking/deleting user accounts and flagging these as locked.

10. Copyright

The services offered by aka-aki and the services published on the aka-aki network are protected by copyright. No part of these services may be reproduced in part or whole for commercial, marketing or any other use without the explicit prior written approval of aka-aki. Users may make copies of contents for their exclusively personal, explicitly non-commercial use under the condition that the origin of such contents remains clearly recognizable. Any other form of reproduction, distribution or publication of contents without the prior written approval by aka-aki is prohibited.

aka-aki respects the intellectual property of third parties and requests its users to do so, too.

11. “aki of the Week” Competition

The “aki of the Week” competition is held according to the regulations stipulated in Appendix B of these Terms of Service. Participation of users in the “aki of the Week” competition is also subject to the regulations stipulated in Appendix B. The regulations in Appendix B constitute a binding component of these General Terms of Service for the use of aka-aki.

Appendix A: Member Conduct, Prohibited Activities and Content on the aka-aki Network

The following lists examples of activities and content of all types (texts, files, images, photographs, other visual depictions, videos, sounds, etc.), which are forbidden on the aka-aki network and thus may not be published in any form on the aka-aki network, including any links or references to any external websites, web pages or any other places with such contents.

1) Violence, sexual depictions, defamation, harassment

• The depiction of naked people, violence or any indecent or sexually explicit representations;
• contents or activities that promote the sexual or violent exploitation of any people and animals;
• contents or activities which promote the direct or indirect harassment of another person;
• contents or activities that are indecent, threatening, obscene, slanderous or libellous;
• the use of information procured via aka-aki with the purpose of harassing, insulting or damnifying another person;
• portrayals of cruel and otherwise inhuman acts of violence against people and animals in a manner which expresses glorification or trivialisation of such acts of violence or which depict the cruelness or inhumanity of the act in a manner that is detrimental to human dignity; this also applies to any virtual depictions;
• contents which offend human dignity, particularly those which depict people dying or people who were or are subject to serious physical or mental suffering, regardless of whether or not the depicted person(s) have approved of these contents;
• contents or activities that depict children or youngsters in a sexual manner; this also applies to any virtual depictions;
• acts of violence which are sexist or pornographic and/or portray the sexual abuse of children or youngsters or sexual actions between people and animals; this also applies to any virtual depictions;
• the propagation of slanderous, indecent or otherwise illegal material, the harassment or threatening and infringement of the personal rights of other users or any other third parties.

• Contents or activities that are racist, xenophobic, fanatical, extremist, anti-Semitic, agitative, insulting towards a religion or world view, hateful or the equivalent thereof;
• propaganda in the sense of §86 StGB (German criminal code) whose contents are directed against the free democratic basic order or the notion of international understanding among nations;
• indications of or to any unconstitutional organisations in the sense of §86 StGB (German criminal code) whose contents are directed against the free democratic basic order or the notion of international understanding among nations;
• contents which incite or promote hatred towards parts of the population or against any national, racial, religious or ethnic group, incite or promote acts of violence or arbitrariness against such groups through which the human dignity of others is affronted, so that parts of the population or any of the above-mentioned groups are insulted, maliciously scorned or slandered;
• contents which describe an act committed by the Nazi regime as referred to in §6, Paragraph 1 and §7 Paragraph 1 VStGB (international criminal code) in a manner that could disturb public peace, deny or trivialise said act;
• contents which incite any illegal action as stipulated in §126, Paragraph 1 StGB (German criminal code) and/or glorify war.

• Commercial contents and activities, e.g. advertising, competitions, raffles or snowball systems, unless they have explicitly been approved by aka-aki in written form and are clearly and explicitly identifiable as commercial by nature;
• the disguise or concealment of advertising banners on personal profile pages with HTML/CSS or any other methods;
• advertising on personal profile pages or the acceptance of remuneration for any service to be produced or supplied through or under the use of aka-aki, such as the supply of advertising space on a personal profile page, the supply and publication of blogs or other news for commercial purposes, establishing contact with a commercial profile, or sending private messages for commercial purposes;
• the use of information procured via aka-aki for the purpose of contacting other users without their previous explicit approval in order to send them advertisements or sell any goods and/or services to them;
• the request of other users to enter passwords or personal data for commercial or illegal purposes.
4) Data collection, phishing and similar activities
• The announcement and/or publication of telephone numbers, addresses, surnames, URLs or email addresses, as well as the request, instigation or abetment thereof;
• the request of personal data from minorities;
• the request of other users to enter passwords or personal data for commercial or illegal purposes;
• the mailing of junk emails, spam, chain letters, spimming, spamming or similar activities;
• eavesdropping/wiretapping or any other inadmissible or unfair procurement of data;
• phishing and the like;
• the electronic or other collection of user names and/or email addresses of members, in particular for the purpose of sending unsolicited emails, and unjustified framing or linking.

• Contents or activities which infringe upon the ancillary copyrights of third parties (copyrights and design patents, brands, hallmarks, the right to bear a name/name of company, patents, petty patents etc.), e.g. the illegal or unauthorised reproduction of the copyrighted work of another person, as well as any contents in which the respective user is not the sole legal owner or for which she or he has not procured the respective exploitation rights;
• publication of photographs, images or videos of another person without the explicit approval of that person;
• programmes or tools, links to and information on the illegal circumvention of factory-made copy protection measures and the unlawful copying of video and images or links to illegal copies of videos and images;
• in the case of band profiles, the copying of codes for a player and embedding of said code in other profiles or the request of other members to embed it in their profiles;
• the deletion of legends or references to the transferred contents; Users are to ensure that they dispose of all rights to the contents provided for publication; users grant aka-aki the unrestricted right to use and exploit such contents, provided such contents have been uploaded to publicly accessible areas of the aka-aki services. This also includes the right to modify, duplicate, forward, publish and further develop such contents, as well as transfer any exploitation rights to third parties without liability for compensation. Should the user not hold the rights to the contents provided, she or he ensures that the owner of the contents has agreed to transfer his or her rights to the contents in accordance with the preceding Terms. Any other publication by users of the contents they have transferred is permitted.

• Any automated use of the system, e.g. adding friends with the help of scripts or sending comments and news;
• the interference, interruption or excessive overload of the aka-aki network;
• the attempt to impersonate another member or another person;
• the use of an account, user name or password that belongs to another member;
• revealing passwords to third parties or the access to one’s own account by a third party without the user’s own approval;
• selling or otherwise transferring one’s own profile;
• linking the Bluetooth ID to any mobile or immobile device with a new or existing account (either with the “aka-aki cell phone wizard” or the function “invite to aka-aki” in the cell phone application) without the explicit approval of the user of that end device;
• placing stickers on the profiles of Bluetooth devices which clearly allow the allocation of the profile to a person (e.g. a photo) without the explicit approval of that person;
• the attempt to determine the absolute location of a member;
• the use of aka-aki server interfaces with any other software than that provided by aka-aki.

• attempts to circumvent, bypass or otherwise override the security barriers of aka-aki in any way;
• the use of computer programmes for the automatic selection of data such as e.g. crawlers (synonymous with spiders or robots, “bot” for short);
• intentional use and/or distribution of viruses, worms, Trojan horses;
• the use of links, applications or any other means or procedures which can or are intended to damage the platform/the database/aka-aki network or individual users;
• brute force attacks;
• spamming.
8) (Other) Infringements against laws and regulations
• False or delusive contents or activities intended to support illegal activities or behaviour;
• unlawful, criminal activities or the intention, support, instruction, instigation, or abetment thereof, including but not limited to the production or purchase of illegal weapons, the infringement of data protection regulations, child pornography, defraud, trade with indecent contents, drug trafficking, gambling, harassment, stalking, spamming, spimming, development and distribution of computer viruses and other destructive files, copyright infringements, patent infringements;
• theft of trade/corporate/industrial secrets;
• the use of aka-aki in any manner that violates valid laws and regulations. Finally, users are forbidden to place any links on the aka-aki platform to any Internet pages or sites that contain illegal contents.

Appendix B: Competitions

1.1.1 Competitions can be carried out in cooperation with various partners.

1.1.2 aka-aki members who have won a competition may not participate in the next competition until four weeks after having had won the last competition.

1.2 In principle, all aka-aki members automatically participate in the competition through their registration. If participation is explicitly not desired, the member can unsubscribe at any time by sending an e-mail to privacy@aka-aki.com.


2. Participants

2.1 In order to participate in a competition, it is mandatory that all required details have been truthfully provided.


3. Exclusion from Competitions

3.1 Employees of aka-aki, its cooperation partners and their relatives are excluded from participation.

3.2 In the case of a violation against these terms of participation, aka-aki reserves the right to exclude persons from the competition.

3.3 Those who use prohibited resources or otherwise gain advantages through manipulative means will also be excluded from competitions. If necessary, wins can be denied and recalled in such cases.


4. Procedure and Settlement

4.1 The competition and selection of prizes are carried out under the sole responsibility of aka-aki/its respective partners.

4.2 The terms of delivery for delivering the prizes shall be defined by aka-aki and its partners. If it is not possible to hand over a prize or only possible under unreasonable circumstances, the winners will receive a substitute prize of equal value.

4.3 The winners will be notified in writing by aka-aki and their names will be disclosed on www.aka-aki.com and/or sites of the partners. The winner explicitly consents to this form of disclosure. aka-aki shall be entitled to send the winner’s details to its partner in order to enable delivery of the prize.

4.4 Only one prize per participant is possible in each competition. If several participants have displayed the same performance that equally entitles them to a prize at the time of the evaluation, the winner will be decided by a draw. The winner will then automatically be excluded from the following four “aki of the Week” competitions. At the end of this period, he or she will participate in the “aki of the Week” competition again.

4.5 A cash payment of the prizes is not possible. Prize claims are not transferable to other persons.

4.6 Complaints are to be addressed to aka-aki in writing within 14 days after becoming aware of the reason for complaint. Complaints that are communicated over the phone and late complaints cannot be processed.


5. Premature Termination of the Competition

5.1 aka-aki reserves the right to discontinue or end the competition at any time and without prior notification. aka-aki will particularly exercise this option if proper procedures for the competition cannot be ensured for technical reasons (e.g. due to viruses in the computer system, manipulation or errors in the hardware and/or software) or for legal reasons. If such termination is caused by the conduct of a participant, aka-aki shall be entitled to demand compensation for the loss incurred through that person.


6. Data Protection

6.1 Be registering with aka-aki, the participant explicitly consents to aka-aki storing all necessary data for the term of the competition and beyond this time period. The participant shall be entitled to revoke consent to data storage at any time and thereby withdraw from participation.

6.2 With regard to the registered data of the participants, aka-aki shall be obligated to observe legal data protection and media law stipulations. In particular, data will be treated confidentially.


7. Liability

7.1 Upon distribution of the prize, aka-aki shall be exempted from all obligations. No liability is assumed for legal and/or material defects.

7.2 Claims related to the prizes received by winning participants must be directly addressed to the partners who distribute said prizes.

7.3 No guarantee is assumed for the disclosure of the winner.

7.4 aka-aki shall not be held liable for losses due to errors, delays or disruptions in the transmission, for faults with technical systems and the service, incorrect contents, loss or deletion of data, viruses or anything that can otherwise occur through the participation in competitions, unless aka-aki (its institutions, employees or legal agents) has deliberately or grossly negligently caused such losses.

7.5 No liability exists for the persons excluded by Section 3 of this Appendix B.


8. Miscellaneous

8.1 Legal recourse is excluded.

8.2 These provisions and the entire legal relationship between the participants and aka-aki are subject to the law of the Federal Republic of Germany.

8.3 If individual provisions of the terms of participation should be or become invalid, the validity of the remaining terms of participation shall remain unaffected.