This page is a plain-language summary. The
Terms of Service, Section 21, is what actually
governs, and it controls if the two ever disagree.
The short version
Why the text is unrestricted
The statutory, regulatory and constitutional text is US primary law, and US primary law cannot be copyrighted. Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., 590 U.S. 255 (2020) settled it, holding that even annotations prepared under contract for a legislature are uncopyrightable government edicts. We claim no ownership of that text and nothing in our terms restricts your use of it. What is licensed to you is the compilation: the schema, the citations, the hierarchy, the cross-references, the metadata and the assembled corpus. That is the work product, and it is the only thing the restrictions below touch.What you keep if you leave
Retrieved through the API
Responses you cached during a paid term are yours to keep. No deletion
obligation, and you may keep showing them to your customers. That includes
the citations, hierarchy and cross-references those responses carry, because
a cached answer is not usable without them.
Delivered in bulk
Different, and deliberately so. On termination or expiry of a bulk
arrangement you delete stored copies of our compilation within 30 days.
There the corpus itself is the deliverable, so permanent retention would let
a single period buy it outright.You still keep anything you had independently retrieved through the API, the
public-domain text, anything obtained under the Open US Law licences, and
Output already embedded in work product you delivered to your clients.
What you may not do
Without a separate signed agreement, you will not:- systematically extract, bulk-download, scrape or accumulate the corpus for any purpose other than powering your own end-user product
- resell, sublicense or redistribute the underlying legal data or our compilation as a standalone dataset, database, feed or API
- offer the API, or a service substantially derived from it, under your own or a third party’s brand
- use the API or its Output to build, train or improve a product that competes with our legal-research, statute-retrieval or legal-data API services
- reverse engineer the API or attempt to derive its models or training data
- exceed or circumvent your plan’s rate limits or credit allowance, including by spreading access across accounts
Attribution
Unless your plan waives it, display “Legal data by Vaquill AI”, linked to vaquill.ai, somewhere a user can reasonably find it in any product where the Output is shown to your end users. A footer, an about page or a data-sources page is fine. One credit per product, not one per response. The console gives you the exact snippet. It is not required for internal or back-office use where nothing is shown outside your organisation, or for evaluation. Attribution can be waived commercially. Talk to us.The open dataset
Separately from the paid API, the whole corpus is published as Open US Law:- Public-domain text: no restriction
- Our compilation: CC BY 4.0
- The ingestion pipelines: Apache-2.0