Copyright & Intellectual Property Policy

1. About This Policy

This policy explains who owns the material on the SoloCogs platform, what you may and may not do with it, and how to report a copyright concern. It applies to everyone who uses the platform - students, parents, carers, tutors, schools, and visitors - and to anyone whose work appears on it.

SoloCogs is operated by Portsdown Tuition (sole trader), Portsmouth, England. This policy sits alongside our Terms & Conditions and Acceptable Use Policy; the broadest licensing rules live there, and this policy goes into the detail.

2. Ownership of Platform Content

All content created by or for SoloCogs is the intellectual property of Jazz / SoloCogs unless otherwise stated. This includes, but is not limited to:

• The written content of every SoloLab unit (resource pages, briefings, knowledge checks, exam practice, error-spot statements, vocab definitions)
• The SoloCognition question bank, including all multiple-choice options, mark schemes, key-phrase scoring data, and adaptive logic
• All inline SVG diagrams, animations, illustrations, and bespoke icons (e.g. the bust icon for the Hall of Lab Legends, the apparatus diagrams in Required Practicals, the menstrual-cycle and glucose-feedback animations)
• The Hall of Lab Legends curation - including which scientists are featured, the wing structure (Codebreakers / Architects / Shadows), the legend bios, and the discovery mechanic
• The visual identity - the SoloCogs wordmark, the Cogs character, the Solo-Teal palette, the typography pairings, and the overall design system
• The platform code itself, including the SoloCognition adaptive engine, the Required-Practical virtual labs (RP1-RP6), the Hall of Lab Legends collection system, the Solo-Progression XP / level / streak system, the Cookie Consent banner, and all custom JavaScript modules
• The Cogs mascot character, including its name, personality, voice, dialogue, and visual design
• Original lesson sequences, assessment structures, and the SEND-informed pedagogy that underpins every unit

Copyright in this content is owned by Jazz / SoloCogs and is protected under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and equivalent international law.

3. Trademarks

The following marks are used by SoloCogs as trademarks (whether registered or unregistered):

• SoloCogs, SoloLab, SoloCognition, SoloSight
• The Hall of Lab Legends, the Codebreakers / Architects / Shadows wing names
• The Cogs character name and design
• The SoloCogs wordmark and gear logo

You may not use these names or logos in a way that suggests endorsement, partnership, or origin from SoloCogs without our prior written permission.

4. Third-Party Content

Some material on the platform comes from third parties under licence or fair use. We acknowledge and respect the rights of the original creators.

4.1 Public-domain material

Many of the scientist portraits in the Hall of Lab Legends are public-domain photographs or paintings sourced from places like Wikimedia Commons. Where copyright has expired or the work was released into the public domain, we use it without further permission. If you believe a work we have treated as public-domain is in fact under copyright, please follow the takedown process in Section 9.

4.2 Stock photography

Content photographs (e.g. the brain MRI in Sub-unit 2 of Homeostasis, the bread-rising photograph in Bioenergetics, the pondweed photograph in Required Practical 5) are sourced from royalty-free stock libraries (Pexels, Unsplash, Wikimedia Commons) under their respective licences. Where attribution is required by the licence, it is given on the page or in the underlying image manifest.

4.3 Open-source software and fonts

The platform uses several open-source components, each governed by its own licence:

• Lexend (SIL Open Font License) - the primary headline font, designed to support reading proficiency for SEND learners
• Atkinson Hyperlegible (SIL Open Font License) - the body font, designed by the Braille Institute for low-vision readers
• JetBrains Mono (SIL Open Font License) - the monospace font used for data displays
• Supabase JS client (MIT License) - authentication and database access
• jsPDF (MIT License) - the lab-evidence PDF builder for Required Practicals

4.4 Educational specifications

SoloCogs content is aligned to the AQA GCSE Combined Science: Trilogy (8464) Foundation specification. The specification itself is © AQA. We follow it as a syllabus guide; we do not reproduce AQA exam papers, mark schemes, or examiner reports. Past-paper questions, where used, are paraphrased into original question stems using AQA's permitted command words and content scope.

4.5 Generative AI

SoloCogs is built by a human educator with the assistance of AI coding tools used as authoring instruments. All copy, lesson sequences, scientific content, and pedagogical decisions are reviewed and approved by Jazz before publication. Any image generated with the assistance of AI is clearly identified.

5. User-Generated Content

When you (or a student linked to your account) use the platform, you may create content that is then stored on our systems - for example:

• Free-text answers to written exam-style questions
• Drawings made on the Digital Canvas during a Required Practical
• Saved lab PDFs from the virtual labs (the AQA-evidence record)
• Wellbeing check-in entries
• Self-reflection notes and Cognition Map annotations

5.1 You retain ownership

You (or, in the case of a student, the student and their parent/carer jointly) retain copyright in the content you create on the platform. We do not claim ownership of student work, parent comments, or wellbeing entries.

5.2 Limited licence to us

By creating content on the platform, you grant SoloCogs a limited, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, store, display back to you, and (with consent or where permitted by law) review that content for the purposes of:

• Operating the platform - showing you your own work back to you, building Cognition Maps, exporting PDFs
• Quality and safeguarding review - examining content where there is a wellbeing concern or a suspected breach of the Acceptable Use Policy
• Aggregated and de-identified analytics - improving the platform without identifying any individual

This licence ends when you delete the content, when your account is closed, or when our retention periods expire (see the Privacy Policy), whichever is sooner. We never use student content to train external AI models without explicit opt-in consent from a parent or carer.

6. Permitted Personal Use

Registered students and the parents / carers of those students may, for personal, non-commercial educational use:

• Read and interact with all content available to their account
• Save and print Required Practical PDFs and other generated outputs that relate to their own work
• Take screenshots of pages for revision use (e.g. on a personal study notebook)
• Cite SoloCogs in a piece of school coursework provided the citation makes the source clear

Schools and tutors operating under a paid SoloCogs subscription may additionally display platform content during lessons with their students.

7. Prohibited Use

Without prior written permission from SoloCogs, you may NOT:

• Copy, reproduce, republish, mirror, or distribute platform content - in any medium, including print, social media, video, podcasts, or other learning platforms
• Sell, sub-licence, or commercially exploit any platform content
• Use platform content to create a competing service, including a competing question bank, virtual lab, adaptive engine, or curriculum resource
• Use SoloCogs material to train, fine-tune, or evaluate any artificial intelligence, machine-learning model, or large language model. We reserve all rights under Article 4 of the EU Copyright Directive and equivalent UK law to opt out of text and data mining for the purpose of AI training
• Scrape, crawl, automate access to, or harvest content from the platform - whether by bot, headless browser, or other means
• Remove, obscure, or alter any copyright, trademark, or attribution notice
• Reverse-engineer, decompile, or attempt to extract the source code of the SoloCognition adaptive engine, the virtual labs, or any other proprietary system
• Frame, deep-link to, or embed individual platform pages on other sites in a way that misrepresents the source

Misuse may result in account suspension or termination under our Acceptable Use Policy, the loss of access to any saved progress, and (where appropriate) civil or criminal legal action.

8. Attribution and Quoting

Short, attributed quotations of platform copy for the purposes of review, criticism, or news reporting are permitted under the fair-dealing exceptions in UK copyright law. Where you quote SoloCogs material, please credit it clearly:

© SoloCogs - solocogs.co.uk

If you would like to use larger extracts (for example, a full lesson summary in a published book or an academic article), please contact us first.

9. Reporting a Copyright Concern

If you believe content on SoloCogs infringes your copyright, please send us a written notice at hello@solocogs.co.uk with the following information:

1. Your full name, postal address, email address and phone number
2. A clear description of the copyrighted work you say has been infringed (a link, image filename, or page URL on solocogs.co.uk works best)
3. Evidence that you own the work, or that you are authorised to act on the owner's behalf
4. A statement, made in good faith, that the use is not authorised by you, the copyright owner, or the law
5. A statement, made under penalty of perjury, that the information in your notice is accurate
6. Your physical or electronic signature

Upon receipt of a valid notice, SoloCogs will review the claim and, where appropriate, act expeditiously to:

• Remove or disable access to the material in question
• Provide appropriate attribution or credit where applicable
• Contact the reporting party for further clarification if required
• Notify any uploader (where the content is user-generated) of the action taken

We aim to respond to a complete copyright notice within 10 working days.

10. Counter-Notice

If you believe content of yours has been removed in error - for example, the work is your own original creation, or it is in the public domain, or its use falls within UK fair-dealing exceptions - you may submit a counter-notice to hello@solocogs.co.uk. A valid counter-notice should include:

1. Your full name, postal address, email address and phone number
2. Identification of the material that was removed and where it appeared
3. A statement, made in good faith, that the material was removed as a result of mistake or misidentification
4. A statement that you consent to the jurisdiction of the courts of England and Wales
5. Your physical or electronic signature

We will forward a valid counter-notice to the original complainant. If the complainant does not file legal proceedings within 14 days, we may - at our discretion - restore the content.

11. Repeat Infringers

SoloCogs maintains a policy of suspending or terminating the accounts of users who, in our reasonable judgement, are repeat copyright infringers. Decisions are made case-by-case, factoring in the seriousness of the infringement, prior notices, and any safeguarding considerations.

12. False or Misleading Claims

Knowingly submitting a false, misleading, or fraudulent infringement claim - or a counter-notice you do not believe to be true - is a serious matter. It may result in:

• Your correspondence being disregarded
• Your account being suspended or terminated
• Liability for damages under section 512(f) of the US DMCA, or its UK equivalents
• Where appropriate, referral to law enforcement

We are committed to operating a fair and prompt notice-and-takedown process and to resolving genuine concerns professionally and respectfully. Bad-faith claims undermine that process for everyone.

13. Children and Schools

If a school or other educational institution wishes to use SoloCogs content beyond the personal-use scope (for example, embedding lesson extracts in a Virtual Learning Environment, or printing class sets of resource pages), please contact us. Educational licences are usually free-of-charge and granted gladly - we just need to know who is using the work and for what.

For individual student work, the student and their parent/carer hold copyright together. SoloCogs will not display, share, or republish a student's work outside their own account without explicit consent from the parent or carer.

14. Changes to This Policy

We may update this policy from time to time - for example, when we add new content types, when the law changes, or when AI tooling evolves. The Reviewed date at the top of this page shows when the current version took effect. Material changes will be communicated to registered users by email.