Terms of service

Spat Court is a game, not a court

Spat Court is an entertainment service operated by Aioanei A. Adrian Persoană Fizică Autorizată, a sole trader registered in Romania (Bd. Chimiei, Iași; Trade Register F22/5/06.01.2022; tax ID RO45431550). You describe a small, everyday disagreement, the people involved can tell their side, and a computer judge writes a ruling about it in the style of a court. The point is to have a laugh and settle a petty argument.

Spat Court is not a court, a tribunal, an arbitrator, a mediator or a law firm, and nobody at Spat Court acts as your lawyer. The judges, courts, case numbers, seals, forms, verdicts, sentences and appeals are part of the game. A ruling is not a judgment, an order or a finding of fact, and it has no legal effect of any kind.

Rulings are not legal, medical, financial, relationship or any other professional advice. Do not rely on a ruling for any decision that matters, and do not present one to anyone as if it were real or official. Sentences are suggestions in the spirit of the game, and nobody is required to carry them out.

Rulings are written by a computer

Every ruling, opinion, dissent and appeal decision is written automatically by a language model, following the court's rules for tone and fairness. No person reads a case before its ruling is written.

Because a computer writes them, rulings can be wrong, unfair, inaccurate, oddly worded or simply not funny. They reflect only what the parties wrote, which may not be the whole story. We do not check the facts, and a ruling says nothing about what really happened or about anyone's character.

Who can use it

You must be 16 or older to file a case, answer one, testify, create an account or buy anything. If you are under 16, please do not use Spat Court.

You may use Spat Court only for yourself and only in the ways these terms allow.

What you may file and write

Only small, everyday disagreements between people who know each other, told the way you would tell a friend. Use first names or nicknames only.

Do not file or write anything involving violence, threats, abuse, self-harm, sexual content, children beyond trivial sibling squabbles, real legal, medical, financial or workplace matters, crimes, attacks on anyone's identity, body, health, ethnicity, religion, gender or sexuality, or anything meant to harass or humiliate someone.

Do not include anyone's surname, address, phone number, email, workplace, school, photos, account names or other private details in what you write, and do not write anything you know to be false or that could damage someone's reputation. You are responsible for what you write and for having the right to share it.

The court checks every statement before it is used and declines what breaks these rules. We may also decline, hide or delete any case, statement or testimony, and stop anyone from using Spat Court, if we believe these rules were broken.

Summoning the other side

When you file, you may give the email address of the person your case is about. The court then sends them a summons with a link to the case, so they can tell their side, and a short note when the court rules. Only give the address of someone you know personally who would expect a light-hearted message from you, and never use Spat Court to contact someone who does not want to hear from you.

The summons comes from Spat Court and says who filed the case. Every email has a link to stop all email from Spat Court to that address, and we honor it at once. We never show the address to anyone.

Hearings, statements and witnesses

During the hearing both sides can make statements, and anyone with the link can testify as a witness, with a name of their choice or anonymously. Statements and testimony are shown on the case page and in the case file to everyone who has the link, and the computer judge reads them.

Witnesses follow the same rules as everyone else. Testimony and the public gallery's opinion are part of the game and are not evidence of anything.

People named in a case

Anyone named in a case can remove it at any time with "This is about me, remove it" on the case page. The case is hidden at once, the page shows that it was withdrawn, and we review the request.

If something on Spat Court is about you and you did not agree to it, tell us through the contact page and we will act quickly.

Your content and the public record

You keep the rights to what you write. You give us permission to store it, to have the computer judge write about it, and to show the case, its hearing and its ruling to anyone who has the link, for as long as the case exists.

If you choose "Allow this ruling to be published anonymously in the public record" when filing, you also give us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to publish the ruling on Spat Court and in share images, after names are replaced with roles and other identifying details are removed. An editor reviews every ruling before it is published.

You can withdraw that permission at any time through the contact page or the privacy choices page. We then remove the ruling from the public record.

Share images and PDFs carry a note that the ruling is for entertainment only. Do not remove it or present a ruling as real.

Credits and payments

Your first two cases are free. After that, paid actions use credits, which you buy in one-time packs. A credit is a prepaid right to use a feature of Spat Court. It has no cash value, cannot be exchanged for money, sold or transferred, and is not a deposit or stored value. Credits do not expire while your account exists, and they end if the account is deleted or closed for breaking these terms.

Payments are processed by Stripe. Prices are shown before you pay. In the United States, prices are in US dollars and sales tax is added at checkout where it applies. Everywhere else, prices are in euros and include VAT or any other sales tax. There is no subscription and nothing renews.

Credits are delivered right away. Refunds are covered by the refund policy. Paying does not change a verdict and does not buy a particular outcome.

Accounts

You can file as a guest or with an account. An account has your email, a username and a password, and you confirm the email with a code. Keep your password to yourself. You are responsible for what happens under your account.

You can delete your account and your cases at any time from Account settings or the privacy choices page.

Acceptable use

Do not use Spat Court to harass, bully, threaten, stalk, defame or embarrass anyone, to send unwanted messages, to break the law, to collect other people's data, to copy or scrape the site, to interfere with how it runs, or to get around its limits, checks or payments.

Do not try to make the computer judge produce something these terms forbid, and do not present anything it writes as the words of a real person or a real court.

Availability and changes

We try to keep Spat Court running, but we do not promise that it will always be available, fast or free of errors. We may change, pause or stop parts of the service, and we delete cases as described in the privacy policy.

If we change these terms in a way that matters, we will say so on this page with a new date. Using Spat Court after a change means you accept the new terms.

No warranties

Spat Court is provided as it is and as available. To the extent the law allows, we make no promises or warranties of any kind about the service or about any ruling, including that it is accurate, fair, suitable for any purpose or free of offense.

Limitation of liability

To the extent the law allows, the operator of Spat Court is not responsible for anything anyone does or decides because of a ruling, a statement, a testimony or a summons, for content written by other people, or for indirect or consequential losses. Our total liability to you for anything to do with Spat Court is limited to the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim.

Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law, such as for death or personal injury caused by negligence or for fraud, or takes away rights you have under consumer protection law where you live.

Your responsibility to us

If someone makes a claim against us because of something you wrote or did on Spat Court in breach of these terms, you agree to cover our reasonable costs of that claim, to the extent the law allows.

Contact

Questions about these terms, and requests to remove content, go through the contact page.