Contributor Agreement

1. Who is entering into this agreement

The service is provided by Ivan Adamov, Silberberger Str. 33, 49076 Osnabrück, Deutschland. Questions about this agreement are answered at [email protected].

You are entering into this agreement in your own name. If you are submitting on behalf of an organisation, you must be authorised to do so — and you should tell us, because it makes a difference to how the contribution is labelled.

You must have reached the age required under the law of your country of residence to enter into a binding agreement. We ask you about this and rely on what you tell us; we do not store a date of birth.

2. It costs nothing, and it commits you to nothing

Submitting is free of charge. There is no fee, no subscription, no invitation, and no requirement to be a journalist by profession.

In return, submitting gives you no claim: a submission is not a promise of publication. We read everything, but we do not publish everything, and for a rejected contribution we owe you neither a fee nor any explanation beyond the grounds for rejection that we give you.

You are not paid for a published contribution unless expressly agreed otherwise.

3. What you declare about your contribution

With every submission you declare that the following is true. We check what we can check — but much of it we cannot verify, and so we rely on you.

• You are allowed to submit this material. No contract, no employment relationship and no agreement with a third party stands in the way.
• The text is your own, or you hold the rights required to publish it here.
• Photographs you submit were taken by you, or you own the rights to them, or you are licensed or otherwise entitled to publish them. For each image you state which of these applies.
• You do not submit anything that you know to be copied from someone else.
• You do not submit anything that unlawfully infringes third-party copyright.
• You do not present as fact anything you believe to be untrue. In particular, you make no knowingly false allegations against named individuals.
• You do not submit unlawful threats.
• You do not submit anything that unlawfully incites hatred against a group.
• You do not submit harassment or the targeted denigration of individual people.
• You do not submit attacks that fasten on origin, skin colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, disability, age or a comparable characteristic.
• You do not publish other people's private data — addresses, telephone numbers, whereabouts, employers — that is not already public and necessary for the contribution.
• You do not submit scams, disguised advertising, malware or misleading commercial content.
• You do not pass yourself off as another person. A pseudonym is expressly permitted — that is something different.
• You disclose it if you have an interest of your own in what you are writing about: a stake, a commission, an office, a personal involvement.
• You disclose the extent to which you have used AI tools. We ask about it; the answer on its own never leads to rejection.

4. Opinion is expressly welcome

Nothing in section 3 requires you to share our views. You may criticise governments, parties, companies, authorities, religions and public figures. You may take positions that are uncomfortable or unpopular, and you may be wrong.

What we do not publish is something other than an unwelcome opinion: unlawful content, threats, targeted harassment, denigrating attacks on protected characteristics, the disclosure of private data, plagiarism, fraud — and statements of fact that create a legal risk we cannot carry.

The political orientation of a contribution is not a review criterion for us. The risk is.

5. What happens to your contribution

First come automatic checks: format, length, language, obvious spam, and a comparison against what has already been published. An AI system then reads the contribution and flags what an editor should look at. This assessment decides nothing. It prepares a human decision.

After that, a human reads it. Without that approval, nothing is published.

The outcome is one of four things: publication, publication after changes, a request for revision, or rejection. Where we reject, we tell you the reason, as far as we can do so without creating a risk of our own.

6. What we may change in your text — and what we may not

We copy-edit: spelling, punctuation, paragraphs, subheadings, formatting, occasionally a headline that does not work in the layout. We do that without asking.

We translate your contribution by machine into the other editions of Tagblick and check the translations automatically for omissions and for altered names, numbers and dates. The source version is kept unchanged.

What alters your meaning, we do not do quietly. A different conclusion, an allegation softened or sharpened, a position turned around, a statement of fact deleted — for that we come back to you, and you can object.

After publication we may correct. Where a correction is substantive, a visible correction note stands on the contribution; we do not secretly replace one text with another.

We can remove a contribution if we are legally obliged to, or if it turns out afterwards that it should never have appeared. We tell you that we have done so.

7. The rights stay with you

The copyright in your contribution stays with you. You do not assign it, and you do not give it up.

You grant Tagblick a simple, non-exclusive right of use — simple means: you may publish the same text elsewhere as well, at any time, without asking us. We receive no exclusive right.

This right of use covers exactly what is needed in order to publish:

• to make the contribution publicly available on Tagblick and to keep it there permanently,
• to translate it into the other language editions and to publish those translations,
• to copy-edit, format and shorten it for publication, within the limits of section 6,
• to show the images you submitted in connection with the contribution,
• to announce and promote the contribution in our own channels — home page, newsletter, Telegram channels, social networks — in each case naming you and linking to the publication here.

8. How you are credited

You decide the name under which your contribution appears: your full name, your first name with an abbreviated surname, a pseudonym, or an author name of your own choosing.

What you make public beyond that — a short biography, occupation, location, photo, website, social profiles — is likewise your decision. None of it is required.

Your telephone number, your Telegram handle and everything else we collect for verification is never published. It is held separately from your public profile.

We do not describe you as a member of the Tagblick editorial team if you are not one. Your contribution is labelled as a guest contribution, and where a translation was produced by machine, that is stated on the translation.

9. Your images

For every image you state where it comes from and on what basis it may be published. Where an attribution is required, you provide it — and we carry it over.

Before storing an image, we strip the embedded metadata from it, location data in particular. That is a protection for you and for the people shown, and it happens without asking.

An image whose rights situation remains unclear, we do not publish. The contribution can still appear.

10. If something goes wrong

If someone comes to us with a complaint about your contribution — a copyright complaint, a personality right, a disputed fact — we look into it. We do not remove anything merely because someone has complained, and we inform you.

We can switch off a single disputed element — an image, for instance — without removing the whole contribution.

If you repeatedly submit material that breaches section 3, we can limit or end your submissions. A single borderline case does not lead to that; an automated classification on its own never does.

Against a rejection you can appeal once. That leads to a second reading, not to a promise.

11. Your data

What we store, for what purpose, and for how long is set out in the privacy policy. In short: your Telegram handle, the telephone number shared during verification, your submissions together with their editing history, and your public profile, if you have created one.

You can request information at any time, and the deletion of your personal data. What we cannot delete in doing so is a contribution that has already been published, together with the records of why it was published — for those we have retention obligations of our own. Your public profile and the link to you as a person we can remove.

12. Changes to this agreement

This version carries a number and a date; both stand at the top of this page. For your submissions, the version that applies is the one you agreed to.

If we change something material — what you declare, which rights you grant, or what may be done with your contribution — we ask you again and tell you in one sentence what has changed. Consent once given is not carried over silently to a materially changed version.

Correcting typing errors, or wording something more clearly, is not a material change.

13. Law and language

The German text of this agreement is authoritative. The versions in other languages are renderings for your information; where they differ, the German wording governs.

Mandatory consumer protection provisions of your country of residence remain unaffected.