Usage Policy

This Usage Policy describes the rules that govern your use of the fobi.com platform, its content, and any related APIs or feeds operated by Fobi Inc. (doing business as fobi, referred to here as "fobi," "we," "us," or "our"). It sits alongside the Terms of Service and the Privacy Policy; together they form the binding agreement between you and fobi.

The purpose of this Usage Policy is to keep fobi useful and sustainable for the subscribers who pay for it. Most of the rules below exist either to prevent free- riding (people taking the work product without paying) or to prevent abuse (people using fobi infrastructure in ways that degrade it for others). The rules are deliberately stated; the spirit behind them is "use fobi the way a paying subscriber would."

As an authenticated subscriber, you are welcome to do the following with the materials accessible through fobi:

• Read, browse, and search all surfaces of the Services available to your subscription tier, including sector dashboards, weekly briefs, Frontline issues, quarterly sector reports, the jobs board, the patent feed, and any other editorial output.
• Quote excerpts with attribution. You may quote short passages from fobi-authored editorial content (briefs, bull / bear analysis, hard-problem write-ups, and similar) in your own writing, presentations, or internal documents, provided you attribute fobi as the source and link back to the relevant page where practical. A short excerpt means a sentence or two — not an entire brief or article.
• Share links to fobi pages with colleagues, in newsletters, on social platforms, in chat threads, and elsewhere. Linking is always fine.
• Print or save personal copies of fobi pages for your own reference. This is the offline-reading equivalent of a browser bookmark; it is not redistribution.
• Use insights to inform your work. The entire point of fobi is to make you better-informed. Acting on what you read — in your job, your investing, your research, your hiring — is exactly the use we built it for.

The following uses are not permitted:

• Bulk redistribution. You may not copy, republish, syndicate, post, or otherwise make available substantial portions of fobi content (sector dashboards, briefs, Frontline issues, quarterly reports, jobs listings, patent abstracts, founder bios, or analyses) in any public, customer-facing, or paywalled location outside fobi. Quoting short excerpts with attribution is fine; reposting an entire brief is not.
• Resale. You may not resell, sublicense, or otherwise commercially redistribute fobi content. This includes packaging fobi data into a separate paid product, a research-as-a-service offering, or a newsletter that re-publishes fobi material under a different brand.
• AI / model training. You may not use fobi content as training data for any machine-learning model, fine-tuning corpus, retrieval-augmented-generation index, embedding store, or similar AI system — whether your own, your employer's, or a third party's. This is true regardless of whether the output is for internal or external use. The prohibition extends to scraping fobi specifically to seed an AI training pipeline, even if the scraping itself would otherwise be technically permitted.
• Automated scraping or bulk export. You may not deploy bots, scrapers, headless browsers, or other automated systems to extract fobi content at scale, beyond the volume and rate consistent with normal human reading. fobi does not offer a public API; if you have a legitimate integration need, write to hello@rickyrichards.com so we can talk.
• Circumvention of paywalls or access controls. You may not use any technical means to bypass fobi's authentication, paywall, or tier-enforcement mechanisms. Sharing an authenticated session, cookie, or token with someone who is not authorized to access the same tier is a circumvention.
• Account sharing. An individual subscription is for one person. Sharing your sign-in credentials, magic-link emails, or active session with others — including teammates, contractors, friends, or family — is not permitted. If you need access for multiple people, the Company plan exists specifically for that purpose; it is keyed to a work-email domain and extends access to anyone with an email at that domain at no per-seat cost.
• Removal of attribution or notices. You may not remove, obscure, or alter copyright notices, attribution lines, source citations, or any other proprietary notice associated with fobi content.
• Interference with the Services. You may not attempt to disrupt or degrade fobi for other users — for example, by sending traffic patterns designed to exhaust resources, probing for vulnerabilities without authorization, attempting to inject malicious content, or otherwise interfering with normal operation.
• Misrepresentation. You may not present fobi-authored analysis or summaries as if they were authored by you or your organization. fobi content carries an implicit "by fobi" byline; passing it off under a different byline is prohibited.
• Unlawful, harassing, or abusive use. You may not use fobi to harass, threaten, defame, or harm others; to engage in unlawful conduct; or to facilitate the same.

fobi offers two paths for paid access, and the access rules differ between them:

• Individual subscriptions (Monthly, Annual, and the Founding Member tier while available) are licensed for use by one named person — the subscriber. The subscriber may use fobi from any device they personally use; sharing the login with anyone else is not permitted.
• Company subscriptions are licensed by email domain. Anyone with a valid email address at the work-email domain registered at checkout may sign in and access fobi. The billing contact remains the original purchaser, who manages the subscription via the Stripe Customer Portal. Company subscriptions are intended for genuine employees of the organization that owns the domain — not for ad-hoc groupings of friends or collaborators on a shared mail-forwarding domain.

Because the AI-training prohibition is the rule most likely to be misunderstood, it warrants additional detail.

fobi's editorial output (sector briefs, bull / bear cases, hard-problem analyses, news summaries, funding-history reasoning, founder-bio synthesis, and all similar AI-assisted-but-human-supervised editorial work) is produced through a combination of automated synthesis and editorial judgment, at non-trivial cost. Using that output as training data for a separate model would transfer the value of fobi's editorial work into a derivative system that the recipient could then operate without contributing to its production. This is true whether the receiving model is a frontier-scale LLM, a small fine-tuned model, an embedding index, or a retrieval-augmented system.

The prohibition applies regardless of the technical mechanism: explicit fine-tuning, continued pretraining, instruction tuning, distillation, dataset assembly, retrieval-corpus seeding, embedding generation for downstream search systems, and any similar use. It applies whether the resulting model is intended for public, internal, or research use. It applies to fobi-authored editorial output, to data tables and rosters that fobi has curated, and to any structured outputs the Services expose.

It does not apply to using fobi as a human reader the way you would use a magazine or research report — you are welcome to read fobi, form your own views, and write your own analysis informed by what you read. The line is the difference between a human reading and a model training.

Significant portions of fobi reference, link to, or summarize third-party material — news articles, SEC filings, USPTO patents, company press releases, YouTube videos, and similar. The third-party material remains the property of its original owner; fobi's use of it is editorial reference, summarization, and citation, not republication. Your use of any third-party content inside fobi is subject to that third party's own terms.

If we have reason to believe a subscriber is violating this Usage Policy, the typical enforcement path is:

1. Informal contact. An email to the registered address asking about the activity and giving the subscriber the chance to explain or stop. Most issues end here.
2. Warning. If the activity continues, a formal warning with a clear statement of which clause is being violated and a deadline to come into compliance.
3. Suspension. Temporary suspension of access while the issue is investigated.
4. Termination. Permanent termination of the account and forfeiture of any remaining subscription period, per the Terms of Service. For Founding Member subscribers, termination forfeits the Founding rate permanently.

Severe violations (deliberate large-scale scraping, intentional credential sharing across many users, knowing AI-training use, abusive conduct toward others) may skip straight to suspension or termination without prior warning.

We may also pursue legal remedies, including injunctive relief and damages, where appropriate. fobi reserves the right to retain logs, records, and any other evidence relevant to enforcement.

If you encounter content on fobi that you believe violates this policy (your copyrighted material reproduced beyond fair use, abusive content, doxing, or similar), or if you become aware of someone else's misuse of the Services, please email hello@rickyrichards.com with the details. Include relevant URLs, dates, and a description of the issue. We take reports seriously and aim to respond promptly.

The acceptable-use guidance in §2 reflects what fobi permits; it is not a warranty about how third parties will treat your use of fobi-derived material. Your employer, your publisher, your investors, or your platform-of-choice may have additional rules that apply to you independently of fobi's. fobi is not responsible for third-party rules that govern your conduct.

We may update this Usage Policy from time to time, particularly as new use cases (good and bad) emerge. Material changes will be reflected in the "Last updated" date at the top of this page and, depending on the significance of the change, communicated by email or in-product notice. Continued use of fobi after an updated policy is published constitutes acceptance of the new policy.

Questions about this Usage Policy, requests for integration permission, or anything else along these lines — email hello@rickyrichards.com.