Terms of Service

1. About these Terms

These Terms of Service (“Terms”) govern your access to and use of BrickContests.com (the “Service”), a free, community-driven platform for organizing and participating in fan-run brick- building contests.

The Service is operated by:

(referred to as “we”, “us”, or “the Operator”).

By creating an account, submitting content, or otherwise using the Service, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

The Service is a privately operated hobby project. It is free to use. It is sustained by the Operator and, optionally, by voluntary donations.

2. No affiliation with The LEGO Group

BrickContests.com is an independent, fan-run project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed, sponsored, or authorized by The LEGO Group. LEGO® and the LEGO logo are trademarks of the LEGO Group, used here for descriptive purposes only.

3. Eligibility and accounts

You may create one account by providing a valid email address, a username, and a password. You must confirm your email address before your account becomes fully active.

The Service is intended for teen and adult fans of LEGO (commonly TFOLs and AFOLs) from the age of 13. Children who lack the agency to participate in community contests should not register. By creating an account you confirm that you have the legal capacity to enter into these Terms in your jurisdiction. If you are a minor under the applicable age of majority, you may only use the Service with the consent of a parent or legal guardian.

You are responsible for keeping your credentials safe and for all activity that takes place under your account. Sharing accounts is not permitted.

4. Your content and intellectual property

You retain full ownership of everything you submit to the Service, including profile information, build photographs, descriptions, and any contest materials you create as an organizer (“Your Content”).

By submitting Your Content to the Service, you grant the Operator a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable-only-to-our-hosting-providers, revocable-on-deletion license to host, store, reproduce, transmit, display, and arrange Your Content solely for the purpose of operating, maintaining, and displaying the Service to other users. This license does not include the right to sell or sublicense Your Content for marketing or commercial purposes, and it does not transfer ownership. This license will end when Your Content is deleted from our systems by you or the Operator.

You confirm that you have all rights necessary to grant this license, that Your Content is your own work, and that displaying it on the Service does not infringe anyone else’s rights.

Backups are not a personal archive. You are responsible for keeping your own copies of anything you submit. The Service maintains short rolling backups for disaster recovery only, and we cannot guarantee that lost content can be restored on request.

5. Our intellectual property and your license to use the Service

The Service itself — including the BrickContests.com name, logos, website design, source code, page layouts, copy, and any associated marks (other than LEGO® marks, which belong to The LEGO Group) — is owned by the Operator and protected by copyright and other applicable rights. You may not copy, modify, scrape at scale, redistribute, or use these materials to build a competing service.

Subject to your compliance with these Terms, we grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable license to access and use the Service for the purpose of participating in or organizing community contests, in line with the features the Service makes available to you. This license ends automatically if your account is terminated or if these Terms are terminated.

If you send us suggestions, feedback, or ideas about how to improve the Service (“Feedback”), you grant the Operator a worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, sublicensable license to use that Feedback freely, with no obligation to attribute, compensate, or implement it.

6. Roles and responsibilities

The Service uses a three-tier responsibility model. Each role is responsible for the content it creates or controls.

Users are responsible for content directly linked to them — username, avatar, biography, first/last name, social profile links, country, contest submissions, the descriptions and metadata attached to those submissions, and comments they post on submissions.

Contest Administrators are responsible for the content of contests they create or manage — including contest titles, taglines, descriptions, category names and descriptions, judging criteria, thumbnails, and example images. Contest Administrators may remove submissions to their own contests that they deem unfit or in violation of contest rules or these Terms. They may also delete comments posted on submissions to their contests for moderation purposes.

The Operator has final authority over all content on the Service and may remove any content or suspend any account that the Operator considers inconsistent with these Terms, with the spirit of the community, or with applicable law.

Reactions you leave on submissions are recorded internally but are never displayed attributed to you — other users see only aggregate counts, not who reacted.

7. Acceptable use

When using the Service, you agree not to:

• post content that is illegal, harassing, defamatory, hateful, threatening, sexually explicit, or that promotes violence;
• impersonate any person or misrepresent your affiliation with any person or organization;
• upload content that infringes the intellectual property, privacy, or other rights of any third party;
• submit, organize, or participate in contests that are overtly political or religious in nature, or that contain submissions, categories, or criteria with overtly political or religious content. The Operator decides what falls within this category, applying judgment flexibly and with the goal of keeping the community welcoming for everyone;
• organize commercial contests, defined as contests that require an entry fee, purchase, subscription, or other monetary contribution to participate;
• use the Service to advertise, promote, or solicit on behalf of a business without the Operator’s prior written permission;
• attempt to disrupt, reverse-engineer, scrape at scale, overload, or bypass the security or access controls of the Service;
• collect or harvest other users’ personal data.

8. Contests and prizes

Contests on the Service are organized by community members, not by the Operator. Each Contest Administrator is solely responsible for their contest’s rules, eligibility requirements, judging, communication with participants, and — where applicable — for all aspects of any prize, including procurement, taxation, shipping, customs, and delivery.

Prizes, where offered, are awarded entirely by the Contest Administrator. The Operator does not provide, fund, guarantee, ship, insure, or otherwise stand behind any prize, and accepts no liability for non-delivery, defects, taxes, or disputes arising from prizes. Contest Administrators must comply with all laws applicable to their contests (including sweepstakes, lottery, advertising, and consumer-protection laws in participants’ jurisdictions). If a prize requires shipping, the Contest Administrator is responsible for collecting and handling the participant’s address directly and lawfully.

9. Copyright complaints

If you believe content on the Service infringes your copyright or other rights, please send a notice to contact@brickcontests.com including: (i) your name and contact details, (ii) a description of the protected work, (iii) the URL(s) of the allegedly infringing material, (iv) a statement of good-faith belief that the use is unauthorized, and (v) confirmation that the information is accurate.

We will review valid notices, remove or restrict access to infringing content where appropriate, and notify the affected user. Repeated infringers may have their accounts suspended or terminated. This process is intended to comply with notice-and-action obligations under EU Regulation 2022/2065 (Digital Services Act).

10. Moderation, suspension, and termination

No general monitoring obligation. Consistent with Articles 6 and 8 of Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 (Digital Services Act), the Operator has no general obligation to monitor content users post or contests organizers run, and does not pre-screen submissions. We may, but are not required to, review content at our discretion. Where we become aware of content that appears to violate these Terms or applicable law — through user reports, copyright notices under Section 9, or otherwise — we will act in accordance with our notice-and-action obligations.

We may, at our reasonable discretion and with notice where practicable, remove content, restrict features, suspend, or terminate accounts that violate these Terms or that we believe harm the community or the Service.

You may delete your account at any time from within the Service. When you do:

• your account data (email, password hash, profile fields) is deleted;
• your comments are deleted;
• your uploaded images remain available as part of the contests they were submitted to, but the submitter attribution is removed so the images are no longer linked to your identity. This is necessary to preserve the integrity of past contests and the experience of other participants. If you object to this, please delete your submissions manually before deleting your account.

The Operator may also discontinue the Service in whole or in part at any time. We will make reasonable efforts to give advance notice through the Service or by email.

11. Donations

The Service is free of charge. Users may, entirely voluntarily, support the Service through donations via a third-party donation platform (currently Buy Me a Coffee). Donations are not refundable, do not grant any special status, privileges, or rights within the Service, and do not change these Terms. The Operator publishes a transparent breakdown of running costs and aggregate donation totals as well as anonymised donations on the Service's donation page.

Optional public acknowledgement. When making a donation, you may — entirely voluntarily and through a separate opt-in — consent to having your chosen display name and donation amount shown as an individual entry in the public list of contributors on the donation page.
Opting in is not required for your donation to be accepted, confers no additional rights, and may be withdrawn at any time by contacting contact@brickcontests.com. We will remove your entry from the public list within a reasonable period after withdrawal. Aggregate totals — which contain no personal data — are not affected by withdrawal. The processing of this information is described in our Privacy Policy.

12. Third-party services

The Service relies on third-party providers (currently Hetzner for hosting and backups, Resend for transactional email, Buy Me a Coffee for donations). Your interactions with those providers may also be governed by their own terms. We describe the data flows in our Privacy Policy.

13. Disclaimers and limitation of liability

The Service is provided “as is” and “as available”. To the maximum extent permitted by law, we make no warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement, and we do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or secure.

To the extent permitted by law, the Operator’s liability is limited as follows:

• The Operator is liable without limitation for damages caused intentionally or by gross negligence, for damages from injury to life, body, or health, and where mandatory law (e.g. the German Product Liability Act) so provides.
• For damages caused by simple negligence, the Operator is liable only for breach of a material contractual obligation (an obligation whose fulfillment makes proper performance of these Terms possible in the first place and on whose observance you may regularly rely), and such liability is limited to typical, foreseeable damages.
• Any further liability for simple negligence is excluded.

Because the Service is provided free of charge, you accept that the Operator’s ability to investigate, mitigate, or compensate for issues is necessarily limited.

Force majeure.The Operator is not liable for delays or failures in providing the Service that result from events beyond reasonable control — including outages or incidents at our hosting or email providers, internet-routing failures, denial-of-service attacks, natural events, government actions, or comparable circumstances. We will make reasonable efforts to restore the Service when such events end.

Nothing in this Section limits any rights you have under mandatory consumer-protection law (including, where applicable, Art. 82 GDPR).

14. Indemnification

You will defend, indemnify, and hold harmless the Operator from any third-party claims, damages, or costs (including reasonable legal fees) arising from Your Content, your use of the Service, or your breach of these Terms, except to the extent caused by the Operator’s intent or gross negligence.

15. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. Material changes will be announced through the Service or by email at least 14 days before they take effect. Your continued use of the Service after the effective date constitutes acceptance of the updated Terms. If you do not agree, you can delete your account before the changes take effect.

16. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of the Federal Republic of Germany, excluding its conflict-of-laws rules and the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods.

If you are a consumer with habitual residence in another EU member state, you additionally benefit from the mandatory protections of the law of that state, which this clause does not override.

Pursuant to § 36 VSBG, we are not obliged and not willing to participate in dispute-resolution proceedings before a consumer arbitration board.

The place of jurisdiction for all disputes arising out of or in connection with these Terms is, where legally permissible, the Operator’s place of residence. For consumers, the statutory rules on jurisdiction (in particular Art. 17-19 of Regulation (EU) No 1215/2012) remain unaffected.

17. Miscellaneous

Entire agreement. These Terms, together with our Privacy Policy, constitute the entire agreement between you and the Operator concerning the Service and supersede all prior oral or written communications on the same subject. Amendments or side agreements are effective only in writing (email is sufficient) and confirmed by the Operator.

Notices. Notices to you may be sent to the email address registered to your account or shown on the Service. Notices to the Operator must be sent to contact@brickcontests.com. Notices are deemed received: by email, on the day they are sent; by postal mail, on actual delivery, or — if the recipient refuses delivery or prevents it through circumstances within their control — on the date delivery would have occurred in the ordinary course of post.

Survival. The following provisions survive termination of these Terms or deletion of your account, for as long as they remain relevant: Section 4 (the license granted in respect of Your Content that remains on the Service after attribution removal), Section 5 (Our intellectual property and Feedback license), Section 13 (Disclaimers and limitation of liability), Section 14 (Indemnification), Section 16 (Governing law and disputes), and this Section 17.

Severability and waiver. If any provision of these Terms is held to be invalid or unenforceable, the remaining provisions remain in full effect. Failure to enforce any right is not a waiver of that right.

Assignment. You may not assign these Terms without our prior written consent; we may assign them in connection with a transfer of the Service to a successor operator that agrees to honor them.