Legal
Last updated: 14 March 2026
Parties
These Terms of Service and API License Agreement (the "Terms") are between you and Hamlaoui & Co., Entrepreneur Individuel (SIRET 102 404 456 00018), trading as Law4Devs ("we", "us", "our"), 254 Rue Vendôme, 69003 Lyon, France.
By registering for an API key, clicking "I Agree", or otherwise accessing the Law4Devs API, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agree to be bound by these Terms. If you are acting on behalf of a company, you represent that you have the authority to bind that company. These Terms were prepared with legal counsel specialising in EU database law, intellectual property, and B2B software licensing.
Definitions
License
Subject to these Terms and timely payment of applicable fees, we grant you a non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to access and use the API solely for your own internal development purposes or to build software products that do not compete directly with Law4Devs.
All rights not expressly granted are reserved. We retain full ownership of the Database, API infrastructure, and SDKs.
Prohibited Uses — EU Directive 96/9/EC
The following clauses reflect our rights under EU Directive 96/9/EC on the legal protection of databases, as transposed in French law.
Clause A — Sui Generis Extraction Prohibition
You acknowledge that the Database is protected by the sui generis right provided by Directive 96/9/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 11 March 1996. You are prohibited from extracting, by permanent or temporary transfer, all or a substantial part of the contents of the Database to another medium by any means or in any form.
Clause B — Anti-Scraping & Automation
The use of automated systems, software, scripts, or "crawlers" to extract data from the API for the purpose of replicating the Database or creating a derivative competing service is strictly prohibited. Any attempt to bypass rate-limiting or technical security measures will result in immediate, permanent termination of your API key and potential legal action.
Clause C — Governing Law & Jurisdiction
These Terms are governed by French law. Any dispute arising from the use of the API or the Database shall be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of Lyon, France. Under EU Regulation 1215/2012 (Brussels I bis), this clause is valid for B2B contracts.
Clause D — Additional Prohibited Uses
In addition to the prohibitions above, you are strictly prohibited from: (i) using API responses to train, fine-tune, or evaluate machine learning models or AI systems of any kind; (ii) redistributing or reselling API responses, whether raw or processed, to third parties; (iii) caching API responses beyond 24 hours or in a manner designed to reduce billable API calls; (iv) creating derivative databases or datasets from API output for commercial purposes.
Legal Grounds
Violations of these Terms may be pursued on three concurrent and independent legal grounds:
Hamlaoui & Co. monitors usage actively and will pursue infringers before the courts of Lyon, France without prior notice.
Monitoring
We employ multiple technical and legal measures to detect and evidence unauthorised use of the Database.
Per-key fingerprinting
Every API response is invisibly fingerprinted with per-key markers embedded in the structure of returned data. These markers survive extraction, transformation, and reformatting. If we detect our fingerprinted data in an unauthorised context, that data constitutes admissible evidence of the origin API key and account holder.
Integrity verification records
The Database contains integrity verification records and structural markers embedded for detection purposes. Any system that reproduces these markers has necessarily extracted a substantial part of the Database. Doing so triggers immediate, automatic suspension of the associated API key and constitutes conclusive evidence of systematic extraction, for which we will pursue legal action before the courts of Lyon, France, seeking damages under contract law, Directive 96/9/EC database right, and French unfair competition law.
Anomaly detection
We monitor API usage patterns, request volumes, timing, and endpoint sequences. Usage that deviates significantly from normal developer behaviour — such as systematic enumeration of endpoints, sequential extraction of all records, or unusually high request volumes — will result in investigation, key suspension, and may be submitted as evidence of intent in legal proceedings.
Account Tiers
Access to certain API tiers requires additional commitments beyond these base Terms:
API Keys
API keys are issued to individual accounts and must not be shared, published, or transferred. You are fully responsible for all activity under your key. Suspected unauthorised use must be reported to [email protected] immediately.
We reserve the right to suspend or terminate any API key for breach of these Terms, non-payment, anomalous usage patterns, or for any other reasonable cause, with or without notice.
Service
We target ≥99.5% uptime for paid plans. Scheduled maintenance windows will be announced via the status page at status.law4devs.eu. Growth tier includes basic API access with best-effort availability and no formal uptime guarantee.
The regulatory data is sourced from EUR-Lex and reflects official publications. We make reasonable efforts to keep data current but do not warrant that it is complete, error-free, or constitutes legal advice. Please consult qualified legal counsel for compliance decisions.
Liability
To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, we shall not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, or consequential damages arising from your use of or inability to use the API or Database.
Our aggregate liability for any claims under these Terms shall not exceed the fees you paid in the three months preceding the event giving rise to the claim.
Changes
We may update these Terms from time to time. Continued use of the API after notice of changes constitutes acceptance. The version you agreed to at signup is logged alongside your email, IP address, and timestamp in our GDPR-compliant agreement records.
Questions about these Terms? Email [email protected].