Terms of use

Effective August 25, 2026.

These terms are an agreement between you and JW Labs LLC, a California limited liability company ("we", "us", "our"). They govern your use of this website, jwlabs.ai, and of 4a, our podcast curator. By using either one you accept them. If you do not accept them, do not use them.

They do not govern longlive. longlive is published at longlivets.com and its own terms of use are there.

1. What we provide, and on what basis

This website is informational. 4a is software we make available free of charge, without an account, a password or a subscription. Neither is sold to you, and nothing here is a contract to deliver a service to a standard, on a schedule, or at all.

4a is early software and we say so everywhere. Features change, the catalogue changes, and things break. We may add, alter, suspend or discontinue any part of this website or of 4a at any time, without notice and without liability to you. We do not promise that either will be available, uninterrupted, error-free, or suitable for any particular purpose.

2. Licence to use 4a

We grant you a personal, revocable, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to use 4a for your own private, non-commercial listening, in accordance with these terms. That is the whole of the permission granted. In particular, you may not:

• resell, sublicense, rent or commercially redistribute 4a or any part of it;
• use it to build a competing catalogue, index or dataset by bulk extraction;
• send automated traffic at it, or at any host it talks to, at a rate a person could not generate;
• attempt to defeat, disable or work around any technical measure in it, or use it to defeat one belonging to somebody else;
• use it in any way that breaks the law, infringes anybody's rights, or would put us in breach of an agreement with a third party.

We may withdraw your licence if you do any of those things. Since 4a needs no account, in practice that means we may block access rather than close an account.

3. Podcast audio is not ours, and we do not touch it

This is the most important section on this page, and it is a description of how the software is actually built rather than a disclaimer bolted on afterwards.

Podcast audio is served to you by the publisher, from the publisher's own hosts. 4a sets a media element's source to the publisher's original enclosure URL and seeks within it. We do not rehost it, proxy it, cache it, transcode it, concatenate it, edit it or produce any derived audio file at any point. There is no JW Labs server between you and an episode.

Consequences you should understand:

• Their terms apply to their audio. Your use of any episode is subject to the publisher's terms and to those of the hosts and content delivery networks they have put in front of it. We are not a party to that.
• We claim nothing in it. Every show, episode, title, description and piece of artwork belongs to its owner. We make no ownership claim over any of it, and where 4a shows a title, a description or artwork it is identifying the publisher's work, not offering our own.
• We do not remove advertising. 4a contains no ad detection and no ad skipping. Where the software chooses a bounded region of an episode it does so for editorial reasons; that some advertising falls outside a chosen region is incidental and is not a feature.
• We do not control what a publisher sees. Because your device fetches audio directly, the publisher's hosts and any measurement service in front of them receive the request — including your IP address and user agent. We never receive it. 4a's privacy policy is exact about this, including who those parties are and why we do not proxy around them.

If you are a publisher and you want your feed handled differently or removed, write to help@jwlabs.ai and we will deal with it. The page for podcasters sets out the whole position in plain English, including how to have a show removed. The answer is yes.

4. Your data, and the feedback you send

4a's privacy policy governs what the app stores, what it transmits and what you can delete. This website's own privacy notice is here. Both are part of these terms by reference.

4a lets you rate a pick and attach a short note. A note you type is free text that you wrote, and it is stored on our server. Do not put anything in it that you would not want kept, and do not put anything confidential or anybody else's personal information in it. We may read feedback, act on it, and use what we learn from it to change the product, without obligation or payment to you. We will not publish your note attributed to you, because we have no name to attribute it to.

5. Our own material

The text, design, code and copy of this website, and of 4a to the extent it is ours, belong to us. Where we publish source code in a public repository, the licence file in that repository governs that code and takes precedence over this section for it. Otherwise, you may quote or link to our pages with attribution; you may not republish them wholesale as your own.

Our engineering notes describe our own systems and measurements. They are published so they can be read, criticised and cited. They are not advice, and they are not warranties about how our software will behave for you.

6. Links to other places

Where we link out — a publisher's episode, a podcast app, longlivets.com, a source repository — we do not control what is at the other end and we are not responsible for it. A link is not an endorsement.

7. No warranty

To the fullest extent the law allows, this website and 4a are provided "as is" and "as available", without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, or non-infringement.

We do not warrant that curation will suit you, that a pick will be relevant, that a segment boundary will land where intended, that audio will play, or that any information on this website is complete or current.

8. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, JW Labs LLC and its members, officers and agents will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, punitive or exemplary damages, or for any loss of data, profits, revenue, goodwill or anticipated savings, arising out of or connected with your use of this website or of 4a, however caused and on any theory of liability.

Where liability cannot be excluded, our total aggregate liability to you for all claims is limited to one hundred United States dollars (US$100). You paid us nothing, and that is the honest reason this figure is small rather than a negotiating position.

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited, including liability for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for death or personal injury caused by negligence. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain exclusions, so parts of sections 7 and 8 may not apply to you.

9. Indemnity

You agree to indemnify us against claims, losses and reasonable costs arising from your breach of these terms or your misuse of this website or of 4a.

10. Changes to these terms

We may change these terms. When we do, we change the effective date at the top of this page, and the version history of this website's public source repository records what changed and when. Continuing to use this website or 4a after a change means you accept the revised terms. If a change is material and we have a way to tell you, we will.

11. Governing law and venue

These terms, and any dispute arising out of them or out of your use of this website or of 4a, are governed by the laws of the State of California and the federal laws of the United States applicable there, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules.

You and we agree that the state and federal courts located in California have exclusive jurisdiction over any such dispute, and each of us consents to venue there.

12. General

If any provision of these terms is held unenforceable, the rest remain in force and the unenforceable provision is limited to the minimum extent necessary. Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it. These terms, together with the privacy documents referenced in section 4, are the entire agreement between you and us on this subject. You may not assign them; we may assign them to a successor to our business.

13. Contact

Notices and questions under these terms: help@jwlabs.ai, which reaches JW Labs LLC directly.

What this document is, and is not

It was written by the people who wrote the software, and it is accurate about how that software behaves — section 3 in particular is a description of the code and not a hope about it. It has not been reviewed by a lawyer, and it is not a professional opinion about its own sufficiency under any particular law. We would rather say that here than imply a review that has not happened. That is the same standard 4a's privacy policy holds itself to, and for the same reason.