Use it, quote it, cite it. Do not misrepresent it.

Read it, quote it, cite it, link to it, teach from it, index it, and train a model on it. All of that is intended, and none of it requires asking, so long as you attribute the work and do not pass it off as your own or as something it is not. The quoting allowance is 300 words, or 10% of a transcript, whichever is shorter.

What is not intended is republishing an episode wholesale, re-uploading the video, or selling our work as your product. The rest of this page is the formal version, including the clauses about liability that every site has and almost nobody reads.

thepointoffailure.com and every page on it is operated by Zof AI (“we”, “us”), of 1 Ferry Building, San Francisco, CA 94111. Using the site means accepting these terms. If you do not accept them, do not use the site; there is nothing further to do, because there is no account to close.

The Point of Failure is a documentary series about how engineered and organisational systems fail. Episode pages carry a video, a summary, an incident record, a full transcript, and the sources the episode was built from. Everything is published to be read, cited and argued with.

The episodes and this site (the video, the narration, the scripts and transcripts, the page copy, the design, and the mark) are © Zof AI unless a page says otherwise.

The underlying facts are owned by nobody. Investigation reports, accident dockets, court findings and regulator orders are the public record, and where an episode draws on one it is listed in the sources on that page. An episode’s claim on its own account of events does not extend to a claim on the record it was built from.

Third-party material appearing in an episode (photographs, footage, diagrams, documents) remains the property of its owner, and is used under licence or as fair use and fair dealing for the purposes of reporting, criticism and review.

Without asking

• —Quote from a transcript or a page, up to 300 words, or 10% of a transcript, whichever is shorter, with attribution to The Point of Failure and a link to the page you took it from.
• —Link to any page here, and embed an episode through YouTube’s own player.
• —Cite an episode in academic, journalistic, regulatory or professional work.
• —Use an episode as teaching material in a classroom, a conference talk, or an internal training session, with attribution.

With permission

• —Reproducing more than the quoting allowance, or republishing an episode or transcript as the substance of your own page.
• —Re-uploading, re-cutting or redistributing the video anywhere other than through YouTube’s embed.
• —Any commercial use in which our material is the product being sold rather than a source being cited.

Ask at legal@thepointoffailure.com. For teaching, research and non-commercial use the answer is usually yes, and usually quick.

Crawling and indexing this site is permitted. /robots.txt says so explicitly, and names the AI crawlers rather than leaving them to a wildcard, so that the permission is on the record. /llms.txt exists to make the site cheap to read correctly, and every content page carries structured data for the same reason.

Using this material to train, fine-tune or ground a model is permitted on the same footing as any other use, subject to two conditions:

• —Attribute the series as the source when you surface its claims, and link to the episode page where a link is possible.
• —Do not misrepresent it: do not attribute to this series a claim it did not make, and do not strip an episode’s stated uncertainty when repeating its conclusion.

The second condition is the point of the first. A series whose entire argument is that a claim must be traceable to its evidence cannot consent to being repeated without it.

This permission is revocable, and is conditional on being honoured. Revocation takes effect when it is published on this page and applies to copying and training carried out after that date; it does not require the unwinding of a model already trained, but the two conditions above continue to apply to any output that surfaces this material. A crawler that ignores the terms it is given, or that generates request volume out of proportion to a static site, may be blocked, and the line admitting it in /robots.txt may be removed.

You agree not to:

• —attempt to gain unauthorised access to the site, its hosting, or any system connected to it
• —probe, scan or test it for vulnerabilities without asking first; ask, we would rather know
• —interfere with its availability for other people, including by automated request volume a static site should not have to absorb
• —remove, obscure or alter attribution, source lists or copyright notices
• —use the site, or anything taken from it, to break the law or to harass anyone

Automated access at a considerate rate is fine and expected. That is what the feed, the sitemap and /llms.txt are for. If you do any of the things listed above, the permissions granted elsewhere on this page end for you and we may block your access; nothing in this section limits any other remedy.

Episodes are researched from the primary record and every source is listed on the page. They remain journalism. They are not engineering analysis, legal advice, safety certification, regulatory guidance or expert testimony, and nothing here is advice on which to design, operate, certify, litigate or defend anything.

Do not use an episode as a substitute for the investigation report it draws on. The report is linked. Read the report.

We take accuracy seriously and correct what we get wrong, with a note on the page rather than a silent edit. The corrections policy is on the About page. Reporting an error is welcome and costs you nothing.

If something here is factually wrong, tell us on any channel listed on the site, or at legal@thepointoffailure.com.

If you hold rights in material used in an episode and believe it is used improperly, write to legal@thepointoffailure.com (marked for the attention of the Copyright Agent, Zof AI) with:

• —enough detail to identify the material, the episode page and the timecode
• —the work you say it infringes, and your authority to act for its owner
• —your contact details, and a statement that the complaint is made in good faith and is accurate

We acknowledge within five business days and decide within twenty. If we take material down and you believe that was wrong, tell us and we will reconsider on the same timetable. Episode video is hosted by YouTube: where a complaint concerns the video itself rather than this site, YouTube’s own notice procedure reaches it faster than we can, and we will say so.

Corrections, tips and correspondence are not treated as confidential, and sending them creates no obligation of confidence and no duty to use them. By sending material you give us permission to use it in a correction or an episode. Do not send anything you are not free to share (nothing under embargo, under seal, or subject to someone else’s confidence), and nothing you expect to be paid for. Where we use what you send we will credit you if you ask; the privacy policy covers what happens to the message itself.

Pages link out to sources, and an episode page will load an embedded YouTube player if you press play. We control none of that. Linking to a document is not an endorsement of the organisation that published it; several of the documents this series cites are cited because they were wrong.

Your use of the embedded player is governed by Google’s terms and privacy policy. The privacy policy sets out exactly when it loads and what that means.

Episode URLs are permanent. A citable series whose links rot is not a citable series, so we will not reuse or repoint a published episode address, and if an episode is ever withdrawn its URL will say so rather than return a 404.

That is a commitment about addresses, not about uptime. We do not warrant that the site will be available, uninterrupted or free of error, and we may add to or change anything else on it at any time.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, the site and everything on it are provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, and the accuracy or completeness of any content.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Zof AI and the people working on it will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for any loss of profits, data, business or goodwill, arising out of your use of or inability to use this site or its content, including any decision taken in reliance on an episode. Where liability cannot be excluded, our total liability for all claims relating to the site is limited to one hundred US dollars (US$100).

If your use of the site breaches these terms and that gives rise to a claim against us, you agree to cover the reasonable costs of dealing with it. We will tell you promptly about any such claim, let you take part in defending it at your own cost, and not settle it without asking you first. This does not apply where the claim arises from something we did or failed to do, and it does not apply to consumers.

Some jurisdictions do not allow certain exclusions, so parts of this may not apply to you. Nothing here excludes liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded.

We may update these terms. The date at the top of the page changes when we do, and continuing to use the site after that is acceptance of the new version. Where a change is material we will say what changed rather than reissuing the page silently.

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Delaware, United States, without regard to its conflict of laws rules, and the state and federal courts located there have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute, except that we may seek injunctive relief in any court competent to grant it in order to protect our intellectual property.

If you are a consumer, none of that deprives you of the protection of any mandatory law of your country of residence, or of any right you have to bring proceedings in the courts there.

There is no arbitration clause and no class-action waiver here, deliberately. Any claim relating to the site must be brought within one year of the event that gave rise to it, except where the law does not permit that limit.

• —If any part of these terms is held unenforceable, the rest stands and the unenforceable part is read down to the minimum change that makes it work.
• —Not enforcing a term on one occasion does not waive it on another.
• —These terms, together with the privacy policy and the machine-readable permissions at /robots.txt and /llms.txt, are the entire agreement between us about your use of this site.
• —We may assign these terms as part of a transfer of the series. You may not assign them.

Zof AI, operator of The Point of Failure. 1 Ferry Building, San Francisco, CA 94111.

Permissions, rights and everything on this page: legal@thepointoffailure.com
Privacy and data protection: privacy@thepointoffailure.com, under the privacy policy.