Bounty buyer terms
Version 2026-08-20 · graded against acceptance criteria 2026-08-10
These terms apply when you fund a bounty — commissioning clips that do not exist yet, captured in private homes. They sit alongside our general Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, and the acceptance criteria, which define what you are and are not being sold. Where these terms and the general Terms of Service conflict on a bounty, these govern.
- 01
You pay up front, and you are charged only for accepted clips
Funding a bounty charges the full amount — clips wanted × price per clip — and Node Data holds it. Each accepted clip draws down that balance. When the bounty closes, whatever was not spent on an accepted clip is refunded to the card that funded it. A rejected clip costs you nothing and is never delivered to you.
- 02
"Accepted" means the published criteria, fixed at the moment you pay
Clips are graded automatically against the acceptance criteria, by the same code for every clip, at the moment of submission. The version of those criteria in force when you funded the bounty is the version your clips are graded against; if we change the criteria afterwards, your bounty keeps the ones you agreed to.
- 03
You have 14 days to dispute a delivered clip
You may dispute an accepted clip within 14 days of first downloading it, by identifying the specific criterion you say it fails. We review the clip and its recorded quality report against that criterion only, and we show you what that report says. Where our own report records the disputed check as failed, the dispute is upheld immediately — we are not going to make you argue against our own evidence. Otherwise a person reviews it. If a dispute is upheld the price of that clip is refunded. After 14 days a delivered clip is final. Disputes are about whether a clip meets the published spec: a clip that meets it but does not suit your model is not a ground for refund.
- 04
An upheld dispute is refunded by Node Data, not taken back from the family
When we accept a clip we pay the capturing household for it. If we later agree with you that the clip should not have passed, that is our grading error and we absorb it — the refund comes out of our share and the household keeps what it was paid. We mention this because it explains why our grader is strict rather than generous.
- 05
What you may do with the clips
On delivery you receive a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive licence to use the clips to train, validate, evaluate and deploy machine-learning models, including commercially and including models you sell. You may store, transform and derive from them internally. You may not resell or publicly redistribute the clips themselves as media, and you may not attempt to identify any individual or household from them.
- 06
You get the clips first, and afterwards they may be re-listed
You are the only buyer while the bounty is running, and you take delivery before anyone else can. Once it closes, the clips it produced may be listed on the Node Data marketplace where other developers can license the same set — which is why a bounty costs what it costs rather than several times more for exclusivity. Your licence is unaffected by anyone else buying it. If you need genuine exclusivity, ask us before you fund: it is a different price, not a setting.
- 07
The family keeps the right to license their own clips
Paying for a clip buys you the licence described above. It does not buy the footage. The household that filmed it keeps ownership of it and keeps the right to license it again through the Node Data marketplace, or to withdraw it from sale entirely — including to a competitor of yours. Nothing you fund makes a family's own recording of their own kitchen unavailable to them. If that is unacceptable for a particular dataset, exclusivity is a separate negotiation and a different price; it is not the default and it is not something a bounty quietly grants.
- 08
Models you train are entirely yours, and stay yours
Weights, checkpoints, embeddings, evaluations and any other artefact you produce by training on these clips are 100% yours. Node Data claims no ownership, no licence and no royalty in them, and neither the households nor Node Data can assert a later claim over a model because their clip was in its training set. A withdrawn permission stops future delivery of that family's clips; it does not reach into a model you have already trained, and we will not ask you to retrain, unlearn or delete one. The one thing this does not cover is a model whose output reproduces an identifiable person or home from the clips — that is outside the licence in any case, and is what the no-identification rule above exists to prevent.
- 09
Households are paid again when a re-listing sells
A share of every marketplace sale of your bounty's clips goes to the households that captured them, split by how many accepted clips each contributed. Some clips may be absent from the re-listing because the family declined that specific permission — their absence changes nothing about what was delivered to you.
- 10
Some clips are captured by minors, under parental control
Capturers include children aged 13 and over, filming inside their own homes. For every such clip a verified parent has separately permitted recording, disclosure to you, and use of the clip to train AI — three separate permissions, each withdrawable — and has approved that individual clip before it is delivered. A parent may withdraw permission at any time, which stops any further delivery of that child's clips. It cannot recall a clip already delivered to you, and we make no attempt to.
- 11
Delivery is a download, and a delivered copy is yours to keep
We deliver by download. Once you have downloaded a clip you hold a copy we do not control and cannot retrieve. We keep our copy for the term of your licence and for 7 years afterwards for tax and contractual records; an accepted clip that is never downloaded is deleted after 18 months.
- 12
What we do not warrant
We warrant that each delivered clip met the published criteria when graded and that we had the permissions described above to deliver it. We do not warrant that the clips will be fit for any particular model, architecture or task, that they are free of artefacts a human reviewer would dislike, or that any model trained on them will perform in any particular way.
- 13
Closing, deadlines and cancellation
You may close a bounty at any time and be refunded the unfulfilled remainder. A bounty with a deadline closes automatically when it passes. Node Data may cancel and refund a bounty in full before any clip has been accepted; after that, a cancellation is a close, and accepted clips remain payable and deliverable.
You accept the version of these terms in force when you fund a bounty, and it is recorded against that bounty. Later changes do not apply to a bounty already funded.