Acceptable Use Policy

By accessing or using Claim Recon (the “Service”), you agree to this Acceptable Use Policy (“AUP”). This AUP supplements and is incorporated by reference into the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. It applies to all visitors, registered users, paid subscribers, and any automated agent or system that interacts with the Service on a person's behalf. We reserve the right to update this AUP at any time. Continued access after changes constitutes acceptance.

• “Content” means all text, data, graphics, code, structure, compilations, schemas, software, audio, images, and other material made available through the Service, whether or not protectable by copyright.
• “Automated Access” means any access to the Service by a computer program, bot, script, scraper, crawler, agent, headless browser, or other automated process, including those operated by or on behalf of an individual.
• “Permitted Personal Use” has the meaning given in § 09.
• “User” or “You” means any individual or entity accessing the Service.

You may not, and may not assist or permit any third party to, use the Service for any unlawful purpose, in violation of the Terms of Service, in violation of this AUP, or in any manner that infringes the rights of Claim Recon or any third party.

The following are expressly prohibited:

• (a) Scraping, crawling, indexing, or harvesting Content by any automated means, except by search engine crawlers operating in compliance with the Service's robots.txt directives.
• (b) Bulk extraction, copying, downloading, or storage of Content beyond what is incidental to ordinary individual browsing.
• (c) Use of any data mining tool, robot, spider, agent, or similar gathering or extraction method against the Service.
• (d) Circumventing or attempting to circumvent any access control, rate limit, authentication, IP block, CAPTCHA, or other technical measure intended to manage access to the Service.
• (e) Maintaining persistent automated sessions or generating volumes of requests inconsistent with individual human use.

You may not, without Claim Recon's prior written authorization:

• (a) Reproduce, republish, distribute, display, syndicate, mirror, or make publicly available any Content, in whole or in substantial part.
• (b) Create derivative works from Content, including reformatted, paraphrased, translated, summarized, or restructured copies.
• (c) Use Content to construct, populate, or augment any competing or substitute product, service, database, knowledge base, dataset, or application.
• (d) Repackage Content under your own brand or strip Claim Recon attribution from Content.

This restriction applies whether the republication is commercial or non-commercial, free or paid, attributed or unattributed.

You may not, without Claim Recon's prior written authorization:

• (a) Use Content as training data, fine-tuning data, evaluation data, or reinforcement-learning data for any artificial intelligence, machine learning, large language model, embedding model, or similar system.
• (b) Submit Content to any third-party AI or ML system for the purpose of training, fine-tuning, evaluating, or improving that system.
• (c) Generate vector embeddings, knowledge graphs, or other machine-readable representations of Content for the purpose of training or augmenting any AI or ML system.
• (d) Use Content to create a model that competes with, substitutes for, or replicates the function of the Service.

Claim Recon's content is curated, organized, and analyzed work — including narrative explanations, statutory framings, worked examples, secondary-condition mappings, and tool outputs. This curation is independently protectable and may not be appropriated as model training material.

You may not:

• (a) Impersonate Claim Recon, its operators, its accredited representatives, or any other person or entity in connection with the Service.
• (b) Misrepresent any affiliation, endorsement, partnership, or relationship with Claim Recon.
• (c) Hold yourself out as a Claim Recon employee, agent, representative, accredited representative, or authorized partner.
• (d) Use Claim Recon's name, logo, trademarks, or trade dress in any manner suggesting endorsement of you, your services, or any third party without express written permission.
• (e) Use the Service to defraud or deceive any third party — including veterans, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, any Veterans Service Organization, or any healthcare provider.

Because Claim Recon's user base includes veterans pursuing disability claims, impersonation in this context can cause direct harm. Violations may be reported to federal authorities and prosecuted under applicable fraud statutes.

You may not:

• (a) Attack, probe, scan, or attempt to compromise the security or integrity of the Service or its infrastructure.
• (b) Introduce malware, viruses, worms, ransomware, or any other malicious code.
• (c) Interfere with or disrupt the Service, its servers, networks, or other users' use of the Service.
• (d) Conduct denial-of-service, distributed denial-of-service, or amplification attacks.
• (e) Exploit vulnerabilities, unauthorized API endpoints, or undocumented features.
• (f) Reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble any part of the Service, except where this restriction is prohibited by applicable law.
• (g) Use the Service to harass, threaten, defame, or harm any other user or any third party.
• (h) Upload content that infringes the intellectual property rights of any third party.

The following uses are permitted without prior authorization:

• (a) Individual personal browsing of the Service in the ordinary course of preparing your own VA disability claim or for personal education on VA benefit topics.
• (b) Linking to Claim Recon pages from your own website, social media, or written work, with attribution to “Claim Recon” and a working hyperlink to the cited page.
• (c) Quotation of short passages of Content for purposes of news reporting, commentary, criticism, scholarship, or research, consistent with the U.S. fair use doctrine (17 U.S.C. § 107), provided that the quoted passage is identified as originating from Claim Recon, a hyperlink to the source page is included, and the quoted passage is not used to substitute for the original or to compete with the Service.
• (d) Search-engine indexing in compliance with the Service's robots.txt directives. Claim Recon currently welcomes indexing by major search engines and AI assistants for the purpose of citation and discovery; this is a current policy and may be modified.
• (e) Use of Claim Recon's published API endpoints in accordance with their documented terms.

Nothing in this section grants any license to scrape, republish, build competing services from, train AI systems on, or otherwise use Content beyond what is expressly permitted.

Claim Recon retains all right, title, and interest in and to the Service and Content, including all copyrights, trademarks, trade dress, patents, trade secrets, and other intellectual property rights.

The Service contains substantial original work, including but not limited to:

• Curated compilations of diagnostic codes, secondary-condition pairings, rating criteria, and statutory citations
• Original narrative explanations, worked examples, and educational commentary
• User-interface designs, tool flows, and proprietary algorithms
• Database schemas and structural organization of veteran-benefit information

Government works (e.g., text of federal regulations, statutes, and VA forms) are not copyrightable in the underlying form; however, Claim Recon's selection, arrangement, organization, annotation, and explanatory presentation of those works are independently protectable as original works of authorship and as protectable compilations under 17 U.S.C. § 101.

The Claim Recon name, logo, and visual identity are trademarks of Claim Recon, used to identify the Service and distinguish it from third-party offerings.

Claim Recon may employ technical measures to manage access to the Service, including rate limiting, bot detection, IP filtering, CAPTCHAs, request signing, traffic analysis, and other access controls. These measures may be applied at Claim Recon's discretion, may change without notice, and may result in temporary or permanent restriction of access for traffic patterns inconsistent with this AUP.

Claim Recon monitors traffic, request patterns, and access logs for the purpose of operating the Service, enforcing this AUP, and protecting the Service from abuse. By using the Service, you consent to this monitoring.

Attempting to evade, defeat, or circumvent any technical measure — including by rotating IPs, spoofing user-agents, using residential proxy networks, or distributing automated requests across botnets — is itself a violation of this AUP.

Claim Recon reserves the right to enforce this AUP through all means available under applicable law, including:

• (a) Issuing takedown notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. § 512) to hosting providers, content delivery networks, and other intermediaries hosting infringing copies of Content.
• (b) Pursuing claims under federal and state law, including but not limited to copyright infringement (17 U.S.C. § 501), trademark infringement (15 U.S.C. § 1114), and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (18 U.S.C. § 1030).
• (c) Seeking injunctive relief, monetary damages, statutory damages, attorneys' fees, and costs.
• (d) Reporting violations to law enforcement, including the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) and applicable state authorities.
• (e) Working with hosting providers, payment processors, advertising networks, and search engines to disrupt operations conducted in violation of this AUP.

You agree that monetary damages alone may be insufficient to remedy violations of this AUP, and that Claim Recon is entitled to seek injunctive and equitable relief in addition to any other remedies.

Claim Recon may suspend, restrict, or terminate your access to the Service at any time, with or without notice, for any violation of this AUP, the Terms of Service, or any applicable law. Termination may be effected by account closure, IP block, blacklisting, or any other technical or contractual means.

Following termination, the prohibitions in §§ 03 through 08 and §§ 10 through 12 continue to apply.

To report a suspected violation of this AUP — including impersonation of Claim Recon, suspected scraping operations, content republication, or other abuse — contact support@claimrecon.com with the subject line “AUP Violation Report” and as much identifying information as you can provide (URLs, screenshots, dates, observed behavior). Claim Recon will investigate reports in good faith but does not commit to any specific response timeline.

This AUP is governed by the laws of the State of Michigan, without regard to conflict-of-law principles. Any dispute arising from this AUP shall be resolved through binding arbitration in accordance with the rules of the American Arbitration Association, conducted in the State of Michigan, consistent with § 15 of the Terms of Service.

If any provision of this AUP is held to be unenforceable, the remaining provisions shall continue in full force and effect.

This AUP is incorporated into and forms part of the Terms of Service. In the event of conflict between this AUP and the Terms of Service, the more restrictive provision applies. Nothing in this AUP limits any other right or remedy available to Claim Recon under contract, law, or equity.

Questions about this AUP: support@claimrecon.com