Legal

Terms of Service

Version 2.0, effective from 24 August 2026

1. About these terms

These Terms of Service ("Terms") govern your use of the Lectora platform — an AI-assisted grading and feedback tool for higher education — operated by Fjordbyte AS, a Norwegian company (org. nr. 933 773 477) with registered address Solheimsgaten 7 C, 5058 Bergen, Norway.

By creating an account, signing in, or otherwise using Lectora, you agree to these Terms.

These Terms apply to two distinct usage modes:

  • Individual mode (PAT) — you sign up yourself and connect Lectora to Canvas using a Personal Access Token you generate.
  • Institutional mode (LTI) — your institution has signed a Master Service Agreement with us and made Lectora available to you via Canvas LTI integration.

In institutional mode, the Master Service Agreement between Fjordbyte and your institution governs the commercial relationship between Fjordbyte and your institution, the Data Processing Agreement (DPA) governs data handling, and these Terms apply to your individual use of the service. Where these Terms conflict with a Master Service Agreement, the Master Service Agreement prevails for institutional users.

2. Definitions

For the purpose of the provisions herein, the following terms shall have the following meaning:

Lectora shall mean the Lectora platform (lectora.app) — the product through which the Service is delivered;

Fjordbyte, we, us or our shall mean Fjordbyte AS (org. nr. 933 773 477), the Norwegian company that owns and operates Lectora. The product name and the company name are distinct, and either may change independently of the other;

Service shall mean Lectora and related services made available by Fjordbyte under these Terms;

You or User shall mean the natural person using the Service (educator, teaching assistant, or administrator) under these Terms;

Institution shall mean a higher-education institution (university, college, business school) that has signed a Master Service Agreement with Fjordbyte;

Canvas shall mean the Canvas LMS by Instructure, Inc., to which the Service connects;

Content shall mean material accessible via the Service, including assignments, rubrics, student submissions, AI-generated drafts, Your edits, and reference files You upload;

Student Work shall mean student submissions and related materials uploaded to or fetched into the Service;

In addition to the definitions above, certain terms may be defined in the provisions wherein they are being used below.

3. Eligibility and account creation

To use Lectora You must:

  • Be at least 18 years old or have reached the legal age of majority in Your jurisdiction;
  • Be a member of the teaching staff (or in a recognised teaching-assistant role) at a recognised higher-education institution;
  • Provide accurate registration information and keep it up to date;
  • Keep your account credentials and Canvas Personal Access Token confidential; and
  • Notify us immediately at lectora@fjordbyte.no if you suspect unauthorised access to your account.

You are responsible for all activity on Your account. You must ensure that Your account is not shared, suspended, compromised, or used in violation of these Terms. You are liable for any consequences should Your account be shared, suspended, compromised, or used in violation of these Terms.

4. Your authority to upload student work (CRITICAL — PAT mode)

If you are using Lectora in individual (PAT) mode, you represent and warrant that:

  1. You have authority from your institution to use third-party AI grading tools with student data;
  2. Such use is permitted by your institution's data protection policies and applicable law (including GDPR);
  3. You have informed your students (or have institutional permission rendering separate notice unnecessary) that their submissions will be processed by Lectora;
  4. You are operating as the data controller — or under delegated authority from your institution as controller — for the Student Work you upload, and Fjordbyte processes it as your processor on your instructions.

If you are uncertain about any of these warranties, do not upload Student Work and contact Your institution's data protection officer first.

In institutional (LTI) mode, these warranties are made by your institution under the Master Service Agreement and DPA, not by you individually.

5. Purchases and payment (paid plans)

Lectora may offer free trials, course-by-course purchases, and institutional licenses. A course purchase is a one-time payment priced per active student enrolled in the course at the time of purchase. The specific terms of your purchase — price, the number of student seats it covers, included features, trial duration, refund eligibility — are presented to you at purchase time and form part of these Terms.

  • Billing: through Stripe. You authorise Fjordbyte and Stripe to charge the payment method on file.
  • Trials: where offered, trials run for seven (7) days per course and do not convert into a paid plan. No payment method is required to start a trial, and no charge is made when one ends — at expiry the course locks until it is purchased. We will notify You three (3) days before a trial ends.
  • Refunds: per the refund policy presented at purchase, or as required by Norwegian consumer protection law (Forbrukerkjøpsloven, Angrerettloven where applicable).
  • Taxes: prices exclude VAT unless stated otherwise. Norwegian VAT (25%) is added for Norwegian customers; reverse charge or local VAT may apply for foreign customers.
  • Failed payments: we may suspend the Service after notice if payment is not made when due. If payment remains unpaid thirty (30) days after notice, we may terminate Your access. Suspension or termination does not relieve You of payment obligations, and we reserve the right to claim statutory late-payment interest under applicable Norwegian law.

For institutional customers, billing is governed by the Master Service Agreement.

6. Acceptable use

You warrant that You will not use Lectora to:

  • Violate law or third-party rights — including copyright, privacy law, or contractual obligations;
  • Upload student work without authority — see Section 4;
  • Upload data of children under 16 — Lectora is for higher education;
  • Attempt to extract, copy, or republish student submissions or AI-generated content outside the legitimate teaching workflow;
  • Reverse-engineer, decompile, or attempt to discover the source code or models powering Lectora;
  • Bypass rate limits, security controls, or feature gating;
  • Interfere with the service — denial-of-service, spam, malware, exploitation attempts;
  • Submit prompts designed to extract training data, jailbreak underlying AI models, or generate content that violates the upstream AI providers' acceptable use policies (OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Mistral);
  • Use Lectora to generate content that defames, harasses, or discriminates against any student;
  • Misrepresent AI-drafted content as fully human-authored to your students or to your institution — see Section 7;
  • Use Lectora for purposes other than course assessment in higher education without our written consent; and
  • Resell, sub-license, or commercially distribute access to Lectora.

Violations may result in suspension, termination, claims for damages, and where applicable referral to Your Institution or relevant authorities.

7. AI-generated content — accuracy, your role, and disclosure

Lectora drafts grades, written feedback, and other educational content using upstream AI models. You acknowledge and agree that:

  • AI output is a draft, not a final grade. You MUST review and explicitly approve every grade and piece of feedback presented to a student before publication. Lectora is built around this human-in-the-loop principle; circumventing it is a breach of these Terms;
  • AI output can be inaccurate, incomplete, or biased. You are the qualified educator; you make the final pedagogical judgement;
  • You are responsible for the grades and feedback you publish under your name, regardless of whether Lectora drafted them. Lectora is not a substitute for educator expertise;
  • Disclosure to students. Where institutional policy requires disclosure, You must disclose to students that AI tools were used in drafting feedback. Lectora does not publish on Your behalf - You decide what to disclose; and
  • No guarantee of grading consistency. Fjordbyte does not guarantee grading consistency beyond what is achievable from the rubric and reference materials You provide.

8. Your data and intellectual property

8.1 Your content stays yours

You (or your institution) retain all rights, title, and interest in the Student Work, assignments, rubrics, reference materials, and other Content you upload to Lectora. You grant Fjordbyte a limited, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to host, process, transmit, and display this Content solely to operate the service for you and as described in our Privacy Policy.

8.2 We will not train AI on your content

Fjordbyte does not use Student Work, assignments, rubrics, your edits, or any other customer Content to train, fine-tune, or improve any AI model, whether ours or our subprocessors'. This commitment is contractually backed by:

  • Our agreements with upstream AI providers — OpenAI Ireland, Google Cloud EMEA, Anthropic Ireland and Mistral AI — which prohibit training on customer data
  • Our use of zero-data-retention configurations on AI API calls where the provider's endpoint supports it

The current list of AI providers, and the region each one processes in, is maintained at lectora.io/subprocessors and in Annex B of our DPA.

8.2.1 Anonymised data

The commitment above concerns AI model training, and it is absolute: your Content is never used to train, fine-tune or improve a model.

Separately, and only after Content has been returned to you at the end of an agreement, we may irreversibly anonymise it and retain the anonymised dataset to improve Lectora. Anonymisation is carried out so the data can no longer be attributed to an identified or identifiable person, as defined in GDPR Article 4(1); anonymised data is no longer personal data. For institutional customers this right applies only where the institutional agreement expressly provides for it. Where an institutional agreement says otherwise, that agreement prevails.

8.3 Lectora's own IP

The Lectora platform — its code, design, AI orchestration logic, prompts, and brand — is owned by Fjordbyte AS. These Terms grant you only the right to use the service, not any ownership in it.

8.4 Feedback and suggestions

If you send us suggestions or feedback about Lectora, you grant us a perpetual, royalty-free license to use them to improve the product. We will not identify you publicly without your permission.

9. Privacy and data protection

Our Privacy Policy describes what data we collect, why, and how we protect it. By using Lectora you confirm you have read and understood it. The providers we use to operate the service, and the region each one processes in, are listed at lectora.io/subprocessors.

For institutional users, our Data Processing Agreement with your institution governs the processing of personal data; the Privacy Policy supplements but does not override it.

For individual (PAT) users, the Privacy Policy is the primary instrument governing our processing of personal data you submit. You are responsible for any further notice or consent required vis-à-vis your students or institution.

10. Service availability

We aim for high availability but do not guarantee uninterrupted service.

  • We may perform planned maintenance with advance notice where practical.
  • Unplanned downtime, third-party outages (Canvas, Vercel, Supabase, OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Mistral), and force majeure events may affect availability.
  • For institutional customers, specific service-level commitments are in the Master Service Agreement, not these Terms.

11. Disclaimers and limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law:

  • Lectora is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, express or implied (including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, non-infringement).
  • We disclaim liability for the substantive content of AI-generated drafts. As stated in Section 7, you are responsible for reviewing and approving every grade and piece of feedback before publication.
  • We do not warrant that Lectora will meet your specific requirements, that the service will be uninterrupted or error-free, or that defects will be corrected.

Limitation of liability. For institutional customers, liability is governed by the Master Service Agreement, and the cap in that agreement prevails over this section.

For individual users, to the maximum extent permitted by law, our aggregate liability arising out of or relating to these Terms or the service is limited to the greater of (a) the amounts paid by you to us in the twelve (12) months preceding the event giving rise to the claim, or (b) NOK 1,000. We are not liable for indirect, consequential, special, or punitive damages, or for loss of profits, data, or goodwill.

Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits liability where exclusion or limitation is prohibited by mandatory law (e.g. gross negligence, intentional misconduct, death or personal injury caused by negligence, or rights of consumers under Norwegian consumer law).

12. Indemnification

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless Fjordbyte AS from claims, damages, and costs (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of:

  • Your breach of these Terms, including the warranties in Section 4
  • Your violation of any law or third-party right in connection with your use of Lectora
  • Content you upload that infringes third-party rights or violates law

13. Suspension and termination

We may suspend or terminate your access to Lectora:

  • For breach of these Terms (with notice where practical)
  • For non-payment after notice
  • If continued service would expose us to legal risk
  • If your institution's Master Service Agreement is terminated and you were accessing Lectora under that agreement

You may terminate by closing your account at any time. Sections that by their nature survive termination — IP ownership (8), confidentiality, indemnification (12), liability limits (11), governing law (15) — survive.

Upon termination, we will delete or return your data per the retention policy in the Privacy Policy and, for institutional users, the DPA.

14. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms. Material changes are notified to you by email (using the address on file) and through an in-app notice. For changes that affect your rights or obligations, we will give you at least thirty (30) days' notice. Continued use after the change takes effect constitutes acceptance; if you do not accept, your remedy is to terminate before the change takes effect.

15. Governing law and dispute resolution

These Terms shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of Norway.

Any dispute, controversy, or claim arising out of or in relation to these Terms shall first be sought resolved amicably through negotiations. If the parties are unable to reach an amicable solution within two (2) weeks, the dispute, controversy, or claim shall be finally settled by the regular courts of Norway. Both parties agree to Hordaland District Court (Hordaland tingrett) as the exclusive legal venue, subject to any mandatory consumer-protection rights that allow a User to bring proceedings in the User's own country of residence.

Disputes between us and an institution are governed by the dispute resolution clause in the Master Service Agreement.

16. Miscellaneous

  • Entire agreement: these Terms (together with the Privacy Policy, and for institutional users the MSA and DPA) are the entire agreement between you and us regarding the service, and supersede prior agreements on the same subject.
  • Severability: if any provision is held unenforceable, the remaining provisions remain in effect.
  • No waiver: failure to enforce any right is not a waiver of that right.
  • Assignment: you may not assign these Terms without our written consent. We may assign these Terms in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, with notice to you.
  • Notices to us: send to lectora@fjordbyte.no or by post to Fjordbyte AS, Solheimsgaten 7 C, 5058 Bergen, Norway.
  • Notices to you: by email to the address on file or by in-app notice.
  • Language: these Terms are published in English. If a translation is made available, the English version prevails unless otherwise required by mandatory law.
  • Force majeure: neither party is liable for failure to perform due to causes beyond reasonable control.

17. Contact

Fjordbyte AS Org. nr. 933 773 477 Address: Solheimsgaten 7 C, 5058 Bergen, Norway Email: lectora@fjordbyte.no​