1. Scope and subject matter
These terms of use apply to the use of BrickDb at www.brickdb.de, at BrickDb's further addresses (www.brickdb.at, www.brickdb.ch, www.brickdb.dk, www.brickdb.nl, www.brickdb.be, www.brickdb.fr, www.brickdb.it, www.brickdb.lu, www.brickdb.es, www.brickdb.co.uk, www.brickdb.us, www.brickdb.com.mx, www.brickdb.eu, www.brickdb.net), and to the associated applications for mobile devices and desktop operating systems (together, "the service").
The provider of the service is ThreeB IT GmbH, Bergstrang 105, 49479 Ibbenbüren (the "provider"); the full details are given in the Imprint.
The service is made available free of charge. No goods or services are sold and no subscriptions are offered; no payment is ever demanded from users.
BrickDb takes part in affiliate programmes and labels the links concerned as advertising, immediately beside the link or once above a table of several shops (see the Imprint). Any purchase contract is concluded solely between the buyer and the merchant; BrickDb is not a party to it and owes neither delivery nor warranty. Prices shown are what the merchant published at the time their data feed was read and may already be out of date — the price at the merchant is always the one that counts.
2. No entitlement to availability
The service is provided without any assurance of a particular availability, functionality or accuracy of data. The provider may restrict, interrupt or entirely discontinue its operation at any time.
There is no entitlement to use the service, to a particular set of features or to the service being continued. If operation is discontinued permanently, this will be announced with reasonable notice so that your own data can be exported.
3. User account
A user account is required for the collection features. Details of how the data arising in that context is processed are set out in the Privacy Policy.
Access credentials must be kept confidential. Anyone who suspects that third parties have obtained knowledge of them must inform the provider without delay. One account per person is permitted. The service is not directed at persons under 16 years of age.
4. User content
4.1 The rights remain with the user
Nothing changes in law as regards the photos, notes, condition details and other content stored in the service: they remain entirely with the person who uploaded them. The provider acquires no ownership and no rights in them going beyond sections 4.2, 4.4 and 4.6.
4.2 The licence granted is narrow and revocable
This section covers collection content and photos. Event submissions follow section 4.4. Your own creations (MOCs) follow section 4.6. Photos of stores follow section 4.8. So that the service can store uploaded content and display it again at all, the provider is granted a simple, non-exclusive, territorially unrestricted right of use, freely revocable at any time. It is limited to:
- the technical storage and reproduction of the content,
- the processing required for display, namely format conversion, resizing, automatic rotation and the removal of embedded metadata, including the resized and otherwise derived versions and thumbnails this produces, and their storage,
- the reproduction of the content to the uploading person themselves and to the people a collection has been opened to under the following paragraph, to the extent described there.
Collection content is private unless a collection's owner sets it otherwise; that is the default for every new collection. If a collection is shared with members, each member sees what their role permits: Owner and Editor see all content, including notes, storage locations, prices, valuations and photos; the Reader role sees only the sets, books, magazines and video games and their condition; the Insurance role additionally sees valuation figures. If a collection is published, it shows its name, its description and the sets, books, magazines and video games it holds with their quantity and condition, and nothing else: no photos, notes, storage locations, prices or valuations, and no members. The owner can withdraw sharing and publication at any time.
The right of use expressly goes no further. In particular, the provider does not pass that content on, sell or license it to third parties, use it for advertising purposes or use it to train machine learning models.
Should a feature be offered in future that uses your own photos to improve image recognition, this will happen only on the basis of separate, express consent that can be withdrawn at any time. This right of use does not cover such training, including training on the derived versions and thumbnails.
The right of use ends as soon as the content concerned is deleted. Thereafter it continues only for the short period that deletion from backup copies technically requires.
4.3 Responsibility for your own content
Only content in which you hold the necessary rights may be uploaded. Photos that recognisably depict other persons may be uploaded only with their consent.
4.4 Event submissions
Submitting an event stores its title, optional description, venue, country and schedule. For an all-day event, these are start and exclusive end dates. For a timed event, these are start and end instants and the venue time zone. We also store an optional registration opening, source URL, your account link and submission time. Moderation records the state and decision time. An administrator reviews the submission manually; pending and rejected submissions are not public. No email notification is sent.
By submitting, you grant the provider a non-exclusive right to store and review these event details and, after approval, publish them and the source URL within BrickDb's public event calendar. This limited permission continues for approved events after account deletion. Your account identity is not published. Submit only information you may publish, without private information or personal contact details. No publication or review deadline is guaranteed.
Submission and moderation provide the requested service (Article 6(1)(b) GDPR). Maintaining approved calendar entries serves the legitimate interest in reliable event information (Article 6(1)(f) GDPR). Your Article 15 export includes your submissions in every moderation state. On account erasure, pending and rejected submissions are deleted; approved events remain public with the submitter link anonymised by a fresh random identifier with no account or mapping back to you. There is no fixed expiry for this anonymised record. The Privacy Policy explains the processing and your rights, including objection; statutory rights remain unaffected.
If you submit an event with a photo of its flyer, you confirm that the flyer was handed out publicly to promote the event and may be shared, and you grant the provider a non-exclusive right to store it, to prepare it for display (cropping, straightening, reducing in size, format conversion) and, after approval, to show it with the event in the public calendar. A flyer is published only if an administrator confirms that it shows no identifiable private person beyond the organiser's published contact details. A flyer that is not published is deleted 30 days after that decision. The provider may remove a published flyer at any time, in particular after a report under section 4.5; the event then stays listed.
4.5 Public content, reports and moderation
Publicly visible in the service are events approved under section 4.4, events taken from public event feeds, collections their owner has published, published and unlisted MOCs under section 4.6, and approved photos of stores under section 4.8.
Anyone can report such content using "Report" on the content itself, without an account. The grounds for a report are: unlawful content, abusive or offensive content, spam or advertising, untrue statements, use of somebody else's work or mark without the right to do so, personal data, and any other ground, which the report must describe. The provider may restrict content on any of these grounds, even where it is not unlawful.
Every report is reviewed and decided by a human; no automated decision is made. If a report is upheld, an event is removed from the public calendar. A collection is set back to private, its contents unchanged. It can be published again, and can then be reported again. For a MOC: if the report concerns the MOC as a whole, it is set back to private and can be made visible again only after a person has reviewed it again. If it concerns a single picture or a set of instructions, only that picture or file is removed; the MOC stays visible. A removed picture or file is kept for six months so that it can be restored after a successful objection, and is deleted afterwards; content that is unlawful to possess is deleted at once.
Whoever published the affected content in the service receives a statement of reasons for the decision by email. You can object to a decision with a support request; a human reviews that too. Statutory rights, including recourse to the courts, remain unaffected. Separately from reports, the provider checks content automatically when it is uploaded; section 4.7 applies to that.
An event's flyer can be reported on its own, on the ground of somebody else's work used without the right to do so or of personal data. If such a report is upheld, only the flyer is removed and deleted; the event stays listed. Whoever submitted the flyer receives a statement of reasons, as for any other content.
A photo of a store can be reported on its own. If such a report is upheld, only that photo is removed and its file deleted; the store stays in the store finder. Whoever added the photo receives a statement of reasons, as for any other content.
4.6 Your own creations (MOCs)
4.6.1 What a MOC is and who sees it. You can keep your own brick-built models ("MOCs") in the service with pictures, name, description and parts list. Every MOC starts private and visible to you alone. You can make it "unlisted" - then anybody with the link sees it; it appears in no overview and search engines are asked not to index it - or publish it - then anybody sees it, without an account, and search engines may index it. Next to a published or unlisted MOC we show the display name you chose in your profile (your first and last name, as far as you entered them there), and nothing else about you. You change the visibility in a separate, confirmed step and not by merely selecting it. You can withdraw it at any time and delete a MOC at any time.
4.6.2 Your licence to the provider. By adding a MOC you grant the provider a simple, non-exclusive, worldwide, free licence, revocable at any time for the future, to store and copy the MOC's content, to process it technically for display (format conversion, resizing, automatic rotation, removal of embedded metadata), and to show it to the extent its visibility under section 4.6.1 provides. For a published MOC that includes the title and preview image that search engines and social networks show when the page is linked. The licence goes no further: the provider does not sell or sublicense your content, does not use it for advertising or in its own promotional material without your separate consent, and does not use it to train machine-learning models. The licence ends when the MOC is deleted; showing it to others ends when you withdraw its visibility. The provider has no influence over search-engine caches or over copies others have already downloaded under section 4.6.3.
4.6.3 What others may do with your MOC. Anybody who can see a published or unlisted MOC may view, download and print its parts list and, where one is provided, its building instructions, build the model for themselves, and show pictures of their own build crediting your display name. They may not pass the files on or publish them elsewhere, sell the instructions, kits or built copies, or pass the MOC off as their own. You give this permission (the "BrickDb build licence") by publishing; it ends for the future when you withdraw the visibility or delete the MOC. Rights in a subject that is not yours (a character, a vehicle or a brand from a film, a game or the motor industry, for instance) can be granted neither by you nor by the provider; the permission covers only your own contribution.
4.6.4 What you warrant. You may add only MOCs you designed or helped design, and only pictures, instructions and files you hold the necessary rights in. In particular, not allowed: somebody else's building instructions, even ones you bought; scans or copies of official LEGO® building instructions; pictures somebody else took, without their permission; pictures in which people can be recognised, without their consent - for children, their parents'; a brand's or a franchise's logo as the mark of your MOC; anything suggesting a MOC is an official product of the LEGO Group or approved by it. Sections 4.3 and 5 apply here too. The provider sells nothing through the service; prices and offers to buy MOCs are not provided for. A link to instructions offered elsewhere is allowed and is marked as an external link.
4.6.5 Age. When you first publish a MOC, or first make it unlisted, you confirm that you are of age or have the consent of a parent or guardian; the time of the confirmation and the version of these terms you accepted are recorded. The provider does not verify age.
4.6.6 Review and reports. The first MOC an account publishes or makes unlisted is reviewed by a person before it is shown; until then only you see it. Once one MOC of an account has been approved, further MOCs of that account become visible without prior review. No particular review time is promised. You can report a MOC, one of its pictures or one of its instructions - without an account too - through "Report" on its page; a person decides on reports, and section 4.5 otherwise applies. A MOC's texts and pictures are also checked automatically under section 4.7.
4.7 Automated checking of content
4.7.1 What is checked. The provider checks texts and pictures you add to the service automatically, using the Azure AI Content Safety service of Microsoft Ireland Operations Limited, for sexual, hateful, violent and self-harm content, and checks texts additionally against a list of blocked terms the provider maintains. Checked are a MOC's texts and pictures, including its step pictures and the titles and links of its instructions; a collection's name and description while it is published; event suggestions; your display name where it appears beside a MOC; and photos of your copies, imported box photos and your avatar picture - including those only you can see. What is processed for this is described in section 8.12 of the Privacy Policy.
4.7.2 Automatic refusal. If the check rates a picture or a text as severe enough to reach a threshold the provider has set, the content is refused when it is uploaded or saved, without a person being involved, and is not stored. You are told at once, with a note that the decision was made automatically. The provider sets the thresholds and may change them.
4.7.3 Held until cleared. If the check flags content below that threshold, or cannot check it - for example because the service cannot be reached or the monthly checking allowance has been used up - it is stored but shown to nobody except you and the administrators until a further check or a person clears it; you see a note saying so. A MOC whose text is held waits for approval as under section 4.6.6; a collection is treated as private until then. No particular time for clearing is promised. A refusal or a hold under this section does not count as an upheld report within the meaning of section 7.
4.7.4 Review by a person. You can object to any automatic refusal and any hold with a support request; a person then reviews the decision. Statutory rights, including recourse to the courts, remain unaffected. The automated check is not complete: it replaces neither your responsibility under section 4.3 nor reports under section 4.5, and content it does not flag is not thereby approved by the provider.
4.8 Photos of stores
4.8.1 Right of use. When you add a photo of a store to the store finder, you grant the provider a simple, non-exclusive, territorially unrestricted and free-of-charge right to store the photo, to process it for display - namely format conversion, resizing and the removal of embedded metadata - and, once the administration has approved it, to show it to every visitor on the store’s public page without naming you. The right goes no further: the provider does not sell or license the photo, does not use it for advertising and does not use it to train models. The right ends as soon as you remove the photo, which you can do at any time, or the administration refuses it; after that it continues only for the short period the deletion from backup copies technically requires.
4.8.2 What you warrant. You warrant that you took the photo yourself or hold the necessary rights to it, and that it shows no recognisable people without their consent and nothing the store has prohibited photographing. The administration looks at every photo before approving it and may refuse it or take it down; you are shown the reason. There is no entitlement to publication.
5. Prohibited use
The following in particular are prohibited:
- automated access to the service, except as section 5a permits;
- attempts to gain access to accounts, data or areas of the system that are not intended for your own access;
- measures that impair the availability or integrity of the service, including denial-of-service attacks;
- circumventing technical protection, access or limitation mechanisms;
- uploading unlawful content, in particular content that infringes the rights of third parties;
- redistributing catalogue data originating from the service as a data set of your own, as a bulk download or as an interface of your own;
- any use that breaches the terms of use of the data sources incorporated into the service.
5a. Automated access
The catalogue, the price information and the other content of the service form a database whose obtaining, verification and presentation required a qualitatively or quantitatively substantial investment by the provider (sections 87a et seq. of the German Copyright Act, UrhG; Article 7 of Directive 96/9/EC on the legal protection of databases). Without the provider's prior written consent, it is not permitted to extract or re-utilise qualitatively or quantitatively substantial parts of this database systematically or by automated means, for example by scraping, crawling, harvesting or mirroring; this also applies to the repeated and systematic extraction of individual pages or records that amounts to the same in total.
The following in particular are prohibited:
- automated access that disguises its origin or its automated nature, for example through rotating or private proxy addresses (so-called residential proxies) or with forged browser or crawler identifiers;
- circumventing technical measures with which the provider limits, controls or blocks access, and disregarding the rules in the service's robots.txt;
- automated access whose volume or frequency goes beyond ordinary use by a human being and burdens the provider's systems.
The following remain permitted:
- search engines and other crawlers that identify themselves truthfully and observe the service's robots.txt, including the AI crawlers it deliberately allows by name, in each case as far as the robots.txt permits access;
- access through the MCP server and the other interfaces the provider makes available, within their respective terms and limits;
- ordinary personal use, including with common aids such as browsers, screen readers or translation features;
- linking to individual pages of the service.
This section is not a reservation of rights within the meaning of section 44b(3) UrhG; whether and to what extent text and data mining is reserved follows solely from the service's machine-readable robots.txt. In the event of a breach, the provider may technically block the access concerned in whole or in part. Claims for injunctive relief and damages remain reserved.
6. Third-party data and trademark rights
The service displays catalogue data and price information from third-party sources. That data is subject to the terms of its respective providers; the sources are listed under Attributions. No warranty is given for the accuracy, completeness or currency of that data. Price information consists of estimates based on observed market data and constitutes neither an offer nor a valuation in the legal sense.
BrickDb is an independent fan project and has no connection with the LEGO Group. The following trademark notice applies, and is binding in its English wording:
LEGO® is a trademark of the LEGO Group of companies. The LEGO Group does not sponsor, authorise or endorse this application.
Anyone who uses the import of a collection from Rebrickable warrants that they are the holder of the Rebrickable account used for it, or are entitled to act for its holder, and that they are entitled to that use. Rebrickable's terms apply to the Rebrickable account and to the retrieval. The import is not an official Rebrickable integration and has not been confirmed by Rebrickable; the provider stores neither the password nor the access key received in the process.
7. Termination
The user relationship may be ended at any time and without giving reasons by deleting the account, which is done on the account page. When the account is deleted, the associated collection data, photos and MOCs with all their pictures and files are deleted, and the sign-in account at the identity provider is deleted too. Bag-code contributions are anonymised rather than deleted. Pending and rejected event submissions are deleted; approved events remain public with the submitter link anonymised, as described in section 4.4. Details of the periods involved, and of the exceptions, are set out in the Privacy Policy.
If, within twelve months, reports about three different MOCs of an account are upheld for illegal content or for the use of others' works or marks, the account cannot publish MOCs or make them unlisted for six months; MOCs already published stay published; the restriction stops new publications only. The account is warned after the second MOC so affected. Such a restriction is notified with reasons by e-mail; section 4.5 applies to objections.
The provider may block or delete an account where these terms of use are breached significantly or repeatedly, where this is necessary to avert a danger to the service or to third parties, or where the provider discontinues the service altogether. Before a block is imposed, the breach will be pointed out and an opportunity to remedy it given, as far as that is possible and reasonable.
8. Liability
The provider is liable without limitation
- for damage arising from injury to life, body or health that is based on a breach of duty by the provider,
- for intent and gross negligence,
- to the extent of a guarantee that has been given, and
- under the provisions of the German Product Liability Act.
In cases of simple negligence, the provider is liable only for the breach of a material contractual obligation, that is, an obligation whose fulfilment makes the proper use of the service possible in the first place and on whose observance the user may regularly rely. In that case liability is limited to the foreseeable damage typical of this type of contract.
Otherwise, liability for simple negligence is excluded. In assessing the standard of care required, account is to be taken of the fact that the service is provided free of charge. The above limitations of liability apply also in favour of the provider's legal representatives and vicarious agents.
9. Data backup
BrickDb is no substitute for keeping your own backups. It is recommended that you export your own collection data regularly. The provider is liable for the loss of data within the scope of section 8; in assessing recoverable damage, account is to be taken of the effort that would have been involved had proper backups of your own been kept.
10. Changes to these terms of use
These terms of use may be changed where this is necessary because of changes in the legal position, in case law or in the range of features. You will be informed of material changes the next time you use the service. Anyone who does not agree with a change may delete their account.
11. Applicable law and authoritative language version
The law of the Federal Republic of Germany applies, excluding the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods. Mandatory consumer protection provisions of the state in which a user has their habitual residence remain unaffected.
Only the German version of these terms of use is authoritative. The versions in English, French, Dutch, Danish, Italian and Spanish are translations provided for information and have no independent legal effect. This applies whichever address the service is used at and whichever language its interface is shown in.
12. Severability clause
Should any provision of these terms of use be or become invalid, the validity of the remaining provisions is unaffected. The statutory rules take the place of the invalid provision.