Terms of Service

These Terms of Service (the "Terms") are a binding agreement between you and RIOT MOTION LLC, a New York limited liability company ("RIOT MOTION," "we," "us," or "our"), governing your access to and use of the Rent History Analyzer web application, RentHistory.org, our REC-1 full-service records request, form-preparation tools, and any related services, content, and communications (collectively, the "Service").

By accessing or using the Service, checking a box indicating acceptance, or submitting any document to us, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agree to be bound by these Terms and by our Privacy Policy and Disclaimer, which are incorporated by reference. If you do not agree, you may not use the Service.

The Service uses automated software, including artificial-intelligence and optical-character-recognition models, to read rent-regulation documents and produce summaries, calculations, flags, timelines, and draft forms. The Service is provided strictly for general informational and educational purposes.

• We are not a law firm and do not provide legal services. No output of the Service constitutes legal advice, a legal opinion, or a recommendation about how to act in your particular situation.
• No attorney-client relationship is created between you and RIOT MOTION, its members, employees, or contractors by your use of the Service, by any communication with us, or by our preparation of any form on your behalf.
• We strongly urge you to consult a licensed attorney admitted in New York before relying on any output, filing any complaint or form, withholding or negotiating rent, responding to a court proceeding, or taking any other action. Rent-regulation matters involve strict deadlines, fact-specific rules, and significant financial consequences that automated tools cannot fully evaluate.

You acknowledge and agree that:

• Documents you submit may be incomplete, illegible, outdated, altered, or themselves inaccurate, and the underlying DHCR registration records frequently contain errors, gaps, and owner-reported figures that have never been verified by any agency.
• Automated extraction and analysis can misread numbers, dates, unit identifiers, and codes, and can misapply rules whose outcome depends on facts not shown in the document (for example, actual rent paid, lease terms, improvements, vacancy, or prior litigation).
• All calculations, including any estimated overcharge, legal regulated rent, statutory cap, look-back period, or recovery scenario, are estimates and hypotheses only, not determinations of any legal right or amount owed.
• We make no representation or warranty whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, reliability, currency, or validity of any output, and you must independently verify all information before acting on it.

You alone decide whether and how to use anything you learn from the Service. RIOT MOTION has no control over, and expressly disclaims all responsibility and liability for, any action or inaction you or any third party takes in reliance on the Service, including without limitation: filing or not filing a complaint with the New York State Division of Housing and Community Renewal ("DHCR") or any court; withholding, paying, or negotiating rent; communicating with a landlord, managing agent, or attorney; responding to or ignoring a notice or petition; missing any deadline or statute of limitations; or entering into or declining any settlement or lease.

"Submitted Materials" means any DHCR rent history or rent registration record, rent roll, apartment registration, lease, renewal, rider, notice, eviction petition or court paper, correspondence, or any other rent-related or housing-related document, image, photograph, scan, screenshot, or plain text, in any format whatsoever, that you upload, transmit, paste, email, message, or otherwise provide to us through or in connection with the Service, together with all data, figures, names, dates, and other information contained in or derived from them.

By providing Submitted Materials, you hereby grant RIOT MOTION LLC a perpetual, irrevocable (except as provided in Section 6), worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, fully paid-up, transferable, and sublicensable (through multiple tiers) right and license to host, store, copy, reproduce, scan, transcribe, reformat, translate, extract, analyze, aggregate, compile, index, annotate, create derivative works from, combine with other data, distribute, disclose, transmit, display, perform, publish, and otherwise use and exploit the Submitted Materials and all data within them, in whole or in part, in any medium now known or later developed, for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, without notice, attribution, or compensation to you or to any other person.

Without limiting the foregoing, you specifically acknowledge and agree that we exercise these rights to:

• Provide, operate, secure, train, evaluate, and improve the Service and our analytical models and methods;
• Regularly share Submitted Materials and the data within them with tenant-rights, housing-justice, legal-services, and advocacy organizations operating in New York City, which may use the data to identify patterns of overcharge, wrongful deregulation, and registration abuse, and to support tenants, organizing, research, and policy work;
• Periodically publish the data, in redacted form, for educational and research purposes so that tenants, advocates, researchers, journalists, and the public can better understand the patterns and mechanics of rent regulation and rent deregulation in New York City. Before any public publication we remove your name, email address, telephone number, and signature; the names of current and prior tenants; and the specific street address and apartment number of the unit (see Section 7). Rent figures, registration codes, dates, building-level or neighborhood-level information, and similar non-identifying data may be published.

You represent and warrant that you have all rights, consents, and authority necessary to provide the Submitted Materials and to grant the license above, and that doing so does not violate any law, court order, confidentiality obligation, or third-party right. You retain any ownership you may have in the Submitted Materials; this license does not transfer ownership.

If you later decide you no longer want us to hold or use your Submitted Materials, you may request retroactive forfeiture by emailing forfeit@renthistory.org from the email address you used with the Service, identifying the document(s) or analysis ID(s) concerned. Upon a verified request we will, within a commercially reasonable time (ordinarily 30 days):

• Delete the original Submitted Materials and your associated contact information from our active systems;
• Cease any further distribution of those materials to third parties, and cease including them in future publications;
• Notify the tenant-rights organizations to which we have shared the materials of your request, where it is practicable to do so.

You understand and agree that forfeiture cannot recall or un-publish copies that were already shared with third parties, already published in redacted form, or already incorporated into aggregated statistics, derivative datasets, or trained models before we processed your request, and that we may retain copies in routine backups for a limited period and as required by law, to resolve disputes, or to enforce our agreements.

Anything we publish publicly from Submitted Materials is first redacted to remove: (a) your name, email address, telephone number, account identifiers, and signature; (b) the names of all current and former tenants and occupants appearing in the record; and (c) the specific street address and apartment number of the unit. Landlord, owner, and managing-agent names, rent amounts, registration codes and status entries, dates, and building- or neighborhood-level descriptors are not considered personal information about you and may be published. Data shared privately with tenant-rights organizations under Section 5 is not necessarily redacted, because those organizations may need unit-level detail to assist tenants in the building.

You must be at least 18 years old and able to form a binding contract to use the Service. You agree to provide a valid, working email address and, where requested, accurate identity and tenancy information. Analysis results and case dashboards are protected by one-time access codes sent to your email; you are responsible for keeping those codes and your email account secure, and for all activity that occurs using them. You may not use disposable, relay, or shared inboxes where we prohibit them.

Where offered, our REC-1 full-service option is a document-retrieval and document-explanation service: for the stated fee we prepare and submit a records request to DHCR on your written authorization, correspond with DHCR about it, notify you of responses, and describe in plain language what any documents received contain. Work begins only after payment is confirmed. Payments are processed by a third-party payment processor; we do not store your full card details.

• We do not control DHCR and cannot guarantee that DHCR will respond, respond within any timeframe, or release any particular record. The fee compensates our preparation, submission, tracking and follow-up work, not any outcome.
• You authorize us to place your signature on the request form, to use a case-specific email address for correspondence, and to receive documents from DHCR on your behalf.
• If our automated document check rejects your ID or proof of tenancy before payment, no fee is charged. After payment, refunds are at our reasonable discretion and are generally not available once a request has been transmitted to DHCR.
• This service is not legal representation and does not make us your agent for any purpose other than requesting records.

Draft forms, complaint narratives, and evidence checklists generated by the Service are prepared from the information you supply and from automated analysis. They are drafts for your review only. You are solely responsible for verifying every statement, figure, and attachment; for deciding whether to sign and file; and for the consequences of any filing. We do not file anything with DHCR or any court on your behalf except the records request described in Section 9.

You agree not to: submit documents you have no right to submit; submit content that is fraudulent, forged, or altered; use the Service to harass, defame, or unlawfully surveil any person; attempt to access other users' results, cases, or data; probe, scrape, reverse-engineer, overload, or interfere with the Service or its security; use automated means to submit documents in bulk without our written permission; or use the Service in violation of any law. We may suspend or terminate access for any violation.

The Service, including its software, models, analytical methods, text, graphics, logos, design, and compiled datasets, is owned by RIOT MOTION LLC or its licensors and is protected by copyright, trademark, trade-secret and other laws. We grant you a limited, revocable, non-exclusive, non-transferable license to use the Service for your personal, non-commercial purposes in accordance with these Terms. You may download and share your own analysis results. All other rights are reserved.

The Service links to and interacts with third parties, including DHCR / New York State Homes and Community Renewal, payment processors, email providers, messaging platforms, and AI-model providers. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting for DHCR or any government agency. We are not responsible for the content, availability, accuracy, or practices of any third party, and your use of third-party services is governed by their own terms.

TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, THE SERVICE AND ALL OUTPUT ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE," WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS, IMPLIED, OR STATUTORY, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION ANY WARRANTY OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, ACCURACY, COMPLETENESS, OR UNINTERRUPTED OR ERROR-FREE OPERATION. NO ORAL OR WRITTEN INFORMATION OR ADVICE GIVEN BY US CREATES ANY WARRANTY.

TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, RIOT MOTION LLC AND ITS MEMBERS, MANAGERS, EMPLOYEES, CONTRACTORS, LICENSORS, AND PARTNERS SHALL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR FOR ANY LOSS OF RENT, MONEY, HOUSING, TENANCY RIGHTS, CLAIMS, DATA, GOODWILL, OR OPPORTUNITY, ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO THE SERVICE OR THESE TERMS, HOWEVER CAUSED AND UNDER ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. OUR TOTAL AGGREGATE LIABILITY FOR ALL CLAIMS SHALL NOT EXCEED THE GREATER OF (A) THE AMOUNT YOU PAID US IN THE TWELVE MONTHS BEFORE THE CLAIM AROSE OR (B) FIFTY U.S. DOLLARS (US$50). Some jurisdictions do not allow certain limitations; in that case these limitations apply to the maximum extent permitted.

You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless RIOT MOTION LLC and its members, managers, employees, contractors, and partners from and against any claims, damages, losses, liabilities, costs, and expenses (including reasonable attorneys' fees) arising out of or relating to your Submitted Materials, your breach of these Terms, your violation of any law or third-party right, or your use of or reliance on the Service.

We may suspend or terminate your access to the Service at any time, with or without notice, for any reason, including breach of these Terms. Sections 3 through 7 and 12 through 20 survive termination, and the license granted in Section 5 continues after termination except to the extent withdrawn under Section 6.

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of New York, without regard to conflict-of-laws principles. Any dispute arising out of or relating to the Service or these Terms shall be brought exclusively in the state or federal courts located in New York County, New York, and you consent to their personal jurisdiction. To the extent permitted by law, you waive any right to a jury trial and agree that claims may be brought only in your individual capacity and not as a plaintiff or class member in any class or representative proceeding. Any claim must be filed within one year after it arises or be permanently barred.

We may modify, suspend, or discontinue any part of the Service at any time. We may update these Terms by posting a revised version with a new effective date; material changes will be indicated on this page. Your continued use after the effective date constitutes acceptance of the revised Terms.

These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy and Disclaimer, are the entire agreement between you and RIOT MOTION LLC regarding the Service. If any provision is held unenforceable, the remainder remains in effect. Our failure to enforce any provision is not a waiver. You may not assign these Terms; we may assign them in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets. Notices to you may be sent to the email address you provided.