# Voters > Use when naming the one or two extreme traits a company wins on. Distills a person's or company's strengths, experiences, and obsessions down to their one or two VOTERS — the decisive, idiosyncratically extreme traits that win the contest because customers who value them accept every other trade-off. Runs each candidate through a hard gauntlet: extremity earned through obsession (not mere competence), rarity among peers, decisiveness (name the weaknesses it overpowers), and reverberation (it must force decisions in product, pricing, and market). Caps the answer at two, records survivors in VOTERS.md — plus the near-miss 'special strengths' to deploy — and delivers the honest zero-voter verdict when nothing is extreme yet. Takes a self-portrait file (M-numbered), strengths or keystones charts, or a live capture. Load when the user asks what makes them special, what to bet the strategy on, their unfair advantage or superpower, or to 'find our voters.' Do NOT load to build the full self-portrait (the previous step) or to design the whole strategy — this file feeds it. ## Facts - Type: Agent skill - Discipline: Marketing - Author: Jason Cohen (https://github.com/asmartbear) - Upstream: https://github.com/asmartbear/asb-skills/tree/main/.claude/skills/asb-voters - Source file: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/asmartbear/asb-skills/main/.claude/skills/asb-voters/SKILL.md (24414 bytes, sha256:c3c4c0016f50609688cda4fd7b9ef7df706f151071cec07a7d268c6d04dac9d6) - Licence: CC-BY-4.0 - Upstream copy last changed: 2026-09-17 - Status: listed, not yet ruled on by the curator ## Use it I want to use the Voters skill by Jason Cohen. This is what it does, in the author's own words: Distills a person's or company's strengths, experiences, and obsessions down to their one or two VOTERS — the decisive, idiosyncratically extreme traits that win the contest because customers who value them accept every other trade-off. Runs each candidate through a hard gauntlet: extremity earned through obsession (not mere competence), rarity among peers, decisiveness (name the weaknesses it overpowers), and reverberation (it must force decisions in product, pricing, and market). Caps the answer at two, records survivors in VOTERS.md — plus the near-miss 'special strengths' to deploy — and delivers the honest zero-voter verdict when nothing is extreme yet. Takes a self-portrait file (M-numbered), strengths or keystones charts, or a live capture. Load when the user asks what makes them special, what to bet the strategy on, their unfair advantage or superpower, or to 'find our voters.' Do NOT load to build the full self-portrait (the previous step) or to design the whole strategy — this file feeds it. Download the whole folder at https://github.com/asmartbear/asb-skills/tree/main/.claude/skills/asb-voters, SKILL.md and every file beside it, into your skills directory: ~/.claude/skills/asb-voters/ for Claude Code, ~/.agents/skills/asb-voters/ for Codex, ~/.cursor/skills/asb-voters/ for Cursor. Get it from the author's repo, not from startupskills.dev. Then tell me the path you installed it to and how to invoke it. Nothing here is vendored: install from the author's repo, not from this site. A verbatim copy of the author's file follows for reading, under the licence reproduced after it; the current file is in the author's repo. ## Links - Page: https://startupskills.dev/asmartbear/asb-voters - Author: https://startupskills.dev/asmartbear - Index: https://startupskills.dev/llms.txt ## The file itself --- name: asb-voters description: "Distills a person's or company's strengths, experiences, and obsessions down to their one or two VOTERS — the decisive, idiosyncratically extreme traits that win the contest because customers who value them accept every other trade-off. Runs each candidate through a hard gauntlet: extremity earned through obsession (not mere competence), rarity among peers, decisiveness (name the weaknesses it overpowers), and reverberation (it must force decisions in product, pricing, and market). Caps the answer at two, records survivors in VOTERS.md — plus the near-miss 'special strengths' to deploy — and delivers the honest zero-voter verdict when nothing is extreme yet. Takes a self-portrait file (M-numbered), strengths or keystones charts, or a live capture. Load when the user asks what makes them special, what to bet the strategy on, their unfair advantage or superpower, or to 'find our voters.' Do NOT load to build the full self-portrait (the previous step) or to design the whole strategy — this file feeds it." --- # Voters: The One or Two Things That Win the Whole Game In high-school debate, the final speaker gets three minutes against the opponent's seven. Answering every argument is impossible — so the winning tactic, "the Voter," reframes the whole debate: reasonable points exist on both sides, so it all comes down to one or two key points that ought to decide the outcome — chosen, of course, where you are strongest. If the judge accepts the framing and you win those points, you win the debate, despite losing everything else. Business works the same way: one or two decisive strengths override a parade of deficiencies, because customers who value those voters accept every other trade-off. This skill distills everything true about you — or your company — down to those one or two, and refuses to stop at a comfortable list of five. ## The mental model ### What a voter is A voter is not a strength. Strengths are common; voters are the one or two traits held at such an idiosyncratic extreme that they decide the contest. Steve Jobs's voter was industrial design — obsession down to the layout of components no customer would ever see — and it made the iPhone dominant *despite* iTunes being famously terrible. The voter didn't fix the weakness; it *overpowered* it. The founder whose product became the fastest in its market had two real strengths (deep platform knowledge, a taste for premium pricing) that shaped the strategy but made him nobody special — plenty of people have both. The voter was caring about performance so far beyond what anyone else was capable of or willing to invest in — earned through a twenty-year obsession that started with implementing math functions efficiently for fun in high school. Because the care ran that deep, every piece of the system got the treatment, and the entire strategy (top-end hardware, premium price, banned slow add-ons, whole market segments walked away from) reverberated outward from that one voter. ### The bar — every voter passes all of it 1. **Extremity, earned.** Not competence — excess. "Magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect." The evidence is a history: years of obsession, care beyond what the job required, depth nobody asked for. A trait acquired last quarter or aspired to next year is not a voter. 2. **Rare among peers.** Plenty of people know the platform; plenty of founders like charging more for quality. Those are *shaping strengths* — they point the strategy, they don't make you special. Test: would a well-informed peer, asked "who is THE person/company for X?", name you? If the honest answer is "you and forty others," it's a shaping strength. Rarity means the *trait's* actual scarcity, not the market's awareness of it: a buried eleven-year obsession nobody has heard of is still rare — the missing reputation is an investment plan, not a failed test. Conversely, when reputation IS the claim, ask for the citable artifact (the post peers link, the thing you're known by), not self-report. When you test rarity against the field ("you and forty others?"), confirm the current competitive field using your search tools; do not rely on internal (training) knowledge, which is stale and may miss the peers who make a trait common — or the gap that makes it rare. 3. **Decisive — name what it overpowers.** A voter proves itself by the trade-offs customers accept for it: the terrible companion software, the banned add-ons, the walked-away-from segments, the premium price. If you can't name a real cost that people who value the voter happily eat, the voter is unproven — possibly imaginary. At the highest intensity, the ideal customer reads your weaknesses as *desirable* — proof of the voter (on a handmade marketplace, a manufacturing imperfection isn't a defect; it's evidence a human made it, and the high price reads as supporting the artist). 4. **It reverberates.** A real voter forces second-order decisions — in product, pricing, market, hiring, what you refuse to ship. If naming it changes nothing downstream, it's a slogan, not a voter. 5. **It energizes.** A voter is executed for years at an intensity nobody sustains through discipline alone. Skill without joy is the burnout recipe; a voter the user dreads wielding will collapse, however real the extremity is today. In company mode, run this test against the human(s) who actually carry the obsession — the founder, the principal; a company voter carried by nobody in particular is suspect. ### One or two. Never three. The debate tactic works because a judge can hold one or two points; so can a market. Three voters is a feature list wearing a costume. When more than two candidates survive the bar, the distillation question is forcing: *when they conflict, which one wins? Which one or two would you bet the company on?* The rest are demoted — to *special strengths* if they're near-misses (top-1%, extreme on some axis) or *shaping strengths* if they're merely common — still true, still useful for strategy, not voters. ### Special strengths: the near-misses worth deploying Below the voters, above the common traits, sits a tier that must not be lost: the **special strength** — a candidate that nails part of the bar (real extremity, real energy) and is genuinely special (top-1%, not "everyone claims it"), yet misses on one decisive axis — usually it's *fairly* rare but not THE-person rare, or no real cost has ever been eaten for it. It is not a voter and must never be inflated into one. But it is also not a mere shaping strength to file and forget: it's a secondary pillar the strategy really should deploy — the thing that makes the plan better and the person more successful and happy, even though it isn't the one bet. The distiller keeps the voter filter tight AND catches these near-misses on the way down, so their value isn't buried. (The classic case: the *standout investment candidate* — extremity real, decisiveness merely untested — is a special strength that also names the change-games bet in a zero-voter file.) ### Special, not best — and the zero-voter verdict A voter does not need to be objectively superior; it needs to be *yours*. A "refuted" chess opening beats prepared opponents at your level precisely because nobody prepares for it — competitors who think your strategy is wrong are evaluating the wrong player, and their disbelief is why they won't copy you. Better than different is *extreme*: not just a minimal interface but so minimal it runs on the command line; not just good design but design people buy for alone. So when no candidate passes the bar, say it plainly: **nothing is special-and-extreme yet.** That verdict is the deliverable, not a failure — and the response is twofold: take the deepest *genuine* obsession on the table and invest it into extremity (extremity is a choice), or change games to one where a fact you already hold IS extreme. What the response never is: padding the file with three shaping strengths relabeled as voters. ### Vocabulary - **Voter (V1, V2)** — a decisive, extreme, rare, reverberating trait; at most two survive. - **Special strength (near-miss voter)** — genuinely special (top-1%, not merely common) and passing SOME of the bar hard — usually extremity and energy — but missing one decisive axis, typically THE-person rarity or a named overpowered cost. Not a voter; recorded in its own section as a secondary pillar the strategy should deliberately deploy — strongly advised, not mandatory. - **Shaping strength** — true and strategy-relevant but common; recorded in its own section, never as a voter. - **Overpowers** (the template's field name) — the named trade-offs and weaknesses the voter's fans accept, including those read as proof of the voter. - **The verdict** — the zero-voter finding and its twofold response. ## The distiller's posture ### Be clear, not clever Write to be understood, not admired. The work here wrestles with hard concepts, and clever metaphors, wordplay, or cute turns of phrase make them harder to grasp, not easier. Say plainly what you mean. If a sentence reads more clearly without a flourish, cut the flourish. State the actual point rather than gesturing wittily at it. ### Restate references; never cite a bare token When you mention a numbered or lettered item to the user — K4, W2, O17, H3, and the like — add a few plain words on what it actually is ("K4 — the owner whose career rides on the site"). A bare token is unreadable to a human who saw it defined hours or days ago: the tag is for traceability, the gloss is for comprehension. Keep the tag for accuracy; always add the gloss. ### Generate willingly; gate mercilessly Harvest candidates liberally — from the self-portrait file, the strengths charts, the user's war stories, and your own reading of their material ("this twenty-year pattern in M3 smells like a voter — defend it"; a keystones file is mined indirectly: the strengths its keystones cite, and the extremity behind those strengths). Nominated virtue-words enter the harvest like anything else — they die at the gauntlet, on the record, or yield the specific fact underneath. Then run the gauntlet one candidate per exchange, all five tests visible, pressing every soft spot: "everyone in your market claims craftsmanship — what's the evidence a peer would name YOU?"; "what have you actually refused to ship because of this?"; "what did this obsession cost you that a reasonable person wouldn't have paid?" A candidate the user is stuck defending gets your best steelman first, then the honest kill. Two bookkeeping notes: when the evidence pressed out of a dying candidate really belongs to another (the "craftsmanship" facts were all about the tooling stack), cut the word and transfer the evidence — record the transfer in both places; and a candidate may be *cut-merged* into another (a drive that is just the fuel of an existing voter) — cut list plus evidence, no independent entry. ### This skill requires the press Distillation to one or two is where users flinch — everything feels essential, and vague answers ("quality," "customer focus," "our people") feel safe. The press is therefore not optional. If a devil's-advocate interrogation skill is installed in the environment (for example *Rude Q&A* / `asb-rude-qa`, from the same author as this method), invoke it twice: per-candidate whenever a verdict is soft — soft means resting on a single piece of evidence, or on self-report with no citable artifact — and against the final file with this brief: *attack these voters — find every one that is a common strength wearing an extreme costume; every one with no named cost it overpowers; every one whose evidence is aspiration rather than history; every one that decides nothing downstream; and attack the count — if two survived, argue one should die; if the file dodged the zero-voter verdict, say so.* If no such skill is available, run exactly that interrogation yourself, visibly, in both places — the method does not work without it. ### The user owns their history; the bar owns the verdict What happened — the years, the episodes, the costs paid — is the user's record, taken at their word after one honest press. But whether a candidate passes the bar is not a vote: a candidate without extremity evidence, without rarity, without named overpowered costs, or without reverberation is not recorded as a voter no matter how attached the user is — it goes to special or shaping strengths with the reasoning on the record. (The boundary: **cut** is for virtue-words, aspirations, and evidence-free claims; anything genuine and *special* — top-1%, extreme on some axis — that misses one decisive voter test is a **special strength**, flagged as a secondary pillar to deploy; anything genuine but *common* or shallow — real familiarity, real-but-ordinary diligence — is a **shaping strength**; both are kept because the strategy work and the verdict's change-games branch draw on them.) Tone stays warm: the refusal is of the classification, never of the trait, which remains true and useful. And the wielder never invents history — the evidence in the file is the user's, confirmed; the closing press may probe whether that evidence is representative (one clarifying round), but it re-attacks classifications, not the user's settled facts. ## How to use this skill ### Phase A — Ingest Ask what this distillation is for — a person choosing what to build, or a company anchoring a strategy — and what exists on disk: a self-portrait file (salient characteristics numbered M1, M2, … with evidence and contexts), a classified strengths chart or keystones file (S/K numbers), interview or customer-quote material. Read whatever exists and cite numbers in the candidates. If nothing exists, say plainly that the distillation is sharper after the self-portrait step (a companion skill from this method's author produces it — `asb-who-me`, if installed; for a company, an observation-and-classification method ending in a strengths chart), then proceed: capture candidate attributes and formative experiences inline, each with at least one concrete episode, caveated as unvetted. If a `VOTERS.md` exists at the target location, read it first: in-progress header = resume where the pointer says; finalized = ask whether to re-distill (things change rarely — a re-run should have a reason). Output: `VOTERS.md`, same directory as the primary input file (the self-portrait if one exists, else the strengths chart); with no input files, ask where the method's files should live before creating it (default: the current directory). ### Phase B — Harvest candidates Collect every plausible candidate into a visible list — the user's nominations plus your own from the files, each tagged with its source ([M3], [S1], war story) AND, for anything captured live rather than from a file, its episode evidence in a line or two — evidence that lives only in chat dies with the session, and a resumed gauntlet run on re-invented evidence can flip a verdict. No gauntlet yet; the harvest is complete when the user has nothing to add and you've mined the files. Create `VOTERS.md` now with the in-progress header carrying the full candidate list (sources, episode lines, statuses) and pointer — the file is the memory, not the chat. If the fuller upstream path was offered and declined, record that in the preamble so a resumed session doesn't re-pitch it. ### Phase C — The gauntlet One candidate per exchange, all five tests run visibly, verdict on the record: **voter-candidate** (passed all — written into The voters at verdict time with its V-number; if Phase D's ranking later demotes it, it moves to special or shaping strengths with a "demoted at ranking" note and its number is never reused), **special strength** (a near-miss — special and passing some tests hard, but missing one decisive axis; recorded as a secondary pillar to deploy, with the axis it missed on the record), **shaping strength** (true, common — recorded with one line of reasoning), or **cut** (aspiration, virtue-word, or no evidence — dies in the header's candidate list with its reasoning, not in the body). Press per the posture; invoke the interrogation on soft verdicts. Update the file and pointer each exchange — the in-flight candidate's status reads "in gauntlet," and the pointer records which tests have run and their outcomes so far, plus any evidence the user gave for them, so a died session resumes mid-candidate instead of restarting it. (Resuming a file whose pointer lacks that detail: say so plainly and restart the candidate from test 1.) ### Phase D — Distill and close - **Count the survivors.** Three or more: force the ranking — "when they conflict, which wins? which one or two do you bet on?" — demote the rest to special strengths (near-misses) or shaping strengths (common), per how special each is. One or two: proceed. Zero: write the verdict section — the plain statement plus the twofold response (invest the deepest genuine obsession into extremity, or change games), naming the specific obsession candidates from the harvest. An almost-voter (extremity real, decisiveness untested) appears in BOTH places: in special strengths tagged "the standout investment candidate," and by name in the verdict. Naming the bet and the proving trade-offs it implies (what to refuse, whom to walk away from — the missing evidence of tests 3 and 4) is this skill's job; designing the full plan around it is downstream. - **Walk the weaknesses** (for each settled voter): from the self-portrait's hindrances, the strengths chart's weaknesses, or the user's list — which does this voter overpower, and which would the ideal customer read as *service to the voter*? Record them under the voter. A voter that overpowers nothing gets one more press before it stands. - **The closing press** (delegated or self-run, per the posture — including the count attack). - Finalize: remove the in-progress header (candidate cuts and their reasoning move to a brief "Cut at the gauntlet" list), and close with the handoff: audit the current strategy against the voters — walk pricing, positioning, product, and channels asking where each voter expresses and where it's contradicted; the mismatches are where to pivot. Expect others to call the strategy wrong — they're evaluating the wrong player, and their disbelief is why they won't copy it. If a positioning skill from this method's author is installed (for example *Positioning* / `asb-positioning`), note that the voters are exactly what its statements should lead with — and the special strengths are secondary supporting claims it should deploy, not ignore. ### The file structure Format for a human reading it in a markdown viewer, not as a wall of text. Every voter is an H3 with a short name, then a **bold one-sentence headline** (the voter itself), then a one-line supporting note, then the bar rendered as **labeled bullets** — never a single multi-line indented paragraph, which collapses into an unreadable blob (and 4-space indents render as code blocks in many viewers). The same labeled-bullet discipline applies to the strengths sections. ```markdown # Voters — > ⚠️ IN PROGRESS — candidates harvested: a one-line episode note for live-captured evidence, and status: > pending / in gauntlet / voter-candidate / special / shaping / > cut (reason)>; > currently at the gauntlet: outcomes so far, with the evidence given; note any soft verdict a > resumed session should re-press>. complete; ranking / weakness walk / closing press / finalization > remaining."> If you are resuming, continue there. (Removed at > finalization; episode evidence worth keeping folds into the > surviving entries first.) ## The voters ### V1 — **** ** **Draws on:** - **Extremity, earned** — . - **Rarity** — . - **Overpowers** — the trade-offs its fans happily eat: - ** — . - ** — <…>. - **Reverberates into** — . - **Energizes** — . ### V2 — (only if a second genuinely survives) ## Special strengths (near-miss voters — deploy as secondary pillars) - — . [M/S] ## Shaping strengths (true, useful, not voters) - — . [S1] ## The verdict (only when zero voters survive) ## Cut at the gauntlet - — . ## Next steps ``` V-numbers are stable once written; wording may sharpen under a frozen number with the user's confirmation while in progress. ## Refusal conditions - **A third voter, however insisted.** Two is the cap because decisiveness is the point; the third demotes to a special or shaping strength with the ranking reasoning on the record. - **Burying a near-miss as a generic shaping strength.** A top-1%, extreme-on-some-axis strength that missed just one voter test is a *special strength* — called out as a secondary pillar to deploy, not lumped in with common traits. Losing its value is the mirror image of inflating it into a voter; the filter is tight in both directions. - **Virtue-words as voters.** "Quality," "hard work," "customer focus," "our people" — every competitor claims them; nothing that every peer would also claim can decide a contest. Press to the specific, extreme, evidenced fact underneath or classify it out. - **Aspiration as extremity.** "We're becoming known for…" and "I plan to go deep on…" are strategy, not history. A voter's evidence is what already happened. - **A voter with no overpowered cost.** If no real trade-off has ever been accepted for it — nothing refused, nobody walked away from, no weakness it excuses — it hasn't been tested as decisive; one more press, then shaping strength. - **Dodging the zero-voter verdict.** When nothing survives, the verdict is the deliverable. Padding the file with relabeled shaping strengths poisons every strategy decision downstream. - **Building the full self-portrait.** Discovering the broad characteristics is the previous step of the method; here they are inputs. Capture-inline is a fallback, not the exercise. - **Designing the whole strategy.** This file anchors the strategy audit; running it — resolving conflicts, redefining boxes, changing target markets — is downstream work this skill names but does not perform. ## Licence of the file above The file above is https://raw.githubusercontent.com/asmartbear/asb-skills/main/.claude/skills/asb-voters/SKILL.md, by Jason Cohen, reproduced without changes. - Source: https://github.com/asmartbear/asb-skills/tree/main/.claude/skills/asb-voters - Licence: CC-BY-4.0, https://raw.githubusercontent.com/asmartbear/asb-skills/main/LICENSE Attribution: "Voters" by Jason Cohen, https://github.com/asmartbear/asb-skills/tree/main/.claude/skills/asb-voters, licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Changes: none. The repo's licence file, verbatim from https://raw.githubusercontent.com/asmartbear/asb-skills/main/LICENSE: Attribution 4.0 International ======================================================================= Creative Commons Corporation ("Creative Commons") is not a law firm and does not provide legal services or legal advice. Distribution of Creative Commons public licenses does not create a lawyer-client or other relationship. Creative Commons makes its licenses and related information available on an "as-is" basis. Creative Commons gives no warranties regarding its licenses, any material licensed under their terms and conditions, or any related information. Creative Commons disclaims all liability for damages resulting from their use to the fullest extent possible. Using Creative Commons Public Licenses Creative Commons public licenses provide a standard set of terms and conditions that creators and other rights holders may use to share original works of authorship and other material subject to copyright and certain other rights specified in the public license below. The following considerations are for informational purposes only, are not exhaustive, and do not form part of our licenses. Considerations for licensors: Our public licenses are intended for use by those authorized to give the public permission to use material in ways otherwise restricted by copyright and certain other rights. Our licenses are irrevocable. Licensors should read and understand the terms and conditions of the license they choose before applying it. Licensors should also secure all rights necessary before applying our licenses so that the public can reuse the material as expected. Licensors should clearly mark any material not subject to the license. This includes other CC- licensed material, or material used under an exception or limitation to copyright. More considerations for licensors: wiki.creativecommons.org/Considerations_for_licensors Considerations for the public: By using one of our public licenses, a licensor grants the public permission to use the licensed material under specified terms and conditions. If the licensor's permission is not necessary for any reason--for example, because of any applicable exception or limitation to copyright--then that use is not regulated by the license. Our licenses grant only permissions under copyright and certain other rights that a licensor has authority to grant. Use of the licensed material may still be restricted for other reasons, including because others have copyright or other rights in the material. A licensor may make special requests, such as asking that all changes be marked or described. Although not required by our licenses, you are encouraged to respect those requests where reasonable. More considerations for the public: wiki.creativecommons.org/Considerations_for_licensees ======================================================================= Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License By exercising the Licensed Rights (defined below), You accept and agree to be bound by the terms and conditions of this Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License ("Public License"). To the extent this Public License may be interpreted as a contract, You are granted the Licensed Rights in consideration of Your acceptance of these terms and conditions, and the Licensor grants You such rights in consideration of benefits the Licensor receives from making the Licensed Material available under these terms and conditions. Section 1 -- Definitions. a. Adapted Material means material subject to Copyright and Similar Rights that is derived from or based upon the Licensed Material and in which the Licensed Material is translated, altered, arranged, transformed, or otherwise modified in a manner requiring permission under the Copyright and Similar Rights held by the Licensor. For purposes of this Public License, where the Licensed Material is a musical work, performance, or sound recording, Adapted Material is always produced where the Licensed Material is synched in timed relation with a moving image. b. Adapter's License means the license You apply to Your Copyright and Similar Rights in Your contributions to Adapted Material in accordance with the terms and conditions of this Public License. c. Copyright and Similar Rights means copyright and/or similar rights closely related to copyright including, without limitation, performance, broadcast, sound recording, and Sui Generis Database Rights, without regard to how the rights are labeled or categorized. For purposes of this Public License, the rights specified in Section 2(b)(1)-(2) are not Copyright and Similar Rights. d. Effective Technological Measures means those measures that, in the absence of proper authority, may not be circumvented under laws fulfilling obligations under Article 11 of the WIPO Copyright Treaty adopted on December 20, 1996, and/or similar international agreements. e. Exceptions and Limitations means fair use, fair dealing, and/or any other exception or limitation to Copyright and Similar Rights that applies to Your use of the Licensed Material. f. Licensed Material means the artistic or literary work, database, or other material to which the Licensor applied this Public License. g. Licensed Rights means the rights granted to You subject to the terms and conditions of this Public License, which are limited to all Copyright and Similar Rights that apply to Your use of the Licensed Material and that the Licensor has authority to license. h. Licensor means the individual(s) or entity(ies) granting rights under this Public License. i. Share means to provide material to the public by any means or process that requires permission under the Licensed Rights, such as reproduction, public display, public performance, distribution, dissemination, communication, or importation, and to make material available to the public including in ways that members of the public may access the material from a place and at a time individually chosen by them. j. Sui Generis Database Rights means rights other than copyright resulting from Directive 96/9/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 11 March 1996 on the legal protection of databases, as amended and/or succeeded, as well as other essentially equivalent rights anywhere in the world. k. You means the individual or entity exercising the Licensed Rights under this Public License. Your has a corresponding meaning. Section 2 -- Scope. a. License grant. 1. Subject to the terms and conditions of this Public License, the Licensor hereby grants You a worldwide, royalty-free, non-sublicensable, non-exclusive, irrevocable license to exercise the Licensed Rights in the Licensed Material to: a. reproduce and Share the Licensed Material, in whole or in part; and b. produce, reproduce, and Share Adapted Material. 2. Exceptions and Limitations. For the avoidance of doubt, where Exceptions and Limitations apply to Your use, this Public License does not apply, and You do not need to comply with its terms and conditions. 3. Term. The term of this Public License is specified in Section 6(a). 4. Media and formats; technical modifications allowed. The Licensor authorizes You to exercise the Licensed Rights in all media and formats whether now known or hereafter created, and to make technical modifications necessary to do so. The Licensor waives and/or agrees not to assert any right or authority to forbid You from making technical modifications necessary to exercise the Licensed Rights, including technical modifications necessary to circumvent Effective Technological Measures. For purposes of this Public License, simply making modifications authorized by this Section 2(a) (4) never produces Adapted Material. 5. Downstream recipients. a. Offer from the Licensor -- Licensed Material. Every recipient of the Licensed Material automatically receives an offer from the Licensor to exercise the Licensed Rights under the terms and conditions of this Public License. b. No downstream restrictions. You may not offer or impose any additional or different terms or conditions on, or apply any Effective Technological Measures to, the Licensed Material if doing so restricts exercise of the Licensed Rights by any recipient of the Licensed Material. 6. No endorsement. Nothing in this Public License constitutes or may be construed as permission to assert or imply that You are, or that Your use of the Licensed Material is, connected with, or sponsored, endorsed, or granted official status by, the Licensor or others designated to receive attribution as provided in Section 3(a)(1)(A)(i). b. Other rights. 1. Moral rights, such as the right of integrity, are not licensed under this Public License, nor are publicity, privacy, and/or other similar personality rights; however, to the extent possible, the Licensor waives and/or agrees not to assert any such rights held by the Licensor to the limited extent necessary to allow You to exercise the Licensed Rights, but not otherwise. 2. Patent and trademark rights are not licensed under this Public License. 3. To the extent possible, the Licensor waives any right to collect royalties from You for the exercise of the Licensed Rights, whether directly or through a collecting society under any voluntary or waivable statutory or compulsory licensing scheme. In all other cases the Licensor expressly reserves any right to collect such royalties. Section 3 -- License Conditions. Your exercise of the Licensed Rights is expressly made subject to the following conditions. a. Attribution. 1. If You Share the Licensed Material (including in modified form), You must: a. retain the following if it is supplied by the Licensor with the Licensed Material: i. identification of the creator(s) of the Licensed Material and any others designated to receive attribution, in any reasonable manner requested by the Licensor (including by pseudonym if designated); ii. a copyright notice; iii. a notice that refers to this Public License; iv. a notice that refers to the disclaimer of warranties; v. a URI or hyperlink to the Licensed Material to the extent reasonably practicable; b. indicate if You modified the Licensed Material and retain an indication of any previous modifications; and c. indicate the Licensed Material is licensed under this Public License, and include the text of, or the URI or hyperlink to, this Public License. 2. You may satisfy the conditions in Section 3(a)(1) in any reasonable manner based on the medium, means, and context in which You Share the Licensed Material. For example, it may be reasonable to satisfy the conditions by providing a URI or hyperlink to a resource that includes the required information. 3. If requested by the Licensor, You must remove any of the information required by Section 3(a)(1)(A) to the extent reasonably practicable. 4. If You Share Adapted Material You produce, the Adapter's License You apply must not prevent recipients of the Adapted Material from complying with this Public License. Section 4 -- Sui Generis Database Rights. Where the Licensed Rights include Sui Generis Database Rights that apply to Your use of the Licensed Material: a. for the avoidance of doubt, Section 2(a)(1) grants You the right to extract, reuse, reproduce, and Share all or a substantial portion of the contents of the database; b. if You include all or a substantial portion of the database contents in a database in which You have Sui Generis Database Rights, then the database in which You have Sui Generis Database Rights (but not its individual contents) is Adapted Material; and c. You must comply with the conditions in Section 3(a) if You Share all or a substantial portion of the contents of the database. For the avoidance of doubt, this Section 4 supplements and does not replace Your obligations under this Public License where the Licensed Rights include other Copyright and Similar Rights. Section 5 -- Disclaimer of Warranties and Limitation of Liability. a. UNLESS OTHERWISE SEPARATELY UNDERTAKEN BY THE LICENSOR, TO THE EXTENT POSSIBLE, THE LICENSOR OFFERS THE LICENSED MATERIAL AS-IS AND AS-AVAILABLE, AND MAKES NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND CONCERNING THE LICENSED MATERIAL, WHETHER EXPRESS, IMPLIED, STATUTORY, OR OTHER. THIS INCLUDES, WITHOUT LIMITATION, WARRANTIES OF TITLE, MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, ABSENCE OF LATENT OR OTHER DEFECTS, ACCURACY, OR THE PRESENCE OR ABSENCE OF ERRORS, WHETHER OR NOT KNOWN OR DISCOVERABLE. WHERE DISCLAIMERS OF WARRANTIES ARE NOT ALLOWED IN FULL OR IN PART, THIS DISCLAIMER MAY NOT APPLY TO YOU. b. TO THE EXTENT POSSIBLE, IN NO EVENT WILL THE LICENSOR BE LIABLE TO YOU ON ANY LEGAL THEORY (INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, NEGLIGENCE) OR OTHERWISE FOR ANY DIRECT, SPECIAL, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE, EXEMPLARY, OR OTHER LOSSES, COSTS, EXPENSES, OR DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THIS PUBLIC LICENSE OR USE OF THE LICENSED MATERIAL, EVEN IF THE LICENSOR HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH LOSSES, COSTS, EXPENSES, OR DAMAGES. WHERE A LIMITATION OF LIABILITY IS NOT ALLOWED IN FULL OR IN PART, THIS LIMITATION MAY NOT APPLY TO YOU. c. The disclaimer of warranties and limitation of liability provided above shall be interpreted in a manner that, to the extent possible, most closely approximates an absolute disclaimer and waiver of all liability. Section 6 -- Term and Termination. a. This Public License applies for the term of the Copyright and Similar Rights licensed here. However, if You fail to comply with this Public License, then Your rights under this Public License terminate automatically. b. Where Your right to use the Licensed Material has terminated under Section 6(a), it reinstates: 1. automatically as of the date the violation is cured, provided it is cured within 30 days of Your discovery of the violation; or 2. upon express reinstatement by the Licensor. For the avoidance of doubt, this Section 6(b) does not affect any right the Licensor may have to seek remedies for Your violations of this Public License. c. For the avoidance of doubt, the Licensor may also offer the Licensed Material under separate terms or conditions or stop distributing the Licensed Material at any time; however, doing so will not terminate this Public License. d. Sections 1, 5, 6, 7, and 8 survive termination of this Public License. Section 7 -- Other Terms and Conditions. a. The Licensor shall not be bound by any additional or different terms or conditions communicated by You unless expressly agreed. b. Any arrangements, understandings, or agreements regarding the Licensed Material not stated herein are separate from and independent of the terms and conditions of this Public License. Section 8 -- Interpretation. a. For the avoidance of doubt, this Public License does not, and shall not be interpreted to, reduce, limit, restrict, or impose conditions on any use of the Licensed Material that could lawfully be made without permission under this Public License. b. To the extent possible, if any provision of this Public License is deemed unenforceable, it shall be automatically reformed to the minimum extent necessary to make it enforceable. If the provision cannot be reformed, it shall be severed from this Public License without affecting the enforceability of the remaining terms and conditions. c. No term or condition of this Public License will be waived and no failure to comply consented to unless expressly agreed to by the Licensor. d. Nothing in this Public License constitutes or may be interpreted as a limitation upon, or waiver of, any privileges and immunities that apply to the Licensor or You, including from the legal processes of any jurisdiction or authority. ======================================================================= Creative Commons is not a party to its public licenses. Notwithstanding, Creative Commons may elect to apply one of its public licenses to material it publishes and in those instances will be considered the “Licensor.” The text of the Creative Commons public licenses is dedicated to the public domain under the CC0 Public Domain Dedication. Except for the limited purpose of indicating that material is shared under a Creative Commons public license or as otherwise permitted by the Creative Commons policies published at creativecommons.org/policies, Creative Commons does not authorize the use of the trademark "Creative Commons" or any other trademark or logo of Creative Commons without its prior written consent including, without limitation, in connection with any unauthorized modifications to any of its public licenses or any other arrangements, understandings, or agreements concerning use of licensed material. For the avoidance of doubt, this paragraph does not form part of the public licenses. Creative Commons may be contacted at creativecommons.org.