Terms of Service

1. Who We Are & Acceptance of Terms

Welcome to italianamericans.com (the “Site”), operated by The Alghini Institute for Italian Americans, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization (EIN 99-0439703) headquartered in Austin, Texas.

By accessing or using this Site you agree to be bound by these Terms of Service. If you do not agree, please do not use the Site. We may update these terms from time to time; continued use after a change constitutes acceptance of the revised terms.

2. Permitted Use

You may browse the Site, share links, and use our educational content for personal, non-commercial purposes. You may also quote limited portions with proper attribution to the Alghini Institute. You may not:

• Reproduce, scrape, or redistribute substantial portions of the Site’s content without written permission.
• Use automated systems (bots, crawlers) in a manner that degrades site performance or harvests user data.
• Impersonate the Institute or misrepresent affiliation with it.
• Use the Site for any unlawful purpose or in violation of any applicable law.

3. User Submissions

The Site offers several ways for you to contribute content, including guest blog posts, Digital Piazza stories, Notable Italian Americans directory nominations, and Clean Streets Initiative submissions.

You retain ownership of anything you submit. By submitting content, you grant the Alghini Institute a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, perpetual license to publish, display, edit for length or clarity, and archive that submission as part of our heritage-preservation mission.

By submitting, you warrant that you hold the necessary rights to the content and that it does not infringe on anyone else’s intellectual property or privacy. We reserve the right to decline, remove, or edit any submission at our discretion, with or without notice.

4. Open Data

The Notable Italian Americans dataset is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. You are free to share and adapt the data for any purpose, including commercially, as long as you provide appropriate credit. See our methodology page for full details on sourcing and citation requirements.

5. Donations

All donations are processed securely by Stripe. Contributions to the Alghini Institute are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law. We issue receipts for your records.

If you need to request a refund, please contact us at salve@italianamericans.com. Refund requests are handled on a case-by-case basis.

6. Intellectual Property

Unless otherwise noted, the content on this Site—including text, images, graphics, design, and code—is owned by the Alghini Institute or used with permission. Our name, logo, and brand identity are our trademarks. Nothing in these Terms grants you a license to use them beyond what is described in Section 2 above.

7. Disclaimers & Limitation of Liability

The Site and its content are provided “as is” without warranty of any kind. For our full disclaimer statements, please see our Disclaimers page.

In particular, genealogy research guidance and Italian citizenship information published on this Site is educational and informational only. It does not constitute legal advice and should not be relied upon as a substitute for consultation with a qualified immigration attorney.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, the Alghini Institute shall not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages arising from your use of the Site.

8. Governing Law, Changes & Contact

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Texas, without regard to conflict-of-law principles. Any dispute arising from these Terms shall be resolved in the courts located in Travis County, Texas.

We may revise these Terms at any time by posting an updated version on this page with a new effective date. Material changes will be noted at the top. Your continued use of the Site after changes are posted constitutes acceptance.