Acceptable use policy

Draft. Sikhaku has not launched. This describes the rules we intend to enforce from the first day the platform is open.

The short version

Sikhaku is for education. Teach something real, do not lie about what it will do for someone, and do not take what is not yours. Almost everything below follows from those three things.

What may not be published

A course fails review, or is removed after publication, if it involves any of the following.

• Content that is not yours. Video, slides, images, music or text you do not own or have no licence to use. Re-uploading someone else’s course is the fastest way to lose an account here.
• Guaranteed outcomes. Promised income, promised jobs, promised exam results, or any variant of get-rich-quick. You may describe what you teach; you may not promise what it will earn someone.
• Financial, medical or legal advice presented as professional guidance rather than education, and anything touching gambling, betting systems or trading signals sold as a way to make money.
• Adult content, gratuitous violence, or material involving minors in any sexualised context.
• Hate, harassment or incitement — content attacking people over caste, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, disability or origin.
• Deception. Fabricated credentials, invented testimonials, a fake institutional affiliation, or an implication that Sikhaku accredits you. It does not accredit anyone.
• Anything unlawful where you are or where we operate, including instructions for committing a crime, malware, and circumventing other platforms’ protections.
• Empty courses. A listing that exists to collect payment and deliver almost nothing, or that pads its runtime to look substantial.

How not to behave

• Harassing students, other creators or our support team.
• Manipulating ratings, reviews or sales counts, whether by buying them, trading them or pressuring students for them.
• Using student contact details for anything other than teaching them the course they bought. Details you receive after a sale are for delivering that course, not for building a marketing list.
• Impersonating another creator, a company, or Sikhaku itself — including handles and storefronts designed to be mistaken for someone else’s.
• Creating a new account to escape enforcement on an old one.

Technical limits

• No scraping, crawling or bulk-downloading the catalogue, and no automated account creation.
• No circumventing content protection: no stripping watermarks, defeating encryption, or capturing streams for redistribution.
• No probing, load-testing or attacking the platform. Genuine security research is welcome — email support@sikhaku.com first and we will agree a scope with you rather than treat you as an attacker.
• API keys are yours to protect. Traffic from your key is treated as traffic from you.

Sharing what you bought

Buying a course gives you a personal, non-transferable licence to watch it on your own account. You may not share your login, re-upload lessons, resell access, or distribute downloaded files. Lessons carry a watermark tied to the account that bought them, so a leaked file identifies its source.

This is the protection creators are relying on when they put real material on Sikhaku instead of holding it back for a private group. Breaking it ends the licence without a refund.

What happens when this is broken

The response is meant to fit the problem. A first, fixable issue usually means an email and a chance to correct it. Repeated or deliberate breaches escalate: a course is unpublished, an account is suspended, and in serious cases an account is closed and pending payouts are held while we investigate.

A single category is different. Content involving minors, credible threats of violence, or anything illegal is removed immediately and reported to the relevant authorities without warning.

Enforcement against a creator does not take courses away from the students who bought them. Where we can keep your library intact, we do.

If you think we got it wrong, reply to the enforcement email. A person reads it, and a different person to the one who made the original decision reviews it.

Reporting something

Email support@sikhaku.com with a link and a sentence about what is wrong. Copyright complaints should identify the work, where it appears on Sikhaku, and your relationship to it. We acknowledge reports within two working days and tell you the outcome.