The agreement between you and Globefin — what we offer, what we ask of you, and the limits of both.
These Terms of Use ("Terms") govern your access to and use of globefin.org and everything on it — the lessons and tracks, quizzes and question bank, the SIE preparation platform, the vocabulary, the Innovation Knowledge Base and its data API, Web Apps and the Basics, Demos and Research pages built in it, Discussions, the blog, the member directory, Commitments, and the lesson review tools (together, the "Service").
Globefin is a creative, educational, and research project founded by Shane Hadden and operated by Library B Development Corporation, a Kentucky non-profit corporation ("Globefin", "we", "us", "our").
By using the Service — whether or not you create an account — you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, please do not use the Service. Our Privacy Policy is incorporated into these Terms by reference.
The short version. Globefin is a free educational resource about how the world designs finance. It teaches; it does not advise. Our content is AI-drafted and published before it is reviewed, then corrected on an ongoing basis — so some of it has been checked and some has not. Verify anything that matters before you rely on it. Our lessons are openly licensed: take them, teach with them, adapt them, even commercially — just credit us and say what you changed. The same now goes the other way: a Web Apps page you publish is released to everyone else under the MIT License, so anyone can build on your code as long as they keep your name on it. In return, use the site honestly, use your real name, and don't post things that aren't yours.
You must be at least 16 years old to create a Globefin account. By creating one, you represent that you are.
Most of the Service now requires a free account. A small number of pages — the homepage, the SIE landing page, the public question bank, Commitments, and these legal pages — remain readable without one. We may change which parts require an account.
You must also be legally capable of entering into a binding contract, and not barred from using the Service under the laws of your country or any applicable sanctions regime.
Accounts are free. When you create one:
You may close your account at any time. See the Privacy Policy for what happens to your data when you do.
Globefin provides financial education for general informational purposes only. Nothing on the Service is financial, investment, tax, accounting, legal, or professional advice, and nothing on it is a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security, instrument, or asset.
We are not a bank, broker-dealer, investment adviser, financial adviser, law firm, or accounting firm, and we are not registered, licensed, or authorised as any of those in any jurisdiction. No adviser–client, attorney–client, or fiduciary relationship is created by your use of the Service.
This matters especially because of what Globefin teaches. The whole premise of the site is that the questions are universal but the answers are local: insolvency, governance, lending, taxation, and licensing rules differ profoundly between jurisdictions, and they change. A description of how something works in one country is not guidance about your country, and a description of how something worked when a lesson was written is not a statement of what the law is today.
Before acting on anything you learn here — particularly anything touching money, tax, regulation, licensing, or the law — consult a qualified professional licensed in your own jurisdiction. Our Licensing pillar teaches the concepts behind professional credentials; it does not confer any credential, qualification, licence, or accreditation, and completing lessons or quizzes does not certify you to do anything.
Globefin publishes material before it has been reviewed. Lessons are drafted by AI and go live first; checking happens afterwards and continuously. At any given time this site carries content that no person has verified, and we cannot tell you which pages those are.
We are open about how Globefin is built, including the parts that are not flattering. Our lessons are drafted with the help of large language models and published before they have been reviewed. We then check and correct them on an ongoing basis, using our own review and flags raised by readers.
This is what makes our comparative, global scope possible — no single team could research and write with authority across every jurisdiction at once, and holding every page until it had been verified would mean publishing almost nothing. It is a deliberate trade-off, and you are entitled to know which side of it you are on when you read a given page.
It also means you should hold the content to the standard it deserves:
Every lesson carries a built-in review tool, and we would rather hear about an error than not. Running a page through independent AI models to surface problems, and sending us the ones worth keeping, is an intended and welcome use of the Service. It does not, however, transfer to you any right to the underlying lesson text, and the outputs of those third-party models are theirs and subject to their terms, not ours.
Other parts of the Service also send text to AI providers — notably the AI tools available inside Discussions, which transmit recent posts in a discussion when a member runs them. Please do not enter confidential or personal information into any AI feature, and bear in mind that what you write in a discussion may later be sent to a provider by another member. Section 7 of the Privacy Policy explains this in full.
You agree not to:
"Your Content" means anything you submit to the Service — profile and résumé information, discussions and posts, corrections and suggestions through the review tool, Sandbox pages, messages, and anything else you post.
You keep ownership of Your Content. You grant Globefin a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable, perpetual, irrevocable licence to host, store, reproduce, adapt, publish, translate, and distribute Your Content for the purposes of operating, improving, and promoting the Service — including incorporating an accepted correction into a lesson.
This licence is necessary and deliberate: if you tell us a lesson is wrong and we fix the lesson, the fix becomes part of the lesson, and we need to be able to keep publishing it. You agree we are under no obligation to credit you (though we may).
Corrections become part of an openly licensed work. Because our lessons are published under CC BY 4.0 (see section 8), any correction, suggestion, or other contribution you make that we incorporate into a lesson will be released to the public under that same CC BY 4.0 licence, and may be freely reused by anyone. A page you publish in Web Apps is openly licensed too, but under a different licence suited to code — the MIT License, as set out in section 9. Please do not submit anything you are not willing to see openly licensed.
You represent and warrant that Your Content is yours to give — that you own it or have the rights to it, and that it does not infringe anyone else's rights or breach any duty of confidence you owe.
We may review, edit, refuse, or remove Your Content at our discretion, but we are not obliged to monitor it, and we do not endorse it. Content posted by other users is theirs, not ours.
If you believe content on Globefin infringes your copyright, write to admin@globefin.org identifying the work, the material you say infringes it and where it sits on the site, your contact details, and a statement that you have a good-faith belief the use is unauthorised and that your notice is accurate. We will investigate and remove infringing material where appropriate, and we may terminate the accounts of repeat infringers.
Globefin is an open educational project. Rather than locking the curriculum away, we release it under two permissive licences — CC BY 4.0 for the teaching material, MIT for code. Pages members publish in Web Apps are code, and follow the same MIT rule (see section 9).
The lessons, classes, case studies, exam questions, and accompanying materials are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
Under that licence you are free to share and adapt this material for any purpose, including commercially — teach from it, translate it, remix it, build on it — provided you:
A suggested citation appears in the footer of every page. Educators in particular: you do not need to ask our permission to use Globefin with a class — the licence already grants it. We would love to hear about it anyway.
The source code of this site is released under the MIT License.
The open licences above do not grant you rights in:
The licences are grants of copyright permission only. They come with no warranty of any kind, and they do not displace sections 18 and 19 below — in particular, reusing a lesson does not make us responsible for what you or your readers then do with it.
Web Apps lets you publish one self-contained HTML page that Globefin serves live inside an isolated frame — a sandbox — so it cannot reach your account or the rest of the Service. What you publish is a page, and it has one of three types.
Demo and Research are open to every member. Basic pages are published by Globefin staff only: a Basic is our statement that this is the best app of its kind on the Service, and that is not a claim a member can make about their own work. Members are not shut out of it, though. Staff review Demos regularly and may promote any member's Demo to Basic — either because it improves on the current Basic, or because it is a type of app the Service does not yet have — in which case it remains your page, under your name and your licence, and we may move it back to Demos later if something better replaces it. Being promoted, kept, or moved back is at our discretion and is not a right.
You keep ownership of your page. But when you set a page to published, you licence it to the public under the MIT License — the same licence Globefin's own code carries. Anyone may copy, modify, merge, publish, and distribute it, including commercially, on one condition: they must keep your copyright and licence notice in any copy or substantial portion. Your name travels with your work.
Four consequences worth understanding before you publish:
If your page does not carry its own notice, Globefin displays this one alongside it, and it is the notice your licence attaches to:
Copyright © [year] [your name]. Licensed under the MIT License. Published on Globefin.
Anyone who copies your page must carry that notice with their copy. When someone downloads your page we also add a short comment at the top of that copy, recording the title, the author, whether it was reviewed, and where it came from. It is a comment only: it does not change how your page runs, does not alter your licence, and does not claim any right over your work. Because we display the notice with the page rather than writing it into your file, the surest way to make the condition travel is to put it in the file yourself — a comment at the top of the page is enough, and it stays attached however the file is copied. You are equally welcome to include the full MIT permission text, or a more specific copyright line. What you may not do is publish a page while withholding the licence — publishing is the grant.
Publish only what is yours to license. If your page includes code, data, images, or text you did not write, you must have the right to release it under the MIT License. Third-party libraries you load from a CDN keep their own licences and are not covered by yours — please say what you have used, and keep their notices intact.
Web Apps pages are member-written code. We do not review Demo or Research pages before or after they are published, and the isolation the sandbox provides is a safeguard, not a guarantee — see section 18. Never enter a password or personal information into a Web Apps page.
What review of a Basic does and does not mean. Before promoting a page to Basic we look at it, including its source. That review asks whether the page is a good app of its kind and fit to be the one we point people at. It is not a security audit, a code audit, or a warranty. We may also run automated checks over any page; those flag patterns worth a human look and cannot establish that a page is safe. A page marked Basic, and any label or note we attach to a downloaded copy, records that we looked — not that we have found it free of faults or of risk. Section 18 applies to Basic pages exactly as it does to every other page.
Downloading a page. Published pages can be downloaded, and that is deliberate — the licence exists so you can keep, study and build on them. Understand what changes when you do. The sandbox is part of how we serve a page, not part of the file: it is applied by your browser because of instructions we send with the page. A copy you have downloaded and opened from your own computer runs without those instructions and without those limits. It can send data over the internet, keep data between sessions, and navigate your browser.
Such a copy cannot read files from your computer on its own, but it can read anything you open in it — so the caution is about what you feed a page, not merely about running one. You download and run pages at your own risk, including pages marked Basic. We add a short note to the top of a downloaded copy recording where it came from and what it is; that note is information, not assurance.
The Innovation Knowledge Base is a structured record of organisations, people, funding, grants, patents, acquisitions, and hiring, aggregated from public filings and records — including SEC EDGAR filings, USPTO patent data, federal spending data, state programme lists — and from member contributions. A read-only JSON API exposes it to signed-in members and to pages built in the Sandbox.
We may change, restrict, or withdraw the API and its data at any time.
Discussions are open conversations started and run by members. Whoever starts a discussion moderates it — they can remove posts within it and block members from it — and every moderation action is recorded in a public log attached to that discussion.
If you start a discussion, moderate in good faith. If you take part in one, understand that another member may remove your post or block you from that thread, and that Globefin administrators may act on anything that breaches these Terms. Posting limits apply.
Posts are the views of the members who wrote them, not of Globefin. We do not endorse them and we are not obliged to monitor them.
Globefin's SIE study platform is an independent educational resource. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or approved by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), the Securities and Exchange Commission, or any securities regulator, self-regulatory organisation, or exam sponsor. "SIE" and "Securities Industry Essentials" are marks of their respective owners and are used here only to describe the exam the material prepares you for.
Our practice questions, flashcards, and mock exams are generated with AI assistance. Some have been reviewed and some have not, on the same basis as the rest of the Service. They are not actual exam questions, they are not drawn from any exam bank, and they are not licensed by any exam sponsor. A question may be wrong, and a wrong question may be scored against you.
We do not guarantee any exam result. Projected scores and readiness estimates are statistical indicators based on your own practice history — they are not a prediction, a pass rate, or a promise, and they should not be your only basis for deciding when to sit the exam. Exam content, weighting, and eligibility rules are set by the exam sponsor and can change without our knowing.
The Commitments tool stores a salted cryptographic hash of text you enter, with a timestamp and a position in a public append-only chain. It does not store your text.
A commitment is not a patent, trademark, or copyright filing, not a legal registration of any kind, and not a substitute for professional advice about protecting an idea. It confers no intellectual property rights, establishes no legal priority, and carries no guaranteed evidentiary weight in any court or proceeding. Treat it as a useful record, not as legal protection.
Globefin does not vet, verify, endorse, or vouch for the credentials, claims, résumés, or conduct of any user, instructor, institution, or organisation appearing on the Service. Any interaction, arrangement, or transaction you enter into with another user is solely between you and them, and at your own risk. Exercise the same judgement you would anywhere else — and be especially careful of anyone who contacts you through Globefin to solicit money, investment, or account credentials. We will never ask you for your financial account details.
You may list yourself in the member directory or hide yourself from it in your profile settings; either way your profile page stays reachable by direct link to signed-in members. You may turn off member-to-member messages.
If you invite someone, you confirm you have a reasonable basis for giving us their email address and that they would welcome the invitation. Invitations are rate-limited, and misuse may cost you access to the feature or to your account.
The Service links to and integrates third-party resources — including the independent AI models available through the review tool and in Discussions, analytics and anti-bot services, content delivery networks, and external sources cited in lessons and in the Knowledge Base. We do not control them, we are not responsible for them, and their inclusion is not an endorsement. Your use of a third-party service is governed by that party's own terms and privacy policy.
Globefin is a growing project: we add tracks, revise lessons, retire material, and change features. We may modify, suspend, or discontinue any part of the Service at any time, with or without notice. We do not guarantee that any lesson, track, dataset, API, or feature will remain available, or that the Service will be uninterrupted or error-free.
The Service is provided free of charge. We reserve the right to introduce paid features in future; if we do, we will make clear what is paid and what remains free, and these Terms will be updated accordingly.
We may suspend or terminate your account and your access to the Service, with or without notice, if you breach these Terms, if we reasonably believe your use harms Globefin or other users, or if required by law. Where it is reasonable to do so, we will tell you why and give you a chance to put things right.
You may stop using the Service and close your account at any time. Sections 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 13, and 18 to 23 survive termination — including any open licence you have already granted, whether CC BY on a lesson correction or MIT on a Web Apps page, which cannot be withdrawn from copies already made.
The Service is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranty of any kind. To the fullest extent permitted by law, Globefin disclaims all warranties, express or implied, including any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, and any warranty arising from course of dealing or usage of trade.
Without limiting that, we do not warrant that the content is accurate, complete, current, or applicable to your jurisdiction, that the Service will be uninterrupted, secure, or error-free, or that defects will be corrected. As set out in section 5, our content is AI-drafted and published before review, so errors may be present in material no one has checked yet. The Knowledge Base is aggregated from third-party records we do not control and is provided without any warranty as to accuracy or completeness.
The sandbox's isolation is a safeguard, not a guarantee. Web Apps pages are code written by other members. We take reasonable measures to isolate them from your account and from the rest of the site, but we do not warrant that those measures are impenetrable or that any page is free of harmful, misleading, or defective code, and we are not responsible for what a member's page does. Those measures apply while a page runs on the Service; a copy you download and open elsewhere runs without them, at your own risk. Reviewing a page, marking one as a Basic, or running automated checks over it does not make us responsible for it and is not a warranty that it is safe or fit for any purpose — see section 9.
Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties, so some of these exclusions may not apply to you. Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded.
To the fullest extent permitted by law, Globefin and its operators, editors, contributors, and suppliers will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for any loss of profits, revenue, data, goodwill, or business opportunity, arising out of or in connection with your use of, or inability to use, the Service — whether in contract, tort (including negligence), or otherwise, and whether or not we were advised of the possibility.
In particular, and without limitation, we are not liable for any financial, investment, tax, regulatory, professional, or legal decision you make, or refrain from making, on the basis of anything you read on Globefin, for any exam outcome, for any loss arising from a Web Apps page written by another member, for any reliance on Knowledge Base data, or for any consequence of a commitment failing to serve a purpose you hoped it would. The Service is educational. Decisions are yours.
To the fullest extent permitted by law, our total aggregate liability arising out of or relating to the Service and these Terms will not exceed the greater of (a) the total amount you have paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose (which, for a free service, will ordinarily be zero) and (b) one hundred US dollars (US$100).
You agree to indemnify and hold harmless Globefin and its operators, editors, and contributors from and against any claims, liabilities, damages, losses, and expenses (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of or connected with your breach of these Terms, your misuse of the Service, Your Content — including any page you publish in Web Apps — or your violation of any law or third-party right.
Globefin is operated by Library B Development Corporation, a Kentucky non-profit corporation. These Terms, and any dispute arising out of or in connection with them or the Service, are governed by the laws of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, USA, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. You and Globefin agree to the exclusive jurisdiction of the state and federal courts located in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, subject to any mandatory rights you have as a consumer to bring proceedings in, or rely on the law of, your country of residence.
If a dispute arises, please contact us first at admin@globefin.org. Most things can be resolved by email.
We may revise these Terms from time to time. When we do, we will update the "last updated" date at the top of this page, and for material changes we will give reasonable notice — by email or a prominent notice on the Service — before they take effect. Continuing to use Globefin after a change takes effect means you accept the revised Terms. If you do not accept them, stop using the Service and close your account.
Questions about these Terms, a permission request, a copyright notice, or a correction to a lesson — all go to the same place.
admin@globefin.org