Trade Guide Library - Membership Terms

Effective date: 11 September 2026

These Membership Terms govern free accounts and paid memberships of the Trade Guide Library (the Library). Please read them carefully before creating an account or buying a membership.

1. Who we are and these terms

1.1 The Library is operated by Copernicus International Consulting Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales under company number 06941196, whose registered office is at 1 Worsley Court, High Street, Manchester M28 3NJ (Copernicus, we, us or our).

1.2 You can contact us at [email protected] or by telephone on +44 161 262 1990. Our telephone answering service may take a message for us.

1.3 These Membership Terms apply when you create a free account or purchase a paid membership of the Library. By doing so, you confirm that you accept these Membership Terms.

1.4 The Library is available to people aged 18 or over. It is used mainly by business customers, but individuals may also buy membership. At checkout, you will identify whether you are buying for a business or as an individual. Clauses which apply specifically to business members or consumers will apply according to that selection and your legal status.

1.5 These Membership Terms are separate from Copernicus’s consultancy terms and conditions. Consultancy terms apply only to consultancy engagements separately agreed by proposal, statement of work, terms of reference, or other written agreement. Consultancy cancellation charges do not apply to Library membership.

1.6 We may amend these Membership Terms from time to time. If a change materially affects an existing paid membership, we will give at least 14 days’ notice by email. Unless the change is required sooner by law, regulation, security, or the prevention of misuse, it will take effect at the next renewal, not during the current paid membership period.

1.7 We are not currently registered for VAT. The prices shown are the total amounts payable in pounds sterling; no VAT is added and none is charged. If we become VAT registered, we will notify you before your next renewal and VAT will apply only from that following renewal where legally required.

2. Membership, eligibility and contract formation

2.1 We make the Library available worldwide, subject to applicable law. We may refuse an application, suspend access, or end a membership where required by law or where we reasonably consider it necessary because of sanctions, export-control restrictions, fraud, security, misuse, inaccurate registration details, unlawful activity, or another material risk to Copernicus, the Library, members, or third parties.

2.2 A membership contract is formed when we confirm that your account has been created or, for a paid membership, when we confirm that payment has been successfully processed. We may decline or cancel an application before that point.

2.3 Where we close an account or end a paid membership for a reason other than your breach of these Membership Terms, non-payment, fraud, unlawful conduct, sanctions or export-control compliance, or another legal or security reason attributable to you, we will refund the unused part of any prepaid annual membership fee on a pro-rata basis.

2.4 A membership is personal to the named account holder. You may hold separate paid memberships where each membership is separately paid for and linked to a different organisation. However, a single membership must not be shared between organisations or used by more than one named person.

3. Membership tiers, fees and Library content

3.1 We offer the following membership tiers at launch:

Membership tier	Annual price	Included access
Free account	No charge	One market summary selected by the account holder, supplied as a PDF download. No payment card is required.
Founder membership	£395	Full access to all guides in the Library and all Regulatory Radar bulletins, while membership remains active.
Standard membership	£495	Full access to all guides in the Library and all Regulatory Radar bulletins, while membership remains active.

3.2 Paid fees are charged in pounds sterling, in full and in advance, on purchase and on each renewal.

3.3 Founder membership is available only for the first 25 completed paid memberships. Founder places are allocated in the order that we receive successful payment confirmation. Once 25 Founder memberships have been issued, the Standard membership price applies to all later paid memberships. Our records of payment confirmation and Founder allocations are conclusive except in the case of manifest error.

3.4 A Founder membership is personal to the member and their account. It is not transferable, assignable, or capable of resale. The £395 annual Founder price is retained only while the membership continues without a break. Founder pricing is lost if the membership is cancelled, lapses for non-payment, or is terminated. If the person later rejoins, the price then in force will apply.

3.5 A free account entitles the account holder to select one available market summary. The selection is final, cannot be exchanged for a summary covering another market, is non-transferable, and has no cash alternative. We may change, replace, or withdraw the summaries available through the free tier at any time. Withdrawal of the free tier does not affect a summary already lawfully downloaded, which may be kept and used under clause 7.

3.6 Regulatory Radar consists of email bulletins for paid members, with an archive made available through the Library. Bulletins are issued when we identify relevant regulatory developments. We do not guarantee a particular frequency, number of bulletins, territory, sector, topic, or level of coverage in any period.

3.7 At launch, the Library contains 101 guides. This number is provided as a description of the Library at launch only, not as a promise that the Library will contain a minimum number of guides or that a particular guide will remain available. Membership provides access to the Library as it exists from time to time.

3.8 We may introduce promotional, discounted, additional named-user, multi-user, organisational, enterprise, reseller, or other membership arrangements in future. We are not required to offer these arrangements, and any separate pricing or terms will not alter existing memberships unless we agree otherwise in writing.

4. Payment, receipts and automatic renewal

4.1 Payment is processed by Stripe using debit card, credit card, and any digital wallet Stripe makes available at checkout. We do not receive or store your full card details. Stripe processes payment information under its own terms and privacy policy.

4.2 Stripe will email a receipt following each payment. Past receipts are available through the Stripe customer portal. As we are not VAT registered, these are receipts rather than VAT invoices.

4.3 Paid membership starts when payment is successfully confirmed and runs for 12 months. It renews automatically for successive 12-month periods on the anniversary of the membership start date, using the payment method registered with Stripe, unless you cancel before renewal.

4.4 We will email you at least 14 days before each renewal, stating the renewal date and the amount to be charged. We will send a receipt after successful renewal payment.

4.5 We may change the renewal price. If we do, we will notify you at least 14 days before the renewal date to which the change applies, so that you can cancel before the new price is charged. A Founder member’s price remains subject to clause 3.4.

4.6 You may update payment details through the Stripe customer portal, accessed from your account. We do not accept card details by email or telephone.

4.7 If a renewal payment fails, Stripe may retry payment according to its standard retry schedule. We will email you after each unsuccessful payment attempt. Access will continue during the retry period. If payment has not succeeded within 14 days after the renewal date, we may suspend access and the membership will end. Any renewal payment that later succeeds before the membership ends will continue the membership for the relevant renewal period.

5. Cancelling renewal and refunds

5.1 You may cancel a future renewal at any time through the Stripe customer portal or by emailing [email protected]. Cancellation stops the next payment. It does not end your current paid membership, which continues until the end of the membership year already paid for.

5.2 Except as stated in clauses 2.3, 5.4, 6, or 10.4, fees for a paid membership are non-refundable. Cancelling during a membership year does not create a right to a refund for the unused part of that year.

5.3 We will refund a payment where you were charged twice or charged in error, or where a renewal payment was taken after you had cancelled it in accordance with clause 5.1.

5.4 Where a qualifying material outage occurs under clause 10, we will restore access and may, at our option, extend your membership by the period lost or refund a proportionate part of the fee.

5.5 Refunds will normally be made to the payment method originally charged. Nothing in these Membership Terms removes rights that cannot lawfully be excluded.

6. Consumer cancellation rights and immediate access

6.1 This clause applies only if you are buying membership as a consumer. A consumer is an individual acting wholly or mainly outside their trade, business, craft, or profession.

6.2 Membership provides immediate access to digital content. If you are a consumer, you would normally have 14 days to cancel a distance contract for digital content. You lose that cancellation right only when you have expressly requested immediate access and expressly acknowledged that, by doing so, you lose your right to cancel within 14 days and receive a refund.

6.3 At checkout, a consumer may separately select the following statement: “I want access to the Trade Guide Library immediately. I understand that by asking for immediate access I lose my right to cancel within 14 days and receive a refund.” The selection is separate from acceptance of these Membership Terms and is not pre-ticked.

6.4 If you select the statement in clause 6.3, access opens immediately after payment confirmation and you lose the statutory 14-day cancellation right in respect of that digital content. We will confirm your immediate-access request and acknowledgement in the order-confirmation email.

6.5 If you do not wish to lose the statutory 14-day cancellation right, do not select the statement in clause 6.3. Contact us at [email protected] and we will arrange access after the 14-day cancellation period. During that period, your statutory cancellation right remains available.

6.6 Consumer statutory rights in relation to digital content, including rights concerning content that is not of satisfactory quality, fit for purpose, or as described, are not affected by these Membership Terms.

7. Your account and permitted use

7.1 Each membership is for one named individual at one organisation. You must keep your login credentials confidential, use them only for your own account, and tell us promptly if you suspect unauthorised access. You must not share login credentials or permit another person to access the Library using your account.

7.2 If the named member leaves their organisation or no longer requires access, the membership may be changed once in any 12-month membership period to a replacement individual within the same organisation. This must be requested in writing from the account email address or by an authorised contact at that organisation. The replacement is a transfer of the existing membership, not an additional user.

7.3 While membership is active, you may read, download, and use the guides and Regulatory Radar bulletins for your own organisation’s internal business purposes. You may circulate materials internally within that organisation for those purposes. You must ensure that internal recipients do not use the materials beyond the permissions in these Membership Terms.

7.4 The same internal-use licence applies to a free market summary. It does not permit redistribution outside the account holder’s organisation.

7.5 You may quote short extracts and individual figures in your own work, including professional or client work, provided you attribute the material to Copernicus International Consulting Ltd. You must not reproduce a guide in substance or copy whole tables, datasets, or material portions of a guide.

7.6 You may use the Library as background research when providing your own advice, consultancy, training, or professional services to clients. However, you must not provide a guide, bulletin, substantial extract, table, dataset, or a substitute version of Library content to a client as a deliverable, whether or not you charge for your services.

7.7 Files lawfully downloaded during an active membership may be retained and used after the membership ends under the same internal-use licence. However, access to the Library, future guides, updates, new versions, Regulatory Radar bulletins, and the Regulatory Radar archive ends when membership ends.

7.8 You must not, and must not allow anyone else to:

• share, sell, transfer, assign, sublicense, or otherwise make your account available to another person or organisation;
• republish, resell, license, distribute, post publicly, or share Library content outside your organisation;
• remove or obscure copyright, attribution, trade-mark, disclaimer, or other proprietary notices;
• reproduce a guide in substance or extract whole tables, datasets, or material portions of Library content;
• use robots, spiders, crawlers, scrapers, scripts, bulk-download tools, data-mining tools, harvesting tools, or other automated means to access, download, copy, monitor, index, extract, or collect Library content or metadata;
• upload, input, reproduce, extract, use, or make Library content available for the purpose of training, testing, developing, improving, or operating any artificial-intelligence system, machine-learning model, database, search index, or competing information product or service;
• bypass, disable, interfere with, defeat, or attempt to circumvent access controls, technical protections, download limitations, or security measures; or
• use the Library or its content in breach of applicable law, regulation, sanctions, export controls, or third-party rights.

7.9 All copyright, database rights, trade marks, and other intellectual-property rights in the Library and its content remain owned by Copernicus or its licensors. Except for the limited licence expressly granted in this clause 7, no rights are transferred to you.

8. What the Library is and is not

8.1 The guides and bulletins provide general market, trade, and regulatory information. They are not advice and are not a substitute for advice tailored to your own circumstances.

8.2 Markets, tariffs, rules, laws, regulations, sanctions, export controls, product requirements, prices, and commercial conditions can change. Although we use reasonable care in preparing the Library, information may be incomplete, may contain errors, may have changed after publication, and may not be appropriate for your circumstances.

8.3 Unless we expressly agree otherwise in writing and the work is carried out by an appropriately qualified and authorised professional, we do not provide legal, tax, accounting, financial, investment, insurance, customs, tariff-classification, sanctions, export-control, immigration, regulatory-approval, certification, product-safety, employment, intellectual-property, or other regulated or specialist advice.

8.4 You are responsible for obtaining appropriate professional advice and carrying out your own due diligence before acting on Library content. You remain responsible for ensuring that your organisation, products, services, transactions, end users, destinations, and activities comply with applicable laws, regulations, licences, sanctions, export controls, contractual requirements, and other obligations.

8.5 We do not guarantee market access, sales, orders, contracts, tender success, lead conversion, partner performance, investment, funding, regulatory approval, licence approval, export success, profitability, revenue, or another commercial outcome.

8.6 We may add, revise, relabel, correct, consolidate, archive, or withdraw guides, bulletins, and Library features at any time. Withdrawal of a guide or bulletin because it is out of date, inaccurate, superseded, or no longer appropriate does not amount to a failure to provide the service.

8.7 We will mark material corrections on the relevant guide. Where we consider a correction significant, we will notify members by email. We do not undertake to issue notices of minor edits, formatting changes, or routine updates.

8.8 The Library does not currently permit comments, forums, reviews, uploads, or other user-generated content. If those features are introduced, additional terms may apply.

9. Privacy and communications

9.1 We handle personal data as explained in our Privacy Policy at www.copernicus-consulting.com/privacy-policy. The Privacy Policy identifies the technology providers used in connection with the Library, including Stripe for payments, MailerLite for bulletins, renewal notices and marketing, CookieYes for cookie consent, our WordPress website host, and Google Analytics through Site Kit.

9.2 We use your contact details to administer the Library and send essential service communications. These include account, access, security, payment, receipt, renewal, failed-payment, terms-change, service, and material-correction notices. These communications are not marketing and may be sent regardless of your marketing preferences.

9.3 Regulatory Radar bulletins are part of the paid membership service rather than marketing. If you ask us to stop sending them, you may not receive bulletins by email, although the bulletin archive may remain available in the Library while your membership is active.

9.4 We send marketing to consumers only where they have consented. We may send relevant business-to-business marketing where permitted by applicable law, including where the soft opt-in applies. Every marketing email will include a means of unsubscribing.

9.5 Our providers, associates, and service partners may process personal data outside the United Kingdom. Where this occurs, we use an appropriate lawful transfer mechanism and safeguards, such as an adequacy regulation, the UK International Data Transfer Agreement, or the UK Addendum, as applicable.

10. Availability, support and service failure

10.1 We aim to keep the Library available, but we do not guarantee uninterrupted or error-free access. Access may be affected by maintenance, security work, software updates, internet or hosting failures, third-party services, circumstances outside our reasonable control, or other operational reasons.

10.2 We will give reasonable notice of planned maintenance where practicable. Short or unplanned interruptions may occur without notice and are not, by themselves, a service failure.

10.3 For these Membership Terms, a material outage means that the core Library is inaccessible to members for more than 72 consecutive hours, or for more than seven days in any rolling 30-day period, excluding planned maintenance, emergency maintenance, and outages caused by circumstances outside our reasonable control.

10.4 If a material outage occurs, we will use reasonable efforts to restore access. Where a material outage has been prolonged, we may, at our option, extend the membership by the period lost or refund a proportionate part of the membership fee. This does not affect consumer rights that cannot lawfully be excluded.

10.5 For account, payment, or Library support, contact [email protected]. We aim to respond within five Business Days, and often sooner. This is a target, not a guaranteed service level. A Business Day is a day other than a Saturday, Sunday, or public holiday in England.

11. Suspension and termination

11.1 We may suspend access immediately where reasonably necessary to protect the Library, its security, our intellectual property, other members, or third parties. This includes suspected or actual credential sharing, bulk or automated downloading, scraping, harvesting, unauthorised redistribution, unlawful use, sanctions or export-control concerns, payment fraud, abuse of the chargeback process, or non-payment after the retry period in clause 4.7.

11.2 If a breach can reasonably be put right, we will normally give you written notice describing the breach and 14 days to correct it before ending membership. We do not need to provide a remedy period where immediate suspension or termination is reasonably necessary.

11.3 We may terminate membership immediately and without refund for serious breach, including redistribution, resale, scraping, bulk downloading, use of Library content for artificial-intelligence training or development, deliberate circumvention of access controls, unlawful use, or repeated breach after notice.

11.4 We may close a free account that has been inactive for 24 months by giving reasonable notice by email. We may vary or withdraw the free tier at any time under clause 3.5.

11.5 If we permanently close the Library, we will give reasonable notice by email and refund the unused part of any prepaid paid membership fee on a pro-rata basis.

11.6 On termination or expiry, clauses 5, 7.7 to 7.9, 8, 9, 12, and 13 continue to apply to the extent necessary.

12. Liability

12.1 Nothing in these Membership Terms excludes or limits liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, fraud, or fraudulent misrepresentation.

12.2 Consumer statutory rights are not affected by these Membership Terms.

12.3 Subject to clauses 12.1 and 12.2, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, or for loss of profit, revenue, sales, business, goodwill, opportunity, anticipated savings, contracts, tenders, market access, regulatory approval, lead conversion, export performance, investment, funding, or any commercial outcome.

12.4 Subject to clauses 12.1 and 12.2, our total aggregate liability arising out of or in connection with a membership, whether in contract, tort (including negligence), misrepresentation, restitution, breach of statutory duty, or otherwise, will not exceed the membership fees paid by you in the 12 months immediately before the circumstances giving rise to the claim.

12.5 The separate liability limits in Copernicus’s Website Terms of Use for free use of the public website do not apply to paid or free Library membership. This clause 12 applies instead.

12.6 We are not responsible for third-party acts or omissions, including those of contacts, suppliers, customers, partners, advisers, public authorities, websites, service providers, payment processors, data providers, or other third parties referred to in or accessible through Library content.

12.7 For business members only, you must notify us in writing of a claim within 12 months after you became aware, or ought reasonably to have become aware, of the circumstances giving rise to the claim. This clause does not limit a consumer’s statutory limitation rights.

13. Complaints, law and jurisdiction

13.1 If you have a complaint, email [email protected]. We aim to respond within five Business Days, and often sooner.

13.2 These Membership Terms are governed by the law of England and Wales.

13.3 The courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction over disputes or claims arising out of or in connection with these Membership Terms. If you are a consumer resident elsewhere in the United Kingdom, you may bring proceedings in the part of the United Kingdom in which you live and retain the benefit of mandatory protections available under the law of that jurisdiction.

14. General

14.1 You may not transfer, assign, or deal with your membership or rights under these Membership Terms, except for the one named-user change permitted by clause 7.2. We may transfer our rights and obligations to another organisation, provided that this does not adversely affect your rights under these Membership Terms.

14.2 If any provision of these Membership Terms is invalid, unlawful, or unenforceable, it will be modified to the minimum extent necessary to make it valid, lawful, and enforceable or, if that is not possible, treated as deleted. The remaining provisions will continue in force.

14.3 A person who is not a party to these Membership Terms has no right under the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999 to enforce them.

14.4 If we delay or do not exercise a right or remedy, that does not mean that we waive it.

14.5 These Membership Terms and the documents referred to in them form the entire agreement between you and us concerning your Library membership.