The research-only license that governs our historical databases — Historical ZIP Code and Historical ZIP+4 — in every edition.
Terms of Service for Research-Only Data Products
INTERNAL RESEARCH USE ONLY. LICENSED DATA MAY NOT BE REDISTRIBUTED, USED IN PRODUCTS OR SERVICES PROVIDED TO OTHERS, USED FOR PRODUCTION OR OPERATIONAL PURPOSES, OR USED WITH ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE OR MACHINE-LEARNING SYSTEMS.
This Data Internal Research License Agreement ("Agreement") is between Datasheer, L.L.C. d/b/a ZIP-Codes.com ("Licensor," "we," or "us") and the person or entity accepting it ("Licensee" or "you"). You accept this Agreement by signing it, affirmatively accepting it electronically, or providing written acceptance that references it. Anyone accepting for an organization represents that they have authority to bind that organization.
This Agreement governs the Historical ZIP Code Database, the Historical ZIP+4 Database, and any additional historical, archived, point-in-time, postal, geographic, demographic, address-related, or other data product that Licensor expressly identifies as subject to this Agreement ("Covered Products"). It applies to all editions, releases, individual periods, collections, and associated supplemental materials of a Covered Product supplied under this Agreement. It does not automatically govern every ZIP-Codes.com product or service.
"Licensed Data" means the Covered Product materials Licensor authorizes you to access under this Agreement, including supplied datasets, records, fields, files, tables, schemas, documentation, historical snapshots, corrections, enrichment, organization, arrangement, formatting, and derived content. Copies, extracts, and transformations of those materials remain subject to this Agreement. References to Licensed Data include any portion of it unless expressly stated otherwise.
"Access Authorization" means a written authorization issued by Licensor and accepted by you that references this Agreement and identifies the authorized Licensee, applicable Covered Products and data scope, and permitted license period. An Access Authorization may be a licensing letter or other written agreement, including an electronic written agreement.
Acceptance of this Agreement alone does not grant access to any data. Merely visiting a product page, viewing this Agreement, or possessing a data file does not create a license.
Licensed Data may contain information from the United States Postal Service ("USPS") and other sources, together with Licensor's selection, arrangement, correction, enrichment, historical compilation, organization, structure, schema, formatting, and derived content.
Licensor retains all rights it possesses in Licensed Data and its value-added content. USPS and other applicable sources retain whatever rights they hold in their respective content. This Agreement does not assert ownership over individual facts or information you obtain independently without using Licensed Data.
This Agreement grants a limited license, not ownership of Licensed Data or its intellectual-property rights. All rights not expressly granted are reserved. No additional rights arise through implication, payment, possession, download, course of dealing, or otherwise.
After your acceptance and issuance of an Access Authorization, and subject to your compliance with this Agreement and payment of any fees separately agreed in writing, Licensor grants you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable license, revocable as provided in Section 8, to access, store, and use the authorized Licensed Data during the applicable license period solely for Internal Research. No other right is granted.
"Internal Research" means research, analysis, evaluation, historical study, statistical analysis, and business intelligence conducted solely for your own internal informational purposes. It excludes every use prohibited by Section 4, including production or operational use, third-party services or deliverables, and AI or machine-learning use, even when conducted internally or described as research.
"Authorized Personnel" means you, if an individual, and your employees and individual contractors who need the data for Internal Research, are informed of these restrictions, and are bound by written confidentiality and use obligations at least as protective as this Agreement. Access is limited to Authorized Personnel. Contractors may act only on your behalf, not for their own purposes or other clients. You are responsible for their acts and omissions.
Affiliates, parents, subsidiaries, customers, partners, investors, and other entities receive no rights unless expressly identified as authorized Licensees in the Access Authorization.
You may use ordinary non-AI database queries, filtering, aggregation, and descriptive statistical analysis for Internal Research. You may make copies and temporary analytical artifacts reasonably necessary for that use and for permitted backup and security purposes. Such copies and artifacts remain subject to this Agreement. Tools with optional AI features may be used only without supplying Licensed Data to, or making it accessible to, those features.
You will not, directly or indirectly, perform, authorize, or facilitate any of the following:
Distribute, disclose, publish, sublicense, sell, rent, lease, transfer, or otherwise make Licensed Data available outside Authorized Personnel, except to infrastructure providers expressly permitted by Section 6 or as legally required under Section 6. This includes access by customers, affiliates not expressly licensed, partners, and other third parties.
Incorporate or use Licensed Data in any product, service, application, website, platform, database, report, deliverable, or other offering provided to or for a third party, whether paid or unpaid. This prohibition applies even if the underlying data is not visible to the recipient.
Use Licensed Data in production or operational systems or workflows, including address verification or validation, mailing, routing, logistics, fulfillment, targeting, customer enrichment, operational compliance, or automated decision-making. Internal deployment does not make these uses permissible. Isolated historical comparisons for Internal Research do not authorize updating, enriching, or operating production records or systems.
Use Licensed Data to create, enhance, supplement, enrich, correct, validate, benchmark, maintain, or improve a commercial or externally used dataset, database, lookup service, address file, geographic or postal product, or similar information product.
Use Licensed Data to develop, maintain, improve, or provide a dataset, product, or service that competes with, substitutes for, reproduces, approximates, or materially reduces the need for Licensor's data products or services.
Expose Licensed Data through an API, query interface, search interface, download, export, data feed, bulk-retrieval mechanism, or other system accessible by anyone other than Authorized Personnel and infrastructure providers acting solely as permitted by Section 6.
Use Licensed Data, or any extract, transformation, representation, derivative, encoding, or information derived from it, to train, pre-train, fine-tune, retrain, post-train, evaluate, benchmark, test, validate, ground, augment, optimize, develop, improve, operate, or otherwise support any AI or machine-learning model or system. This includes large language models, foundation models, neural networks, embedding models, generative models, AI or machine-learning predictive and recommendation models, and AI agents. The prohibition applies to internal, research-only, local, self-hosted, private, and third-party systems alike.
Use Licensed Data for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), embedding generation, AI-accessible vector databases, semantic retrieval for AI systems, prompts, prompt libraries, model context, context windows, inference-time retrieval, AI agents, or AI-powered search. You may not supply Licensed Data to an AI or machine-learning system even if you intend to retain only the output.
Upload, transmit, paste, import, synchronize, or otherwise provide Licensed Data to any third-party AI, machine-learning, generative-AI, embedding, model-training, model-hosting, AI-agent, AI-coding, or AI-analysis service. This applies regardless of training opt-outs, non-retention commitments, enterprise plans, private processing, or dedicated or isolated models.
Use Licensed Data to generate synthetic datasets, model weights, embeddings, or AI/ML feature stores, or to create reconstructed datasets, statistical representations, or other materials intended or reasonably capable of reproducing, reconstructing, approximating, or materially substituting for Licensed Data. Permitted temporary analytical artifacts under Sections 3 and 5 do not authorize any prohibited AI/ML use or substitute dataset.
Circumvent Licensor's technical, contractual, access-control, security, monitoring, download, or usage restrictions, or remove, obscure, or alter copyright, attribution, proprietary, or licensing notices supplied with Licensed Data.
You may create analyses, statistics, charts, summaries, and conclusions from permitted Internal Research ("Research Results"). Research Results may be used only internally and may not be published, provided to third parties, or used in third-party deliverables except under an express signed modification under Section 12 or a legally required disclosure under Section 6.
Research Results must not disclose individual Licensed Data records, reproduce a material portion of Licensed Data, permit reconstruction or extraction of a material portion, function as a substitute for Licensed Data, or constitute a commercial or externally distributed dataset.
Temporary derived datasets and analytical artifacts remain Licensed Data for purposes of use restrictions, confidentiality, and deletion. Aggregation, anonymization, de-identification, reformatting, or combining Licensed Data with other information does not remove the applicable restrictions. The AI/ML prohibitions also apply to Research Results and other information derived from Licensed Data.
You will treat Licensed Data as Licensor's confidential and proprietary information whether or not marked, use reasonable administrative, physical, and technical safeguards, and restrict access to Authorized Personnel with a legitimate need to know. Use at least the care you use for your own confidential information of similar importance. Public availability of individual underlying facts does not authorize disclosure of the supplied compilation or extracts from it.
You may use ordinary hosting, storage, backup, and security providers only when they act solely as infrastructure providers for you, are bound by written confidentiality and use restrictions, have no independent right to use Licensed Data, and do not expose Licensed Data to AI or machine-learning functionality. These permissions do not authorize outsourced analytics or research services beyond Authorized Personnel under Section 3. You remain responsible for provider compliance.
Promptly notify Licensor after discovering actual or reasonably suspected unauthorized access, loss, disclosure, redistribution, AI/ML use, or other material misuse. Reasonably cooperate in investigation, containment, and mitigation.
If disclosure is required by law or binding legal process, disclose only what is legally required and, to the extent legally permitted, give Licensor advance notice and reasonable assistance seeking confidential treatment. This exception does not authorize voluntary publication or sharing.
No provision transfers ownership of third-party content or grants rights beyond those Licensor may lawfully license. Preserve all applicable copyright, trademark, attribution, proprietary, and other notices supplied with Licensed Data.
USPS-specific acknowledgments apply only to Licensed Data containing USPS-sourced content. For such content, Licensor is a non-exclusive USPS licensee; any price charged by Licensor is not established, controlled, or approved by USPS; and use of USPS names or marks does not imply USPS or United States Government endorsement. No independent trademark license is granted.
Any additional mandatory source-specific terms applicable to a Covered Product must be identified in its Access Authorization. Those terms cannot be used to expand the Internal Research license or authorize a use prohibited by this Agreement.
The permitted license period for each Covered Product must be specified in its Access Authorization. This Agreement does not independently establish a twelve-month term, a perpetual license, or a subscription. The period during which files are available for download is distinct from the period during which their use is licensed.
For a material breach other than those identified in the next sentence, Licensor may terminate if you fail to cure within thirty (30) days after written notice describing the breach. A violation involving redistribution, external use, production or operational use, commercial exploitation, competing or substitute products, AI/ML use, or unauthorized disclosure is not subject to a cure period and permits immediate termination upon written notice. Licensor may suspend access while investigating reasonably suspected material misuse. You may terminate by written notice and compliance with the deletion obligations below.
Upon expiration or termination, all affected license rights end and you must immediately stop using the affected Licensed Data. Within ten (10) business days, delete or destroy copies, extracts, and temporary derived artifacts under your control, including copies held by Authorized Personnel and providers. On request, provide written certification signed by an authorized representative.
Inaccessible copies in ordinary automated backups may remain until overwritten under normal retention procedures, but may not be accessed or used. If incidentally restored during recovery, they must promptly be deleted again and may not be returned to active use. Any copy legally required to be retained must remain restricted, confidential, and unused except for the required legal purpose, and must be deleted when that requirement ends.
You may retain compliant Research Results that do not contain Licensed Data or permit its reconstruction or substitution. Internal-use-only, confidentiality, and AI/ML restrictions applicable to retained results survive.
On reasonable written request, provide a compliance certification signed by an authorized representative, including confirmation of relevant access, storage, redistribution, operational use, and AI/ML use.
No more than once in twelve months, Licensor may audit compliance on thirty (30) days' written notice during normal business hours. You will reasonably cooperate and provide relevant records sufficient to verify compliance. Audits must reasonably minimize disruption and protect unrelated confidential information; any independent auditor must be subject to confidentiality obligations.
The annual limit and notice period do not apply where Licensor has a reasonable basis to believe Licensed Data has been compromised, redistributed, commercially exploited, used operationally, or used with AI or machine learning. In that case, reasonably cooperate in a prompt investigation. If an audit establishes a material violation, reimburse Licensor's reasonable third-party audit costs; otherwise Licensor bears its own audit costs.
TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, LICENSED DATA IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE." EXCEPT AS EXPRESSLY PROVIDED IN THIS AGREEMENT, LICENSOR DISCLAIMS ALL EXPRESS, IMPLIED, AND STATUTORY WARRANTIES, INCLUDING MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, ACCURACY, COMPLETENESS, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT.
Licensor does not warrant that Licensed Data is complete, error-free, suitable for your requirements, or a perfect representation of every historical condition or record. Unless expressly agreed in the Access Authorization, Licensor has no obligation to update, correct, supplement, or maintain it after delivery.
Licensor will defend and indemnify you against third-party claims alleging that Licensed Data, as provided by Licensor and used strictly in accordance with this Agreement, infringes the claimant's copyright or trade-secret rights. You must promptly notify Licensor, give it control of the defense and settlement, and reasonably cooperate.
This obligation excludes claims resulting from your modification, combination, or unauthorized use of Licensed Data. Licensor's total liability under this subsection will not exceed fees, if any, you paid under this Agreement during the twelve (12) months preceding the claim.
You will indemnify, defend, and hold harmless Licensor and its affiliates, and, only to the extent required by source-specific terms identified in your Access Authorization, applicable source providers, from claims, losses, liabilities, damages, costs, and reasonable attorneys' fees arising from your breach, unauthorized use or disclosure, production or operational use, AI/ML use, or violation of applicable law.
TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, NEITHER PARTY WILL BE LIABLE FOR INDIRECT, SPECIAL, PUNITIVE, INCIDENTAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES, OR LOSS OF USE, DATA, PROFITS, REVENUE, GOODWILL, OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION.
Except as stated below, each party's total aggregate liability arising from this Agreement will not exceed fees, if any, paid or payable by you under this Agreement during the twelve (12) months preceding the claim.
Neither of these limitations limits your liability for breach of Sections 3, 4, 5, or 6; unauthorized redistribution or disclosure; unauthorized production or commercial use; AI/ML use; your indemnification obligations; fraud; gross negligence; or willful misconduct.
Unauthorized disclosure, redistribution, commercial exploitation, or AI/ML use may cause harm for which monetary damages are inadequate. Licensor may seek injunctive or other equitable relief in addition to available legal remedies. This provision does not require a court to grant any particular remedy.
You may not assign this Agreement or your rights, including through merger, acquisition, change of control, sale of substantially all assets, or operation of law, without Licensor's prior written consent. Licensor may assign it in connection with a merger, acquisition, reorganization, or sale of substantially all its business or assets.
New York law governs, without regard to conflicts-of-law principles. The parties consent to exclusive jurisdiction and venue in the state courts located in Dutchess County, New York, and the federal courts having jurisdiction over that county.
This Agreement and the applicable Access Authorization constitute the entire agreement concerning Licensed Data provided under them. For that Licensed Data, this Agreement controls over inconsistent general website or product terms, including terms permitting broader internal use, redistribution, or AI/ML use. Unrelated products remain subject to their own applicable agreements.
An Access Authorization or other writing may modify a restriction only if it expressly identifies the provision and modification and is signed by authorized representatives of both parties. An ordinary product description, communication, payment, or possession of data does not expand your rights. Your procurement or other unilateral terms have no effect unless expressly accepted in such a signed writing.
Licensor may publish revised terms for future authorizations. The version accepted for an Access Authorization governs that authorization unless the parties agree otherwise in writing. Merely posting revised terms or designating another Covered Product does not retroactively amend an existing license or automatically replace a previously executed separate agreement.
Sections 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12 survive expiration or termination to the extent necessary to give them effect. Survival does not authorize continued use of Licensed Data.
Notices to Licensor must be directed to Datasheer, L.L.C., 121 Blue Hill Road, Hopewell Junction, NY 12533, or info@zip-codes.com. Notices to you may be sent to the contact address identified in your Access Authorization or otherwise supplied by you for licensing communications.
An unenforceable provision will be enforced to the maximum extent permitted by law, and the remaining provisions remain effective. Failure or delay in enforcement is not a waiver; a waiver must be in writing.
Neither party is liable for delay or failure caused by circumstances beyond its reasonable control, including changes to source products, licensing terms, availability, or release schedules. This provision does not excuse agreed payment obligations or permit unauthorized use of Licensed Data.