Terms of use

OwnedBy is operated by Touch Grass AB, registered as 559484-7435 in Sweden. Using the site means these terms apply between you and Touch Grass AB. “We”, “us” and “our” below mean that company; “you” means whoever is using the site.

Registered office

Idunsgatan 46
214 46 Malmö
Sweden

Post

OwnedBy — Touch Grass AB
3950 Lawrence Avenue East
Toronto, Ontario M1G 1R8
Canada

These terms apply from the moment you use the site. There is nothing to sign and no box to tick, because there is nothing to sign up for: reading a record is the whole transaction. If you do not accept them, the remedy is to stop using the site, and nothing is left behind on our side when you do.

OwnedBy is a general-audience shopping tool and is not directed at children. There is no account and therefore no age gate; if you are below the age of majority where you live, use it with the involvement of a parent or guardian.

The site is free to use. We may one day charge for something — programmatic access is the obvious candidate — and if we do, the paid thing will arrive with its own terms rather than quietly under these.

A record

One brand or company page on this site: the ownership chain we publish for it, the confidence word on it, the sources cited beneath it, and the prose around them.

A confidence word

The label a record carries — Confirmed, Likely, Tracing or Unconfirmed. It describes how well the sources support the conclusion, and nothing else.

A source

A public document a record rests on: a corporate registry entry, a regulatory filing, a legal-entity identifier register, a company’s own published statement, or reporting of record.

A lookup

One search you run — the brand name you type, or the identity read from a photograph you take — and the research it starts.

A report

A finished record emailed to you, once, because you asked for it while the research was still running.

The site

Everything served at ownedby.ca, including the records, the directories, the explanatory pages and this one.

Each record is a reading of public sources — corporate registries, regulatory filings, legal-entity identifiers, and companies’ own published documents — assembled to show who ultimately benefits from a brand. Every record lists the sources behind it and carries a confidence word describing how well its conclusion is supported.

Records can be incomplete, out of date, or wrong. Ownership changes, disclosure varies by country and by company type, and some structures are not published at all. A record is our best supported reading at the time it was generated, not a certification of fact, and the confidence word on it is the honest ceiling of what it holds.

Research runs when somebody asks for it, and a record improves when better sources are found. A record you read today may say something different next month, either because the ownership changed or because the evidence did. Both are normal, and neither is a correction being hidden: records are append-only, so a change is visible as a change.

Confirmed, Likely, Tracing and Unconfirmed are statements about evidence, not guarantees about the world. Confirmed means the chain is closed on sources we treat as authoritative. Likely means the reading is well supported but rests on something short of that. Tracing means the research is still running. Unconfirmed means we could not close the chain, which is very often a fact about what a company publishes rather than a failure of the search.

A Confirmed record is not warranted to be correct, and an Unconfirmed one is not an allegation that something is hidden. Reading more into a confidence word than the evidence behind it is the specific misreading this product is built to prevent, and it is why the sources sit on the record itself.

Nothing here is financial, investment, legal, tax or professional advice, and nothing here is a recommendation to buy, avoid, boycott or invest in anything. OwnedBy reports who benefits; what that should mean to you is yours to decide.

Appearing in the Canadian brands directory, or beside a search, is not an endorsement. A category match never earns an ownership badge.

Nothing published here is an allegation of wrongdoing by any company or person named in a record. Ownership is a structural fact. Reporting where profit lands says nothing about whether anybody involved has behaved lawfully or well.

If you are making a commercial, legal or regulatory decision, verify the underlying sources yourself. They are linked on every record for exactly that reason.

There are none. You cannot register, there is nothing to sign in to, and no password of yours exists to be lost. The one identifier the site will ever ask for is an email address, and only if you ask us to send you a report.

The operator consoles behind the site are a separate, internal surface. They are not a consumer feature, they are not reachable from anything here, and they are excluded from search indexing.

You may read, search, link to and quote the records, including in reporting, research and teaching. Attribution to OwnedBy is appreciated and a link is better than a screenshot, because a link stays correct when the record is revised.

That permission is a licence, not a transfer: it is personal to you, non-exclusive, revocable, and limited to ordinary reading, citation and commentary. It does not extend to rebuilding the compilation somewhere else.

Please do not scrape the site in bulk, run automated extraction against it, or republish the records as a dataset of your own. Not because the underlying facts are ours — they are public, and they belong to everyone — but because the compilation, the verification and the confidence grading are the work, and a copy stripped of the sources and the confidence words is the confidently-wrong artifact this product exists to prevent. A public API is where this is going; if you need programmatic access, that is the conversation to have.

• Extract the records in bulk, by crawler, script or manual repetition, or build a competing database or index out of them.
• Train a machine-learning model on the compilation, or resell, sublicense or syndicate the records as a dataset or a feed.
• Strip a record of its sources or its confidence word when you reproduce it, or present a conclusion of ours as more certain than the word on it says.
• Present a record as an endorsement, a certification, a rating, or a statement of wrongdoing about anyone named in it.
• Attempt to disrupt the service, circumvent its rate limits, probe its endpoints or interfere with anyone else’s use of it.
• Use the site to harass, threaten or defame anyone named in a record, or to build a profile of a natural person.
• Submit anything unlawful, or anything you have no right to send us, through the lookup, feedback or record-submission routes.
• Misrepresent yourself as connected with OwnedBy, or use its name or marks in a way that suggests we endorse you.

The rate limits exist because research costs money and one heavy source of traffic can exhaust a budget everybody shares. Working around them takes the answer away from the person standing in a shop, which is who this is for.

The facts are nobody’s. That a company owns another company is a fact about the world, it usually comes from a public register, and we claim no ownership of it.

What we do own is everything built around those facts: the compilation and its arrangement, the confidence grading, the ownership chains as assembled, the written explanations, the design, the code, and the OwnedBy name and marks. Those belong to Touch Grass AB or are used by it with permission, and are protected by copyright and, where it applies, database right. Nothing on this page transfers any of it to you.

Company and brand names, logos and trade marks belong to the companies that own them. They appear here to identify the subject of a record — the only way to report on who owns a brand is to name the brand — and their appearance implies no association with or approval by their owners.

Sources are quoted narrowly and cited, and are linked so a reader goes to the original. If you hold rights in something quoted on a record and believe the use goes beyond what citation allows, write to us and say which record and which passage.

A short list, and it is the whole list: the brand names you look up, a photograph of a product label if you use the camera, the thumbs-up or thumbs-down you leave on a record, a “this looks wrong” report filed against a record, and a brand you submit through the add or correct page. Every one of them is a signal about a company rather than about you. None of them opens a message box for you to write into, so nothing but a brand name can reach us this way, and the privacy page describes exactly what is kept, for how long, and what happens to the photograph.

By sending any of them you give us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free permission to use them to run and improve the service — to research the brand, to see which records need work, and to publish the resulting record. You keep whatever rights you had; we are not buying anything from you, and nothing you send is published with your name on it, because we never learn your name.

One consequence of that permission is worth stating rather than leaving in the small print: a brand name you search becomes part of the index that suggests brands to everyone else, so a company nobody had looked up before can appear as a suggestion to the next person after you look it up. That is a company name and never anything about you, and it is the mechanism by which this product gets better by being used.

Please do not send confidential information, anything you are under a duty not to disclose, or personal information about another person. These routes are public research inputs, not a confidential channel, and we cannot treat them as one.

If you ask us to email you a report, we send it, and asking also subscribes you to occasional OwnedBy news. That subscription rests on your own request for a report, which Canadian anti-spam law treats as an inquiry, and it lasts six months from the last time you asked. Every message identifies the sender, carries our mailing address, and carries a one-click unsubscribe link.

Unsubscribing stops the news and nothing else. A report you explicitly asked for is still sent, because you asked for it — unsubscribing is about what we send unprompted, not about the thing you requested. The privacy page sets out what is stored, on what basis, for how long, and how to have it erased.

There is a small daily cap on how many reports one address can request, for the same reason the site has rate limits.

If you are named in a record, or you represent a company that is, and you believe the record is wrong or incomplete, we want to hear it. Write to us at the postal address in these terms and say which record you mean, what is wrong with it, what the correct position is, and which public source shows it. That last part is what makes a correction actionable rather than a request.

The add or correct page takes a brand name and starts fresh research on it. It is the fastest way to get a stale record looked at again, and it is the right route when the fix is “this is out of date”. It is a single field and it cannot carry an explanation, so anything that needs one goes by post.

Corrections are checked against sources rather than applied on request, because a record that changed whenever a named party asked would be worth nothing to the person reading it. Records are append-only: a correction is visible as a change rather than as a quiet edit, and we keep both when a fact was true and when we learned it.

Where a record concerns a natural person rather than a company, and you want it reviewed under applicable data-protection law, the same route reaches us and the privacy page describes what is held, what your rights are, and how to exercise them.

The service is provided as it is, without a promise of availability. Features may change, records may be revised or withdrawn, and the whole service may be suspended or discontinued. We do not guarantee that any particular record will remain available at a particular address, although record addresses are meant to be durable and are treated as such.

Research depends on third-party sources and services that we do not control. When one of them is unavailable, incomplete or wrong, the record above it shows that as a lower confidence word rather than as a guess.

The site and everything on it are provided “as is” and “as available”. To the fullest extent the law allows, we give no warranties of any kind, whether express, implied or statutory, and specifically we do not warrant that a record is accurate, complete, current or fit for any particular purpose, that the service will be uninterrupted or error-free, or that any defect will be corrected.

That is not lawyer’s throat-clearing. It is the same sentence the rest of the product says in plainer words: this is a research aid built on public records, it is wrong sometimes, and the sources are on every record so you can check it yourself.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties. Where that is so, this section applies only as far as the law permits and your non-excludable rights are untouched.

To the fullest extent the law allows, Touch Grass AB is not liable for loss arising from reliance on a record, from the service being unavailable, or from any decision taken on the basis of what is published here. Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited, including liability for fraud, for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or any statutory consumer right you have that cannot be excluded.

In particular, and again only as far as the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for lost profit, revenue, goodwill or anticipated savings, or for loss arising from a third-party source being wrong or unavailable.

The service is free, so there are no fees to refund and no sum paid against which a cap could be measured. Where the law nonetheless requires a stated limit, our total liability to you for all claims arising out of or in connection with the site is limited to one hundred euro (€100).

If somebody brings a claim against us because of the way you used the site — because you scraped it, republished the records as your own, used a record to harass someone, or otherwise broke the section above about what you may not do — you agree to cover the reasonable costs and damages that follow, provided we tell you promptly and let you take part in the defence.

This applies only to your own acts, only where they were deliberate or negligent, and never to ordinary reading, citing or discussing a record, which is what the site is for. It does not apply to a consumer to any greater extent than the law allows.

You can stop at any time by closing the tab. There is no account to delete; clearing your browser data removes everything the site kept on your device. If you are subscribed to the news, the unsubscribe link in any message ends that, and the privacy page explains how to have the address erased outright.

We may block or limit access — by rate limit, by technical measure, or outright — where use breaches these terms, threatens the service, or exhausts the shared research budget. Where the block is not automatic and it is practical to say so, we will say why.

The sections on intellectual property, on what you send us, on no warranty, on liability, on indemnity and on governing law survive the end of your use of the site.

These terms are governed by the law of Sweden, and the courts of Sweden have jurisdiction over any dispute arising from them. If you are a consumer, this does not deprive you of the protection of mandatory rules of law in the country where you live, and it does not take away your right to bring proceedings in your own local courts where the law gives you one.

For consumers in Canada, and in Ontario in particular, nothing in these terms limits, waives or contracts out of any right, remedy or protection given to you by consumer-protection legislation that cannot lawfully be excluded, including your right to bring a claim in a Canadian court where that legislation entitles you to. Where any clause here conflicts with such a right, the right prevails and the clause applies only to the extent it lawfully can.

For consumers in the European Union, the same principle applies to the mandatory consumer rules of your country of residence, and the European Commission’s online dispute resolution platform is available to you as well as the courts.

If these terms change, the version number and the date at the top change with them. Continuing to use the site after a change means the revised terms apply. For a change that materially reduces your rights, we will make it visible on the site rather than relying on you to re-read this page.

Old versions are not published as a set today. If you need the wording that applied on a particular date, ask and we will send it.

• If any part of these terms is found unenforceable, that part is severed and the rest continues to apply.
• Not enforcing something once does not waive it. A concession is a concession, not an amendment.
• These terms, together with the privacy page they refer to, are the whole agreement between you and us about the site, and they replace anything said earlier about it.
• We may transfer our rights and obligations under these terms to another company — on a sale of the business, for instance — provided your rights are not reduced by the transfer. You may not transfer yours.
• Nothing in these terms gives a third party a right to enforce any of it.
• These terms are published in English. A translation, if one is offered, is for convenience, and the English text governs.

Questions about anything written here, a record you think is wrong, or a request about your own data all reach us at the same postal address. It is a real address and it is the address that appears in the footer of every email we send.

OwnedBy — Touch Grass AB
3950 Lawrence Avenue East
Toronto, Ontario M1G 1R8
Canada

To have a brand researched or a stale record refreshed, the add or correct page is faster than the post. To stop the news, the unsubscribe link in any message we send is one click and needs no explanation.