Licence agreement

Who you are dealing with

Plate Software is supplied by Paramount Plates Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales under company number 16366988, whose registered office is at 42 Moorside, Spennymoor, DL16 7EA, United Kingdom.

In this document, “we”, “us” and “our” mean Paramount Plates Ltd, and “you” means the business named at checkout.

You can reach us at hello@platesoftware.co.uk or on 0191 367 3451, Monday to Saturday, 8:00am to 4:30pm.

Licence granted

While your subscription is paid and current, we grant your business a non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to install and use Plate Software for your own business purposes, at the tier you have paid for.

The licence is granted to the business named at checkout. It is not a named-user seat: anyone authorised by that business may use an activated computer.

This licence is limited to the United Kingdom, which is where the plate standards the software implements apply.

Production Licences

A Production Licence permits one Windows computer to create final printable output. Your subscription tells you how many you hold.

That count is your obligation, not a technical control. The software does not count computers, does not report installations to us, and will not stop you activating more machines than you have paid for. We are telling you this rather than implying an enforcement that does not exist — but activating more computers than your Production Licences allow is a breach of this agreement.

If you need more, email us and we will add them. If you want to move production to a different computer, activate the new one and stop using the old one. There is no self-service transfer and no deactivation step, because nothing reports back to us either way.

Your licence key

Your key is a signed file of text that you paste into the application. It is verified on your own computer, offline. Nothing about it is sent anywhere, and the application does not contact us at any point.

A key runs to the end of the period you have paid for, plus seven days, and then stops working. Renewal issues a new one by email.

We cannot withdraw, disable or revoke a key once issued. Treat it like a password: anyone who has it can use it on any computer until it expires, and we cannot undo that. Sharing it outside your business is a breach of this agreement, and it is also a risk you carry rather than one we can reverse.

Working offline

Plate Software works entirely offline. There is no activation server, no periodic check, and no internet connection needed to design, print or export.

The only time you need the internet is to receive your key by email and to download the application.

What you may not do

You may not:

• share, resell, sublicense or transfer your licence key outside your business, unless you are a partner operating under a separate written agreement with us;
• use the software to produce plates you are not lawfully entitled to produce;
• remove or alter supplier markings, British Standard references or any other compliance marking the software applies, other than by configuring them for your own business;
• copy the software, other than a back-up copy or a copy the reverse engineering section below permits;
• work around, disable or defeat the licence check, other than while doing something the reverse engineering section or our security and vulnerability disclosure page permits.

Show plates

The Show Plate workspace exists for plates that are not for road use: display boards, model names, event and exhibition work. It lets you set spacing, fonts, colours and effects a road plate may not use. That freedom has one limit, and the limit is the registration mark.

A plate carrying no DVLA-issued registration mark is not a number plate in law, and you may make it however you like. A plate carrying a real registration mark must meet the display rules — whatever you call it, whoever you sell it to, and whatever they tell you it is for.

Selling a plate with a real registration mark mis-spaced, in a non-standard font or colour, or with a slogan on it is an offence, and it is the person who sells it who commits it. The software will let you do it. The law will not.

Reverse engineering

You may not decompile, disassemble or reverse engineer the software, except to the extent the law says you may. UK copyright law gives you rights we cannot remove: to decompile for interoperability with another program, to observe and study how it works, and to make a back-up. Nothing here restricts those.

Security research is welcome and is dealt with on our security and vulnerability disclosure page. What that page permits, this agreement permits: it forms part of this agreement and you can rely on it. If you are looking for faults so you can report them to us, you are not breaching this agreement.

Nothing anywhere in this agreement restricts the rights sections 50A to 50C of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 give a lawful user, and any part of it that tried to would be void.

Your content

Your projects, templates, artwork, fonts and business details are yours. They are stored on your own computer and we have no access to them.

Where the application lets you embed a font or artwork into a project, you confirm at the point of import that you have the right to use and embed it. That confirmation is recorded with the asset. Responsibility for those rights is yours, because we cannot know what you are licensed to use.

Intellectual property

We own the software and everything in it apart from your content. Nothing in this agreement transfers ownership of any part of it.

The software includes third-party open-source components, some of them under the GNU Lesser General Public Licence. Their licence texts are included with the application, you may obtain the source for the LGPL components from us on request, and nothing in this agreement overrides the rights those licences give you.

No warranty beyond the terms of sale

We provide the software with reasonable care and skill, and it is described accurately on this website. Beyond that, and beyond anything the law requires, the software is provided as it is.

We do not warrant that it is free of defects, that it will meet a requirement you have not told us about, or that output will be accepted by any particular authority or customer of yours.

The limits on what we are responsible for, and the cap on our liability, are set out in the terms of sale and apply to this agreement too.

Updates

Updates and new features released during your subscription are included at your tier. We may change how a feature works, or withdraw one, where there is a good reason — a standard changing, a security problem, or a supplier withdrawing something we depend on.

If a change materially reduces what you have paid for, tell us and we will put it right or refund you fairly.

If this agreement ends

You stop using the software for production. You keep your projects, templates, printer profiles and calibration, which are on your own computer, and the application still opens so you can reach them.

Any key already issued keeps working until it expires. We cannot withdraw it.

Partner-supplied licences

If your licence was supplied through a partner rather than bought from us directly, this agreement still governs your use of the software, and your commercial arrangement is with that partner.

Partner arrangements are made under a separate written agreement with us. If you are interested in one, the partner programme page explains the routes and nothing on it is an offer until it is in writing.