Acceptable use

Why this document is short

Most acceptable use policies are long because the service holds what its users upload and has to defend itself against all of it. This one holds nothing. Your photograph never leaves your device, there are no accounts, no comments, no uploads and no public profiles.

What is left is a short list of things that are either against the law, unfair to the people whose work this depends on, or unfair to us. It is written as rules rather than as legalese, because a rule nobody can read is a rule nobody follows.

These rules sit alongside the licence in the terms and the copyright section of the disclaimer. Where they overlap they say the same thing.

What you may not convert

Images you do not have the right to use. That includes photographs taken by somebody else, stock images you have not licensed, artwork found online, and pictures of people who have not agreed to it.

Copyrighted characters, logos, badges and club crests. Cartoon characters, video game sprites, brand marks and football crests are the most searched fuse bead subjects there are, and every one of them belongs to somebody. That is exactly why the gallery contains none of them, and why converting one here is your responsibility rather than ours.

Anything illegal where you are. Explicitly and without exception: no material depicting the sexual abuse of children, no terrorist content, nothing whose possession is itself a crime.

We should be clear about the limits of this rule. The conversion happens entirely inside your browser: we cannot see it, cannot log it and cannot block it. This is not a filter we operate. It is a statement of what your permission to use this tool does not extend to, and breaking it leaves you on your own, legally and otherwise.

What you may not do with the files

Do not redistribute the PDF or the PNG, and do not republish a pattern as an image. The full rules, including the considerable list of things you may do — up to and including selling what you make — are in the licence section of the terms.

Do not present the gallery, or a slice of it, as your own catalogue.

Do not share an unlock. Passing the token to other people so that they can download without paying is circumvention, and it is the only thing on this list that takes money directly out of the pocket of the person who made this.

What you may not do to the site

No scraping at a rate that degrades the site for other people. Reading pages is fine — that is what they are for, and machine readers are welcome — but a crawler hammering the gallery is taking something from visitors who are only trying to load a page.

No bulk copying of the gallery in order to rebuild it somewhere else. The patterns are drawn by hand, one at a time, and republishing them as a set takes the only thing here that cost real hours.

No going around the paywall: no forging or altering an unlock token, no reusing a token issued to somebody else, no automating the download of paid files. The unlock is signed and checked on the server, so it is not a wall you can lean on — but the actual reason not to go around it is that it costs a few euros and a person made this.

No attacks on the infrastructure: no denial of service, no hunting for vulnerabilities without asking first, and nothing injected into pages that other people load.

Security research is welcome if you tell us. Write to hallo@pixelperlen.com before testing anything intrusive and give us a reasonable time to fix what you find. Nobody who reports a problem in good faith will be threatened for it.

Reporting something

If you believe a pattern in the gallery infringes your copyright or your trademark, write to hallo@pixelperlen.com. Say which pattern it is, what right you hold, why you believe it is infringed, and how we can reply to you.

A pattern that is credibly challenged comes down while we look at it. If the claim is right it stays down. If it is wrong it goes back up, and you will be told why.

The same address takes anything else that is wrong on the site: a file that will not open, a colour code that no longer exists, a page that says something untrue. We would much rather hear it from you than not hear it at all.

What happens if you break these rules

Access can be blocked, by address or by pattern of behaviour. An unlock obtained without paying can be invalidated. Those two levers are the whole enforcement mechanism, and there is not a third.

There is no account to ban, no strike system and no appeals process, because there is nothing for an appeal to be made to. If you think a block was a mistake, write and say so, and a person will read it.

Serious cases — fraud, criminal material, an attack on the infrastructure — get reported to whoever should hear about them. That is not a threat, it is the obvious thing to do.

Contact

Questions, complaints, refund requests and takedown notices: hallo@pixelperlen.com. A person reads that address.

This policy was last updated on 9 August 2026.