Terms of service

1. Who may use the site

You must be at least 16 years old. By opening an account you confirm that you are, and that nothing in the law where you live prevents you from agreeing to these terms.

2. Your account

An account is one email address. There is no password: you sign in with a one-time code, a one-time link, or Google. That makes your email account the key to this one, so keep it secure — anyone who can read your inbox can open your file here.

You are responsible for what happens under your account. Tell us promptly if you think someone else has been using it. We may suspend or close an account that is being used to break these terms, and we will say why unless telling you would itself cause harm.

You can close your account at any time by writing to us. See the privacy policy for what happens to your information when you do.

3. Slivers

Slivers are the site’s internal unit for releasing editions. They are a limited licence to use a feature of the site, and it is worth being blunt about what that means:

• They are not money, not a currency, not a security, and not property. They have no cash value and cannot be exchanged for money by us or by anyone else.
• They exist only inside SYNward and cannot be transferred, sold, gifted or traded, whether for money or anything else.
• We may change what they cost and what they buy, and we may change how they are earned, at any time.
• Slivers earned rather than bought carry no entitlement to a refund, and unused slivers are not refundable when an account closes, except where the law says otherwise.
• If your account is closed for breaking these terms, any remaining balance is forfeit.

An edition you have released stays released for as long as you have an account and we have the right to offer it — see clause 5.

4. Payments

SYNward does not currently charge for anything. If and when it does, the price and what you get will be shown clearly before you pay, and payment will be handled by a third-party processor whose own terms will also apply to that transaction.

Digital items are delivered immediately, so unless the law where you live gives you a right to cancel, all sales are final. Where you do have a statutory right to cancel or refund, nothing here removes it. If we take a payment in error, tell us and we will refund it.

Prices exclude tax unless stated. You are responsible for any tax that applies to you.

5. The writing, and what you may do with it

Everything published on SYNward — the fiction, the artwork, the audio, the design and the software — belongs to Lupus Rex Enterprises LLC or to the people who licensed it to us. It is protected by copyright.

You get a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to read, listen to and enjoy what you have access to, for your own use. You may quote short passages with attribution, as copyright law allows.

You may not:

• copy, republish, sell or redistribute any of it, in whole or in substantial part;
• scrape it, or use automated means to download it in bulk, including for training machine-learning models;
• remove or work around any restriction on access, or share your access with people who do not have it;
• use it to make a derivative work you then distribute.

Access can end — a title may be withdrawn, a licence may lapse, or the site may close. Clause 8 covers that.

6. How you may behave

Do not use the site to:

• break the law, or help anyone else to;
• attack, probe or overload the site, or try to reach parts of it or accounts that are not yours;
• interfere with anyone else’s use of it, or impersonate us or another reader;
• open accounts automatically or in bulk, or work around limits on how often something can be requested.

If you send us anything — feedback, a bug report, an idea — you allow us to use it freely without owing you anything for it. Please do not send us anything you consider confidential.

7. The site is a work in progress

SYNward is published as it is written. We add, change and remove things, and we make no promise that any particular feature, edition or piece of writing will remain available, or that the site will be available without interruption. We may change these terms; if we do, we will update the effective date above, and where a change matters we will tell account holders by email before it takes effect. Continuing to use the site after that means you accept the new terms.

8. Ending it

You may stop using the site and close your account whenever you like. We may suspend or end your access if you break these terms, if we are required to by law, or if we stop operating the site. If we close the site altogether we will give account holders reasonable notice by email where we can.

Clauses 3, 5, 9, 10 and 11 survive the end of this agreement.

9. Disclaimers

The site is provided “as is” and “as available”. To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the site will be uninterrupted, secure or error-free, or that any content is accurate or complete.

The fiction on this site is fiction. Any resemblance between it and real people, places or events is coincidental, and nothing in it is a statement of fact.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties. Where that is true for you, this clause applies only as far as the law permits, and your statutory rights are untouched.

10. Liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, Lupus Rex Enterprises LLC is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data or lost goodwill, arising out of your use of the site.

Our total liability to you for any claim relating to the site is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, or fifty US dollars.

Nothing here limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.

You agree to indemnify us against claims, losses and reasonable legal costs arising from your breach of these terms or your misuse of the site.

11. Law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of New York, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules. Any dispute will be brought in the state or federal courts located there, and you and we consent to their jurisdiction.

If you are a consumer resident elsewhere, this does not deprive you of the protection of mandatory consumer law where you live, or of your right to bring proceedings in your local courts where that law gives you one.

If any part of these terms is held unenforceable, the rest continues to apply.

12. Contact

Lupus Rex Enterprises LLC, operator of SYNward — reach us at info@synward.net. These terms, together with the privacy policy, are the whole agreement between us about the site.