Terms of Use Agreement
USE OF THIS Web site SIGNIFIES YOUR ACCEPTANCE OF WRITERDUET INC.'S TERMS OF SERVICE AGREEMENT, PRIVACY POLICY AND COMMUNITY GUIDELINES.
IF YOU HAVE QUESTIONS ABOUT ANY OF THESE AGREEMENTS, YOU CAN CONTACT US AT HELP@WRITERDUET.COM.
1. YOUR ACCEPTANCE OF THIS AGREEMENT
This Terms of Use Agreement is an electronic contract between you and WRITERDUET INC.. All users of WRITERDUET INC. Web sites agree to be legally bound by this Agreement, regardless of whether they register with WRITERDUET INC.. Nothing in this Agreement shall be deemed to give benefits or rights to any third party.
Using or visiting the WRITERDUET INC. Web sites or using any WRITERDUET INC. product or service (collectively, our "Service"), signifies your agreement to abide by: (1) the terms and conditions listed here (our "Terms of Use" or “this Agreement”); (2) the terms of WRITERDUET INC.'s Privacy Policy found at https://writerduet.com/privacy.html; and (3) WRITERDUET INC.'s Community Guidelines found at found at https://writerduet.com/community.html. Our Privacy Policy and Community Guidelines are incorporated by reference into these Terms of Use. You should not use our Service if you don't agree to any part of our Terms of Use, Privacy Policy, or Community Guidelines.
We may alter the terms of this Agreement at any time by posting changes to our Terms of Use, Privacy Policy, or Community Guidelines on the WRITERDUET INC. Web sites. Although we may try to notify you when we alter the terms of this Agreement, you should periodically review the most up-to-date versions. Your use of our Service or Web site after we post any changes signifies your acceptance of all revisions to date, regardless of whether you receive actual notice of those changes.
You must be at least 13 years of age to use this web site. If you are under the age of 13 you are not permitted to use this web site. If you are over the age of 13 but under the age of 18, use of this web site requires you to have the consent of your parent or guardian.
2. HOW TO WITHDRAW YOUR CONSENT
You have the right to withdraw your consent to this Agreement and revoke your WRITERDUET INC. registration at any time by deleting your account from your User Account page on our Web site. Upon receipt of your notice, we will permanently delete your account and remove the information in your user profile from all publicly accessible WRITERDUET INC. web pages. This means that you will no longer be able to use the Service unless you re-register. However, relevant provisions of this Agreement that by their nature may survive its termination will remain in effect after you close your account. Furthermore, some data, as described in Section 7 below, may be retained and used by WRITERDUET INC. even after you terminate your registered account.
3. HOW YOU SHOULD PROTECT YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION
When you register with WRITERDUET INC. as a user, you may be asked to provide us with personal or personally identifying information, such as your name, address, email address, physical address, and credit-card information. The ways we use and protect the confidentiality of this data are subject to the terms of our Privacy Policy, which you should thoroughly review before revealing posting any such information to WRITERDUET INC.
You will be asked to select a password when you register. You are responsible for all activities performed by any person that occur under your account and are solely responsible for protecting the confidentiality of your password. Exercise caution when accessing your account from a public or shared computer and be sure that no one can view your password and other personal information displayed on your screen. If you share your computer, disable “Remember Me,” Autocomplete, and other features that may let other parties learn your confidential information. You should also be sure to log out of your WRITERDUET INC. account at the end of each session. WRITERDUET INC. is not liable for loss or damages arising from your failure to take any of these precautions.
You promise to notify WRITERDUET INC. of any unauthorized use of your account or of any other breach of security as soon as you learn of it.
4. NON-REFUNDABLE PAID SERVICES
Some features of our Web site and Service are available only to users who have registered and opened an account. You will be asked to set up a registered account and pay any associated fees before you can use related WRITERDUET INC. products and services. All payments made to WRITERDUET INC. are non-refundable, unless otherwise specified in writing.
For some customers, primarily those located in Europe, our order process is conducted by our online reseller Paddle.com. Paddle.com is the Merchant of Record for some of our orders. Paddle provides all customer service inquiries and handles returns for those orders, which would be placed on the Paddle.co webs site.
5. SUBMITTING A SCRIPT
Registered members of WRITERDUET INC. who have written an original script (“Script Authors” or “Authors”) may upload their scripts for analysis, grammar correction, conversion to an audio file (the “Readthrough Recording”), and other services performed by proprietary software owned by WRITERDUET INC. or by our Partners. Our Web site lists any file-format or other types of compatibility requirements necessary to use any of our products or services.
When you submit a script to WRITERDUET INC., you promise that:
You retain all your prior ownership rights in your submitted scripts. However, by submitting your script to WRITERDUET INC., you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to use, copy, reformat, translate, excerpt, distribute/publicly display (only as you permit, to guests, actors, people you submit your script to, and anyone else you explicitly choose) and perform your script in any media format and through any media channel to provide to you any current or future WRITERDUET INC. service or product. We will not act without your authorization, for example, to make your submitted script publicly viewable on our Web site, to submit it to a studio, or to reveal it to other registered users. You also agree that your submitted scripts may be reviewed and processed by our and our Partners' automated systems and human reviewers, when doing so is necessary to provide our services or products to you.
You agree that you will not suggest, directly or indirectly, that WRITERDUET INC. endorses the content of any script that you submit, including opinions, recommendations, or advice expressed by that script.
You grant all other WRITERDUET INC. users a non-exclusive license to access your script through the authorized methods provided by our Service for personal, non-commercial consumption, and to use, reproduce, distribute, display and perform that script only as permitted by our Service and under the terms of this Agreement.
WRITERDUET INC. makes no other guarantees or warranties regarding use of our Web site or our Service and all of our products and services are provided “as-is.” While we will take all reasonable steps to protect your submitted script from unauthorized general publication or disclosure, we do not unequivocally guarantee that your submission will remain confidential or that its publication will be limited to you and your designated viewers.
6. INDEMNIFICATION AND WARRANTIES
You agree to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless WRITERDUET INC. and its subsidiaries, affiliates, officers, directors, owners, agents, information providers, licensors and licensees, advertisers, third-party content-providers and licensors, and other partners and employees, (collectively, the "Indemnified Parties") from any loss, liability, claim, or demand made by a third party and arising: 1) out of your use of the Service in violation of this Agreement; 2) from a breach of this Agreement; or 3) from any other breach of your representations and warranties listed above. This indemnification extends to the award of attorneys' fees in any legal dispute, except where prohibited by law.
You will cooperate with us as fully as reasonably required in the defense against such claims. WRITERDUET INC. reserves the right, at its own expense, to assume the exclusive defense and control of any matter subject to indemnification by you.
WRITERDUET INC.'s software, services, and products are provided as-is and we will take every reasonable step to ensure that they are reliable and secure. You agree that WRITERDUET INC. and the Indemnified Parties will not be liable to you or to any third party for losses caused by your use or reliance on information obtained through or content distributed by WRITERDUET INC.
WRITERDUET INC. and the Indemnified Parties will not be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, special, punitive, or consequential damages or injury: 1) arising from the use of or inability to use WRITERDUET INC.'s Web sites, products, or services; 2) arising from the breach of any warranty; or 3) caused by an error, omission, interruption, deletion, defect, delay in operation or transmission, computer virus, communication line failure, failure to perform, or theft, destruction, hacking, cracking, or other unauthorized access to or alteration of the WRITERDUET INC. Web sites or our Service, software, or other products. This holds true regardless of whether such claims are based on legal theories of contract, tort, negligence, strict liability, or any other cause of action, and regardless of whether hawse have actual knowledge of the possibility of such damages. If your jurisdiction restricts the right to limit liability in this way, this Section may not apply to you. But even in that case, our liability will not exceed the sum of $100US.
7. READTHROUGH RECORDINGS
If you are a Script Author, you agree that Readthrough Recordings of your submitted scripts, regardless of whether they contain the recorded voices of live actors, synthesized or sampled “voice font” recordings created by computer programs or other types of automated processes, or by some variation or combination of the two, are provided to you “as is” and solely for analytical purposes within the scope of our Service. As one component of an informational service, these Recordings are provided to help you evaluate and improve your submitted script, and are not themselves a deliverable product that may be owned by Script Authors or transferred by Authors to other parties.
As a Script Author, you may download Readthrough Recordings of your own submitted script only through a Download button or similar mechanism on our Web site that is intended for that purpose and may use downloaded Readthrough Recordings only for your personal, non-commercial use and consumption. To be clear, you may access, play, and share links to Readthrough Recordings during the course of your personal use only to the extent intended and allowed by the functionality of our Service and as permitted by this Agreement. You may not otherwise modify, copy, remove from our Web site, distribute (such as by webcasting), sell, license, or assign rights to these recordings in any manner and for any other use, commercial or non-commercial, without our prior written consent.
You agree that voice fonts and recordings of voice fonts embedded in a Readthrough Recording are the sole intellectual property of one or more of our text-to-speech service-provider Partners; and that nothing in this Agreement transfers to you any rights of ownership, reproduction, or use of such intellectual property rights or constitutes a license to use those voice fonts or Readthrough Recordings that contain recordings of those fonts in ways other than those expressly allowed by this Agreement.
Our text-to-speech service-provider Partners currently include, but are not limited to, Cepstral LLC (“VoiceForge”) of Pittsburgh, PA; iSpeech, Inc. of Newark, NJ; Wizzard Software Corporation of Pittsburg, PA; and AT&T of Dallas, TX. These Partners retain all rights to edit, copy, reproduce, distribute, transmit, broadcast, display, sell, license, or otherwise exploit the voice fonts that they own and those components of any content, including Readthrough Recordings, that contains their voice fonts, whether created for either commercial or non-commercial purposes, subject to the rights of the script writers. Neither we nor our Partners, however, claim any copyright, trademark, trade secret rights in a submitted script other than what is necessary to deliver our Service to you and to maintain proper functioning and operation of our Web site and Service.
As a Script Author, you agree to grant WRITERDUET INC. and our Partners the right to edit, copy, reproduce, distribute, transmit, broadcast, display, or otherwise use any Readthrough Recording made from your submitted script only when necessary to provide you the service, and only if doing so does not violate any intellectual property right that you hold in your script. If we do not use a submitted Readthrough Recording on our Web site promptly after upload, that does not mean that we waive the right to use it without notice at a later time.
Script Authors may choose to have the voices of one or more live actors (“Voice Actors”) incorporated into a Readthrough Recording of a script you submit. WRITERDUET INC. may also give Script Authors the ability to choose or confirm the choice of specific Voice Actors to read parts of a submitted script. As an Author, you agree to grant Voice Actors a non-exclusive license to view and read the contents of your uploaded script for the purpose of creating a Readthrough Recording, if done with your consent and with the permission of WRITERDUET INC. and using the resources of our Web site and Service . Voice Actors have no other rights in your submitted script or the performance thereof.
If you are a Script Author, you agree that WRITERDUET INC. and our Partners are not responsible for any real or perceived financial losses, loss of opportunity, or other types of losses due to the quality of our Service, Web site, or products, including the quality of any Readthrough Recording or the results of our script analysis, rating, and correction tools.
You also agree that WRITERDUET INC. and our Partners are not responsible for any real or perceived financial losses, loss of opportunity, or other types of losses caused by your or anyone else's reliance on information, including Readthrough Recordings and script ratings or reviews: 1) posted by us on our Web site; 2) transmitted to or posted on our Web site by others, including members, guests, advertisers, featured guests, Voice Actors, or experts; or 3) transmitted to or by WRITERDUET INC. by other means.
You agree not to circumvent, disable or otherwise interfere with security features of our Service or features that prevent or restrict unauthorized use or copying of Readthrough Recordings or enforce limitations on use of our Web site, Service, or products.
WRITERDUET INC. does not guarantee the quality, accuracy, or usefulness for any purpose of Readthrough Recordings. WRITERDUET INC. may remove or block access to any submitted content, including Readthrough Recordings, that we deem to violate any term of this Agreement, including our Privacy Policy and Community Guidelines, or for any other reason. Mere creation of a Readthrough Recording does not guarantee that WRITERDUET INC. will accept or use it in conjunction with any of our services or products, post it on our Web site, distribute it to our Partners for further processing, or include it in any of our statistical analyses or reports.
Authors and Voice Actors who participate in creating a Readthrough Recording guarantee that no part of their contributions to Readthrough Recording, including its textual component and related or accompanying content (such as photographs, drawings, other audio recordings, and video clips) violate any party's copyright, trademark, trade secret, or other intellectual property rights Authors and Voice Actors also guarantee that such Readthrough Recording components do not violate our Terms of Use, Privacy Policy or Community Guidelines, including restrictions against the submission or recording of patently offensive, pornographic, or illegal content. WRITERDUET INC. may remove or block access to any submitted content, including Readthrough Recordings, that we deem to violate any term of this Agreement, including our Privacy Policy and Community Guidelines, or for any other reason.
WRITERDUET INC. is not responsible for damages due to breaches of contract, misrepresentation, fraud, or any other violation of the law or civil disagreement that occurs within the scope of any collaboration between Script Authors and Voice Actors. This is true regardless of whether the Authors and Voice Actors ever make actual contact with each other, either online or in person, or have formed any written or oral contract, or whether the alleged violation occurs within the scope of our Service. WRITERDUET INC., for example, assumes no responsibility if an Author tricks Voice Actors into contributing to the creation of an infringing recording by misrepresenting a stolen script as an original work. Nor would we be liable if, after or during the process of creating a Readthrough Recording, a Voice Actor sells or distributes an Author’s script to a third party without authorization from the rightful owner.
8. VOICE ACTORS
Voice Actors (as defined in Section 7) are users of our Service and agree to abide by the terms of this Agreement, including our Privacy Policy and Community Guidelines.
By consenting to this Agreement, Voice Actors agree that they claim no present or future rights of ownership in or control over any Readthrough Recording that contains a recording of their voices. In particular, Voice Actors agree to the limitations described in Sections 6 and 7 above. Voice Actors may access, play, and share links to Readthrough Recordings only for their personal use and only to the extent intended and allowed by the functionality of our Service and as permitted by this Agreement. Voice Actors may not otherwise copy, modify, remove from our Web site, distribute, sell, license, or assign rights to these recordings in any manner and for any use, commercial or non-commercial, without our prior written consent. This is true even if a Voice Actor improvises or makes other changes to the script when reading a part into a Readthrough Recording.
Voice Actors acknowledge that nothing in this Agreement transfers to them any rights of ownership, reproduction, or use in the voice fonts or in the script incorporated into a Readthrough Recording, or constitutes a license to use those rights in ways other than those expressly allowed by this Agreement.
Voice Actors involved in creating a Readthrough Recording guarantee that no part of the Readthrough Recording that they create, including textual components and related or accompanying content (such as photographs, drawings, other audio recordings, and video clips) violate any party's valid copyright, trademark, trade secret, or other intellectual property rights. Voice Actors also guarantee that such components of Readthrough Recordings do not violate our Terms of Use Agreement, Privacy Policy or Community Guidelines, including restrictions against the submission or recording of patently offensive, pornographic, or illegal content.
As described in Section 7, WRITERDUET INC. is not responsible for damages due to breach of contract, misrepresentation, fraud, or any other violation of the law or civil disagreement that occurs within the scope of any collaboration between Script Authors and Voice Actors.
As a Voice Actor, you agree that WRITERDUET INC. and our Partners may use Readthrough Recordings that contain your recorded voice in any way permitted by law, such as posting them on our Web site or transmitting them to our business partners. If we do not use a submitted Readthrough Recording on our Web site promptly after upload, that does not mean that we waive the right to use it without notice at a later time.
Voice Actors have rights in neither the script that they read into a Readthrough Recording nor in the recording itself and may not modify, copy, distribute (such as by webcasting), reuse, sell, assign, license, or sublicense Readthrough Recordings without the written consent of WRITERDUET INC., the Script Author, and, in some cases, our service-provider Partners. By agreeing to record their voices into a Readthrough Recording, Voice Actors also assert that they understand that they may not be able to listen to or access online a Readthrough Recording that contains their voices, receive public credit for their voice acting, or take any part in deciding whether a Readthrough Recording will be selected for use within the scope of our Service.
READHTHROUGH.COM may, in its sole discretion, choose to publicly identify the Voice Actors involved in the creation of each Readthrough Recording. We may also include metadata in our aggregated statistical analyses and reports to describe the Readthrough Recordings, their content, and their creators. This data, and the Readthrough Recordings themselves, may be retained and used by WRITERDUET INC. even after Authors and Voice Actors have terminated their registered accounts with our Service.
WRITERDUET INC. may post our own and users' reviews and ratings of Voice Actors and is not liable for any damages to any party that result from the distribution of such information. We reserve the right to remove or block access to any reviews or rankings that violate our Community Guidelines.
9. WE MAY MONITOR USER BEHAVIOR
We reserve the right to delete, move, or edit anything that you transmit to WRITERDUET INC., including email messages, forum postings, and submitted content, that we deem to violate the terms of this Agreement, our Privacy Policy, or our Community Guidelines that violate any law, court order, or government regulation or that we feel are otherwise unacceptable or offensive.
10. SERVICE INTERRUPTION
You agree that WRITERDUET INC. is not liable for damages and losses due to interruption of our Service, regardless of the cause of the interruption.
11. THIRD-PARTY MATERIAL AND Web siteS
When processing your submitted script, we may forward it to text-to-speech service-provider Partners. These Partners retain all rights as described in Sections 6 and 7. To be clear, WRITERDUET INC. and its Partners are not responsible for any loss or damages caused by your or anyone else's reliance on information: 1) posted by us on the WRITERDUET INC. Web sites; 2) transmitted to or posted on the Web site by others, including members, guests, advertisers, featured guests, Script Authors, Voice Actors, or experts; or 3) transmitted to or by WRITERDUET INC. through other means.
Opinions, advice, statements, offers, reviews, or other information or content made available by third parties on or through our Web site or Service are the property of their respective authors, who are solely responsible for their content. WRITERDUET INC. does not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any such information, whether published by WRITERDUET INC., our Partners, or our users.
The WRITERDUET INC. Web sites contain links to other Internet sites and resources ("External Links"). You acknowledge that WRITERDUET INC. is not responsible for, and has no liability as a result of the availability or use of our External Links or the contents of the sites they link to. We suggest that you review the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy statements of any Web site you visit by clicking one of our External Links.
By uploading your script to WRITERDUET INC., you grant us the right to submit your scripts to our Partners for analysis or conversion. WRITERDUET INC. makes no representations regarding our Partners’ services or their Web sites and we are not responsible for any infringement by these parties of your rights in your script, of your privacy, or of any other legal rights you claim.
12. CLAIMS OF COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT: TAKEDOWN NOTICES AND COUNTER-NOTICES
If you believe that any material or content distributed or posted on WRITERDUET INC. infringes your copyright, we will remove it upon receiving a takedown notice from you, as described in the federal Digital Millennium Copyright Act § 512(c). You should send us the notice via email to help@writerduet.com, or by mail to:
WRITERDUET INC.
5201 Encinitas Ln
Austin, TX 78749
WRITERDUET INC. will evaluate your claim and, if it appears reasonable, will remove the offending content from our Web site.
Legally proper takedown notices must include the six pieces of information listed below. If your notice does not substantially comply with this requirement, your rights as a copyright holder may be compromised. Your notice must include:
When we receive a proper takedown notice, we immediately launch an investigation. If we find any reasonable chance that the material you identify does indeed infringe a valid copyright, we will remove that material from our Web site or block access to it. We'll also promptly notify the person who posted it. Our goal will be to remove the content within 48 hours of receiving proper notice, but in complicated situations, this process could take as long as two weeks.
If we remove or block material that you have posted because another person has claimed that it infringes a valid copyright, we will give you the chance to contest that claim in a counter-notice. You should promptly send the counter-notice to us through any of the acceptable methods for sending takedown notices. If your counter-notice substantially complies with the legal requirements listed below, we will restore your material no later than 10-14 days of receipt, regardless of whether it is ultimately determined that your material actually does infringe. If the person filing the original takedown notice sues you in court, however, we cannot restore your material until the court case concludes.
Your counter-notice must include:
13. CHANGES WE MAKE TO OUR SERVICE
We may alter, suspend, discontinue, or add terms to any aspect of the WRITERDUET INC. Web sites, our Service, or our other products at any time without liability or notice to you. We may limit the availability of any Service feature, database information, or other content and may restrict your access to parts or all of the Service without liability or notice .
14. CHOICE OF VENUE FOR LEGAL DISPUTES
If you become involved in a legal dispute with WRITERDUET INC. or in a legal dispute that arises out of your or another party's use of our Web site, products, or Service, you agree that the dispute will be governed by the laws of the State of Texas, regardless of Texas's conflict-of-law rules. You also consent to the exclusive jurisdiction and venue of the state and federal courts of the State of Texas, in Travis County, for the resolution of that dispute.
15. STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS
You agree that, regardless of any law to the contrary, any claim or cause of action arising from or related to the use of our Service, Web site, or other products that you don't file within one year after it arose will be forever barred. The failure of any party to exercise a right provided by this Agreement is not a waiver of further rights under the terms of the Agreement.
16. INTEGRATION & THIRD-PARTY BENEFICIARIES
If any provision of this Agreement is found to be unenforceable or invalid, that provision will be limited or eliminated to the minimum extent necessary to permit the rest of the Agreement to remain in effect. This Agreement may be assigned in whole or in part, transferred, or sublicensed only with WRITERDUET INC.'s prior written consent. This Agreement does not create any agency, partnership, joint venture, or employment relationship.
This Agreement creates no third-party beneficiaries, except those that may be expressly created by one of its terms. These Terms of Service and the incorporated Privacy Policy and Community Guidelines together contain the entire agreement between you and WRITERDUET INC. regarding the use of our Web site, Service, and other products.