Comics Publisher Agreement

1. You must hold the rights, and you are warranting that you do

Before you can publish, you must attest that you hold every right needed for the work you upload. That attestation is recorded with your account and is the basis on which we host and distribute your work.

You represent and warrant, for every work you publish, that:

• you own it, or you have written permission from everyone who does — including co-creators, letterers, colourists, translators, and anyone whose contribution appears in the work;
• publishing it here does not breach an exclusivity agreement, a work-for-hire contract, or a prior licence you granted to someone else;
• it does not infringe anyone’s copyright, trademark, publicity, or privacy rights, and does not use another party’s characters or settings without permission;
• the credits and revenue splits you enter are accurate and agreed with the people they name.

If a claim is brought against us because one of these was untrue, you agree to indemnify and hold us harmless for it, including reasonable legal costs. This is the single most important term in this agreement: we can verify a great many things automatically, but we cannot verify that you own what you uploaded.

2. The licence you grant us — and what you keep

You keep your copyright. You are not assigning your work to us and you can take it down. What you grant us is a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence, for as long as your work is published here and for a reasonable wind-down period afterwards, to do the specific things required to run a reader:

• store, encrypt, re-encode, and resize your pages (we generate several sizes and formats of every page so it renders well on different screens, and we encrypt them at rest);
• transmit those pages to readers who are entitled to them;
• let those readers download encrypted copies to read offline in our apps. Each copy is tied to one device, can only be opened by our reader on that device, cannot be exported or moved out of the app, and expires 30 days after it is downloaded (see §7);
• generate thumbnails, previews, and excerpts to promote your work on Waypoint Realms, and to show your cover and title in listings, search, recommendations, and our own marketing of the platform;
• keep backups and archival copies for as long as we are legally required to.

We do not use your work to train machine-learning models, and we do not licence it to third parties for that purpose. We use automated systems to screen your work (see §4) and to draft optional metadata such as alt text and a suggested content rating; those are operational uses of your files, not training.

3. Content standards

Every chapter must carry an accurate content rating and the content descriptors that apply to it. Under-rating a work is the one metadata error we treat as a policy violation rather than a mistake: readers, including minors, rely on those bands, and our age gate is built on them.

The following may not be published here at all:

• sexual content involving minors, or any depiction that sexualises a minor, in any style or medium — this results in immediate removal, account termination, preservation of evidence, and reporting to the appropriate authorities;
• explicit sexual content of any kind (this platform does not host adult work today);
• content that incites violence against a group, promotes a hate movement, or exists mainly to harass a real person;
• content that encourages self-harm or suicide, or presents it instructionally;
• content that is unlawful where we operate, or that we are legally required to remove.

Fiction depicting difficult subjects is not the same as content promoting them. Violence, cruelty, addiction, abuse, and despair are legitimate subjects for comics; we ask that you rate and describe them honestly so readers can choose.

4. Review, holds, and strikes

Uploads are screened automatically before they can be published. That screening fails closed: if it finds a problem, or if it cannot run at all, your chapter waits for a human rather than going live. We would rather delay your release than publish something nobody checked.

• Held for review — a moderator looks at it. Your chapter cannot be published until one of them clears it. Approval clears the hold; it does not publish your chapter, because your release date is yours.
• Paused — screening found something that may breach §3. You’ll be told, and you can reply.
• Strikes — issued by a person, never by an automated check, and only for an actual violation. Strikes expire. Three active strikes put your account into termination review.

You can see every decision recorded against your own work, with the reason. If you think a decision is wrong, reply to the notice; a different reviewer will look at it.

5. Copyright complaints

If we receive a valid copyright notice about your work, we will remove access to it and tell you, including a copy of the notice. Removal is immediate and thorough: entitlements stop working, in-progress reading sessions end within minutes, downloaded copies stop opening the next time the reader’s device checks in (within 7 days at most), and the encryption keys for that work are rotated.

You may send a counter-notice if you believe the claim is mistaken or that your use is lawful. Send notices and counter-notices to dmca@waypointrealms.com. A notice must identify the work claimed to be infringed, identify what to remove and where it is, give us your contact details, and state under penalty of perjury that you are authorised to act for the rights holder.

We terminate the accounts of repeat infringers. The strike system in §4 is how we count.

6. Money

You set your own prices. Payouts run through Stripe Connect, so you will complete Stripe’s onboarding and be bound by their terms as well as ours; we cannot pay you until that is done.

• Platform fee. We keep a percentage of each sale, shown to you before you publish a priced work and on every statement. Payment processing fees are deducted by Stripe separately.
• Splits. If several people are credited on a title, you assign each a share and the shares must total 100%. We pay each collaborator their share directly where they have a payout account. Getting the splits right is your responsibility, not ours.
• Refunds and chargebacks. If a reader is refunded, the corresponding share is reversed. A chargeback also carries the processor’s fee.
• Taxes. You are responsible for your own taxes on what you earn. We collect and remit sales tax and VAT where we are required to.

If we remove your work for breaching §3, we may withhold the associated earnings; we will tell you why.

7. What we can and cannot protect — read this one

We take copy protection seriously and we will not overstate it. Here is exactly what we do and where it stops.

What we do. Page images are encrypted at rest with a key unique to each chapter. They are never delivered as ordinary images: a reader’s browser fetches encrypted bytes with a short-lived, page-scoped token and decrypts them in memory to draw onto a canvas. There is no image file in the page, no right-click-and-save, and no URL that works if copied to someone else. Automated scraping is rate-limited and flagged. A portion of reading sessions carry an invisible forensic watermark that lets us trace a leaked image back to the session that produced it.

Offline downloads. Readers can download a chapter they are entitled to and read it offline. A download is kept encrypted inside our app’s own storage on that one device, with a key tied to the device. It is never written out as an image or comic file, cannot be exported, shared, or moved to another device or app, and the stored data cannot be read anywhere else. Every download expires 30 days after it is made and has to be downloaded again, which needs the reader to still be entitled to it. The app must also check in with us at least every 7 days, which is how a takedown or refund reaches a downloaded copy.

What we cannot do. Nobody can prevent a reader from photographing or screen-recording their own screen, and no web platform — ours or anyone else’s — can prevent a determined, technically skilled person from extracting page images eventually. Any service that tells you otherwise is selling you something. A download on a device that stays offline cannot be told about a takedown until it next checks in, so the 7-day check-in is the real limit there, not an instant switch. Our goal is to make casual and automated copying fail, make bulk copying slow, expensive, and traceable, and be honest with you about the rest. If that trade-off is not acceptable for a particular work, please do not publish that work here.

8. Accessibility

Comics are a visual medium and blind and low-vision readers depend on the descriptions you provide. We ask — and strongly encourage — that you write alt text for your pages. We can draft it for you automatically, but a draft is never published without you accepting it: an unreviewed description of your artwork, under your name, in the one place a reader cannot check it, is worse than none.

9. AI disclosure

If a work was produced substantially with generative AI, disclose it when you publish. We surface that disclosure to readers. This is a labelling requirement, not a prohibition.

10. Taking work down, and ending this agreement

You can unpublish or remove your work at any time. Readers who have already bought it keep access for as long as we reasonably can provide it, unless the removal is because of a rights claim or a policy breach — in which case access ends immediately, downloaded copies stop opening at their next check-in, and affected readers are refunded.

We may suspend or remove work that breaches this agreement, and may terminate a publisher account for repeated or serious breaches. Where we can give notice first, we will. Sections 1 (rights and indemnity), 6 (money owed), and 7 (protection limits) survive termination.

11. Changes

If we change this agreement, we publish a new version and ask you to accept it before you publish again. Your existing published work stays available while you decide. We do not apply new terms retroactively to sales already made.

12. Contact and governing law

Questions about this agreement: support@waypointrealms.com. Copyright notices: dmca@waypointrealms.com. This agreement is governed by the laws of the State of Delaware, USA, as set out in our Terms of Service.