Comics Reader Terms

1. What you get — a licence to read, not a file to own

When you buy a comic here, or read one included with a subscription, you get a personal, non-transferable licence to read it on Waypoint Realms. You are not buying a file. When you read online, the pages are delivered encrypted and drawn directly to your screen rather than saved to your device.

We say this plainly because “buy” is a misleading word for what almost every digital comics service actually sells, ours included. If what you want is a file you keep forever regardless of what happens to us, a DRM-free storefront is a better fit, and we would rather tell you that now.

1A. Downloading to read offline

You can download a chapter you have access to so you can read it without a connection. A download is still part of your licence to read, not a copy you own, and it works like this:

• It stays encrypted, and it stays in the app. A downloaded chapter is kept in the Waypoint Realms app’s own encrypted storage on the device you downloaded it to, and only our reader on that device can open it. It is never saved as an image, a comic file, or anything else you can find in your files, photos, or downloads folder, and it cannot be exported, shared, sent, backed up to, or opened on another device or in any other app. A copy of the stored data taken off the device cannot be read.
• It expires after 30 days. Thirty days after you download a chapter, the download stops opening and is removed. To keep reading offline, download it again. You can do that as long as you still have access to the chapter.
• It checks in while you hold it. The app needs to reach us at least once every 7 days to keep a download open. If it can’t, the download waits until you are back online. This is how the rules in §2 reach a download: if your access to a chapter ends, its download stops opening the next time the app checks in.
• It belongs to that device. Signing out, removing the app, or signing that device out from your account removes its downloads.

Some works may not be available to download. Where that is the case, the chapter says so.

2. If a work goes away

Creators can unpublish their work, and we sometimes have to remove work in response to a copyright claim or a policy breach. Either can happen to something you have paid for.

• A creator unpublishes. You keep access for as long as we can reasonably provide it. It stays in your library, and you can keep downloading it under §1A.
• We remove it for a rights claim or a policy breach. Access ends immediately — usually within a few minutes, because your reading session is short-lived by design — and we refund what you paid for it. A downloaded copy stops opening the next time the app checks in (§1A), so within 7 days at most.
• Waypoint Realms stops operating. We would give as much notice as we can, but we cannot promise perpetual access to something we no longer run.

3. Age ratings and your content settings

Every chapter carries a content rating and content warnings set by its publisher. Two different things act on them:

• The age gate uses the birthdate on your account and is not adjustable. If you are under the relevant age, mature work is not shown to you and cannot be unlocked by a setting.
• Your content settings (/profile/comics) are yours to change and only ever hide more. You can cap the ratings you see and hide specific warnings — for example, hiding flashing or strobing imagery for photosensitivity, without giving up anything else.

If your own settings hide something, we tell you which setting did it and let you read it anyway. It was your choice, so you can change your mind.

4. Purchases, subscriptions, and refunds

Payments are processed by Stripe. Subscriptions renew until you cancel, and cancelling stops the next renewal rather than the current period.

Because a comic is consumed immediately, we do not offer change-of-mind refunds once you have read a meaningful part of a chapter. We do refund duplicate charges, works removed under §2, and anything that is materially not what was described — a chapter that is unreadable, mis-titled, or missing pages. Ask us at support@waypointrealms.com; we would rather refund a borderline case than argue about it.

5. What you may not do

The people who made these comics are usually small independent creators, and copying their work takes money directly from them. So:

• do not attempt to circumvent, disable, or reverse-engineer the encryption, tokens, or other technical measures that protect pages;
• do not share your account, your reading session, or any token issued to it, or use automated tools to fetch pages;
• do not copy, move, export, or back up a downloaded chapter out of the Waypoint Realms app, try to open it anywhere else, or try to keep it working past its 30 days other than by downloading it again;
• do not redistribute, upload elsewhere, or publicly post the pages of a work you read here. Ordinary quotation and criticism — a panel in a review, a page in an essay — is fine and always was.

We may suspend access for accounts that do these things, and serious or commercial infringement can be pursued by the rights holder directly.

6. What we record while you read

This is the section most services bury, so here it is in full. While you read we record:

• Your reading position — which page you reached, so you can resume. Yours to delete.
• Session and delivery records — that your account requested pages from a chapter, when, and roughly how fast. We use this to detect automated scraping, not to profile your taste.
• Download records — which chapters you have downloaded, to which of your devices, when each download expires, and when that device last checked in. We use these to keep your downloads working and to withdraw them when access ends.
• A forensic watermark, on a portion of sessions. Some reading sessions carry an invisible marker in the rendered pages that identifies the session. If pages from a work later appear somewhere they should not, that marker lets us trace which session produced them. It is invisible, it does not change what you see, and it exists to make leaking traceable rather than to observe your reading.

We do not sell any of this. It is covered by our Privacy Policy, including how to request or delete your data. Aggregate reading counts are shared with the publisher of the work you read — how many people read a chapter, not who.

7. What the protection actually does

Pages are encrypted and drawn to a canvas rather than served as image files, so they cannot be saved with a right-click and a copied link will not work for anyone else. Downloads stay encrypted on your device with a key tied to that device, so the stored data is useless anywhere else. That is real, and it is also the limit: we cannot stop someone photographing their own screen, and we have told publishers the same thing in their agreement. We would rather you knew what the protection is than believed it was more.

8. Reporting something

If you find content here that breaks our rules — including anything mis-rated, and especially anything involving minors — report it from the work itself or email support@waypointrealms.com. Copyright holders should use dmca@waypointrealms.com. Reports about minors are escalated immediately.

9. Changes

If we change these terms we publish a new version and note it here. Material changes that affect what you already bought will be sent to you rather than only posted. These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Delaware, USA.