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, for a reasonable wind-down period afterwards, and for as long as buyers keep the chapters they bought (§10), 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;
• split, encrypt, and transmit any recording you add to readers who are entitled to it;
• 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 and recommendations there. We don’t use your work in our own marketing off the platform without a separate agreement with you (see our Artist Bill of Rights);
• 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 our designated agent at patrick@waypointrealms.com (US Copyright Office registration DMCA-1084574). 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

Comics sales and payouts are in test mode. Until we tell you they are live, they run only for accounts we name, any figure or statement you see is test data, no money moves, and nothing is owed on it. The rest of this section is how they work once they are live.

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. Publishing free work is open on every plan. Selling is open on every plan to adults who finish that onboarding. Members under 18 can’t sell.

• Platform fee. Stripe’s processing fee comes off each sale first. We then keep 15% of what remains, or the rate you have agreed with us in writing, and the rest is your share. You sell one chapter at a time. We show you an estimate of the fee before you publish a priced work, and the actual fee on every statement.
• Bindery Pass. Stripe’s processing fee comes off Pass revenue first. We then keep 30% of what remains, and the rest is a royalty pool, shared among publishers by how much their subscription titles were read under a paid Pass. Reads during a free trial, under a Publisher Pass, of free work, or of chapters a reader bought earn no share. Neither do reads by Pro members, who read subscription titles without a Pass, unless we add a contribution for Pro members to the pool.
• Publisher Pass. If you offer one, you are the seller: it is sold on your own Stripe account, the money goes there, and each reader’s email is on that account. Tax on it is yours, and so is paying any collaborator their part of it. You set the price, from $3 to $100 a month. We take an application fee on each payment: our rate on what remains after Stripe’s fee, plus an amount to cover Stripe’s fee, so your Stripe dashboard shows one higher percentage. At 15%, that is about 22.6% of a $5 Pass. If you turn the Pass off, subscribers keep reading to the end of the period they paid for and aren’t charged again. If your publisher account is suspended, closed or deleted, their access ends and they are refunded for the unused days from your Stripe balance, and we give back our fee on that part. A dispute lost on a Pass payment ends that subscriber’s Pass.
• 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, and hold it until they do. Getting the splits right is your responsibility, not ours.
• Payouts. We pay monthly. We hold earnings for 45 days after the end of the month they were earned in, to cover chargebacks, and pay once a balance reaches $25. A smaller balance carries forward, and a negative balance comes off future earnings. Payouts wait while your publisher account is suspended.
• Refunds and chargebacks. If a reader is refunded, the corresponding share is reversed, and we carry the fee Stripe keeps on the refund. A chargeback reverses the share too, and carries the processor’s dispute fee. If the dispute is won, the sale is restored in full and we carry that fee.
• Taxes. You are responsible for your own taxes on what you earn. Prices don’t include sales tax or VAT today. If we become required to collect it on a sale, we’ll collect it and tell you before it applies. A Publisher Pass is yours to handle, as above.
• Buyers under 18. Members under 18 can’t buy your chapters, or subscribe to your Publisher Pass. The Bindery Pass is sold by us, and they can hold one with a parent or guardian’s approval.
• Where paid work appears. Chapters are bought on the web, and nothing is sold in our apps. Our App Store and Google Play apps show free chapters, and may let a member read what they already have. Mature work stays on the web.

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. Every page of a paid read, downloads included, carries an invisible forensic watermark that lets us trace a leaked image back to the session that produced it. In free reading, a sample of pages carries 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 can’t be read without that device’s key. 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.

Audio. A recording on an audio comic is encrypted in segments, fetched with short-lived tokens, and played online only: it can’t be downloaded. The forensic watermark is on the panels, not in the sound, so a leaked recording can’t be traced from the file itself.

What we cannot do. Nobody can prevent a reader from photographing or screen-recording their own screen, or recording what they hear, 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. A web browser can’t stop someone copying its whole profile off a disk, key included, so that check-in and the 30-day expiry are the limit on a copy made that way too. 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 may show that disclosure to readers. This is a labelling requirement, not a prohibition.

10. Taking work down, and ending this agreement

You can unpublish your work at any time, and remove anything nobody has bought. A chapter a reader has bought can be unpublished but not deleted. Readers who have already bought it keep access for as long as we reasonably can provide it, including when we remove work for a moderation or contract reason.

There are two exceptions. Work we can’t lawfully keep providing, as after a valid copyright notice, ends: access stops immediately, downloaded copies stop opening at their next check-in, and affected readers are refunded in full. And while a copyright notice or an automated safety check is waiting for a person’s decision, buyers can’t open the work. Nothing is taken from them, and if it is cleared they can read it again.

If you delete your account, your publisher profile and unsold work come off the Service. Chapters readers have bought stay readable for those buyers, off sale, and the licence in §2 continues for that purpose. Money owed to you at that point is held rather than paid, and we show you the amount before you delete.

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. If the change is material, we tell you by email and in the app at least 30 days before it takes effect, 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. Legal notices: legal@waypointrealms.com. Copyright notices: patrick@waypointrealms.com (registration DMCA-1084574). This agreement is governed by the laws of the State of Illinois, USA, as set out in our Terms of Service.