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Terms of Service
The following Terms of Service are intended to protect both site visitors as well as the site owners. Failure to follow the tenets outlined in these Terms is grounds for immediate termination of your account. Please read them carefully before creating your account.

Community Rules
This is a community for serious writers. There are no age limitations or requirements, however, beware that your are expected to behave as a civil, mature, adult member of the community at all times. The definition of such behavior is solely at the discretion of OpenStory System Administrators. Personal attacks, flames, assaults, or other activities whose only purpose is to tear down another member will not be tolerated. This is particularly applicable to critiques. When writing a critique, it should be written in a way that is beneficial to the authors. Profanity is NOT prohibited, however, like all good things it should only be used in moderation and should add something to the discussion. Directing profanity at another member will anger the SysAdmin gods and invoke their wrath. Be forewarned.

There is no standard of privacy for interpersonal communication tools utilized on this site. If emails generated by the toolset or private messages sent between members are misused, they can and will be reviewed by system administrators to determine if these Terms of Service have been violated.
Intellectual Property Rights
OpenStory.Org will never claim, nor try to acquire rights to the writing you submit via the toolsets we provide. These tools exist to help you manage the story-writing process, not to insert itself into it. While we store your information in our databases, it belongs to you. For single author stories this is straightforward:
Your content is clearly marked and defined as "Copyright <date>, ©, <your name>. All rights reserved." In addition, you retain clear control over what parts of your writing are publicly visible, further ensuring your rights over your content.

This can become more complicated in multi-author collaborative environments. Under those circumstances the primary Author, who also initially plays the roles of Managing Editor and Creator for the story, will be prompted to make several choices regarding the management of intellectual property rights for that given project. These include:
- Creative Commons Licensing. Please visit CreativeCommons.Org for license option details.
- Equal Copyrights. All contributing Authors are credited equally for copyright and creative rights to the collective work produced by the group. All Authors retain the right to produce derivative and subsequent works from the collective work of the group.
- Proportional Copyrights. All contributing Authors are credited proportionally (based on word count of not only the story itself, but also the supporting informational records) for copyright and creative rights to the collective work produced by the group. Individual Authors retain the right to produce derivative and subsequent works only for the specific content they contributed. For example, if a given character was created by one Author, only that Author could re-use that character in a "spin-off" story.
- Custom Licensing. The Managing Editor can write their own rights management and copyright guidelines and rules for a project. While this is not recommended, OpenStory does not want to force your writing projects into any hard and fast rights management molds.
Once a project has any content submitted to it, the rights management becomes locked. The Editor cannot change the license type of the produced work without 100% approval from all Authors who've contributed to that point. In the event there is a rights dispute between Authors, OpenStory toolset logs will be provided on request to any project member. Logs record all related tasks, functions, and content submissions by all project members and are retained indefinitely. OpenStory will certify the validity of logs for any member for an additional fee.

At no time will OpenStory.Org, Knowledge Link Network, their owners, publishers, editors, employees or vendors be held liable or responsible for rights management. We provide the tools for you to clearly choose and define your rights to your own works as clearly as possible, but you are responsible for their legal and operational management.
Free Services
The basic toolsets and services provided on OpenStory.Org are currently free, and will hopefully remain so for as long as operational and financial considerations allow. In the event that some portions of those tools and services become fee-based in the future we will always try to do so in a manner that will allow access to pre-existing content and that allows for some form of free account access.
Paid Services
OpenStory is committed to continuing to extend upon and expand our tools for Authors. As these are developed in addition to our basic, free tools, we may release specific features as paid services. These may or may not include such things as print and electronic publication services, data backups, story bible generation services, common data format exports, advanced editing tools, manuscript editing services, marketing tools, etc.
Evolution of Terms
Knowledge Link Network reserves the right to modify these Terms of Service at any time. If the Terms of Service change after account creation you will be notified via e-mail and always be given an opportunity to review the new Terms of Service. Changes to the existing Terms of Service will be clearly outlined to ensure you can see what has changed.