Terms

1 What PublicSh is

PublicSh is a place to publish your work, keep a record that it is yours, set the terms other people can use it on, sell it, and stream it. These terms cover publicsh.com and everything you can reach from it.

PublicSh is run by PublicSh LLC, registered in the State of Georgia in the United States, at 110 Mansell Circle, Ste 204, Roswell, GA 30075. Legal notices should be sent to legal@publicsh.com. Where the company is registered is not a statement about which law applies to these terms — that is still open, and the section on it says so.

2 It is a beta, and it will change

PublicSh is in invite-only beta. Features are added, changed and removed while you are using them, and some of them will break. It is not finished software and you should not treat it as finished software.

Money moves are still being run in by hand: payouts are made manually during the beta, and cashing out what you earn by helping other people listen is not available yet.

3 Your account

You sign in with a link sent to your email address, or with a passkey held on your device. There is no password to remember. Some sign-in methods are only available when the people running the site have switched them on, including signing in with a Google account.

Keep control of the email address you signed up with: anyone who can read that inbox can sign in as you. You are responsible for what happens under your account. If you think somebody else has got into it, end the other sessions in your security settings and get in touch — see Contact, at the end of this page.

You must be at least 13 years old to use PublicSh, and old enough to agree to these terms where you live. PublicSh does not ask your age today and has no way to check it. Open question, needs a lawyer: what age checking is required where our users are, and what to do about an account found to be below that age

4 Your work stays yours

Publishing on PublicSh does not hand us your work. You keep it. What you give us is permission to store your files, make the versions needed to play or read them, show them to the people you have allowed, and deliver them to those people — including through the device sharing described further down.

When you publish, PublicSh takes a fingerprint of the file and a time stamp and keeps a permanent record of both. That is evidence, not a copyright registration, and it does not replace one.

5 The terms you set

You decide what other people may do with each work and what it costs. PublicSh applies what you set.

The platform’s share of what a work earns is fixed at the moment you publish that work and is never changed afterwards, even if the rate changes later for new work.

Card payments are handled by Stripe. What you are owed is recorded against your account and paid out to you through Stripe. Open question, needs a lawyer: fees, refunds, chargebacks, and what may be recovered from somebody who has already been paid

6 Helping other people listen

If you switch it on, works you hold a license to can be streamed to other listeners through your own device while PublicSh is open. It is off unless you turn it on, you can turn it off again at any moment, and your copy is never transferred or resold.

Open question, needs a lawyer: whether holding a license to listen to a work includes the right to serve it to other listeners, and the words that grant it

7 What you may not put on PublicSh

Do not publish work you do not hold the rights to. Do not publish anything unlawful, and do not publish anything that puts other people in danger.

Anyone can report a work, a message or an account. A person reviews reports. We can hide something, restrict an account or close it.

Open question, needs a lawyer: the full acceptable-use rules, and a policy for accounts that infringe repeatedly — neither of them is written yet

8 Copyright complaints

If you believe something on PublicSh infringes your copyright you can file a notice, and if your work was taken down by mistake you can contest it. Both forms are on the copyright notices page, and you do not need an account to use them.

Nothing is taken down or put back automatically. A person reads every notice.

No agent has been registered to receive these notices. Open question, needs a lawyer: registering a designated agent, the contact details that go with it, and the takedown and counter-notice timings

9 We can change or stop things

PublicSh can change, pause or remove any part of the product, and during the beta this happens often. Open question, needs a lawyer: what notice is owed before removing something somebody has already paid for

10 Closing your account

You can close your account in your settings. Closing is not deletion, and it would be dishonest to call it that. Your name is replaced with a placeholder wherever it appears, you will not be able to sign in again, and payments, licenses, ownership and anything agreed with somebody else stay exactly as they are.

If you hold a share of a group you have to pass it on before you can close, because a share is property — it is not ours to take and it is not given to the people who stayed.

We can restrict or close an account that breaks these terms. Open question, needs a lawyer: what notice and what appeal are owed, and what happens to the money and the works held by a closed account

11 What we promise, and what we do not

PublicSh is provided as it is. During the beta especially, we do not promise that it will be available, that nothing will be lost, or that it will suit any particular purpose.

Open question, needs a lawyer: the disclaimer of warranties and the limit of liability, and whether either one holds where our users actually are

12 Which law applies, and where disputes go

Open question, needs a lawyer: governing law, where a dispute is heard, whether arbitration applies, and whether any waiver of collective claims is included

None of that has been decided. This section is deliberately empty rather than filled in with something that sounds right.

13 Changes to these terms

Open question, needs a lawyer: how these terms may be changed, what notice is given, and whether carrying on using PublicSh counts as accepting a change

What the software does today: every version of this page has a date and a fingerprint of its exact wording, both shown at the top. PublicSh records which version you agreed to, in which language, and when. When the wording changes in a way that matters, you are asked again the next time you open PublicSh, and your earlier agreement stays on record beside the new one rather than being replaced.

14 Contact, and when this takes effect

Write to legal@publicsh.com about these terms.

There is no date and no version on this page, because it is a draft and dating it would imply it had been settled. Open question, needs a lawyer: the date this takes effect, and how versions are recorded