Terms of Service

These Terms of Service govern your use of arscalami.com and the Ars Calami writing, critique, reputation, credit, publisher-readiness, and related services. By creating an account, selecting a plan, submitting content, reviewing another member's work, or otherwise using the Service, you agree to these Terms.

If you use Ars Calami for an organization, publisher, or other entity, you represent that you have authority to bind that entity. If you do not agree to these Terms, do not use the Service.

You must be at least 18 years old, or the age of legal majority where you live, to use the Service. You must provide accurate account, billing, and verification information and keep it current.

Ars Calami is pseudonymous to other members by default, but it is not anonymous to Ars Calami. We may use internal identity, payment, device, audit, and verification records to operate the Service, protect members, investigate abuse, enforce these Terms, and comply with law.

Ars Calami provides tools for writing, organizing manuscripts, requesting peer critiques, reviewing other members' work, earning and spending feedback credits, tracking reputation signals, exporting manuscripts, and, where available, participating in publisher-facing workflows.

The Service may include automated or AI-assisted tools for moderation, safety checks, critique quality scoring, writing assessment, matching, summaries, revision insights, story structure analysis, contradiction detection, publisher-readiness workflows, and other evaluatory or tool-based features. Ars Calami does not promise that these tools will be error-free, complete, or suitable for any particular creative, academic, legal, commercial, or publishing purpose.

Some features require a paid plan or credits. Plan features, prices, renewal timing, cancellation flow, and available credits are shown in the billing flow or account settings. You authorize Ars Calami and its payment processors to charge the payment method you provide for paid plans, renewals, upgrades, and other paid features you select.

Credits are a limited, revocable, non-transferable in-platform accounting unit. Credits are not money, stored value, property, or a gift card, and they have no cash value unless mandatory law says otherwise.

Unless the Service expressly says otherwise, fees are non-refundable. If a review workflow promises a platform credit refund for a specific failure, such as no delivered critique within the applicable review window, the refund is limited to the credits stated for that workflow. Subscription fees, context-processing costs, and other platform costs are not refunded unless the billing flow, these Terms, or mandatory law requires it.

You keep ownership of the stories, manuscripts, chapters, excerpts, prompts, notes, context, intent statements, critique questions, profile materials, and other content you submit to Ars Calami, except for rights owned by others.

You grant Ars Calami a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to host, store, reproduce, process, format, transmit, display, analyze, summarize, moderate, and otherwise use your content only as needed to provide, maintain, secure, troubleshoot, and enforce the Service. This includes showing submitted work to assigned reviewers, showing critique output to the relevant writer, creating permitted summaries or insights, operating publisher-readiness tools, generating exports you request, handling disputes, and maintaining audit records.

Ars Calami does not sell your private submitted writing, publish it outside workflows you choose, license it to third parties as training data, or use manuscripts, chapters, critiques, notes, prompts, context, or intent statements to train or fine-tune Ars Calami or third-party AI models unless you separately opt in through a clear written workflow.

You also grant Ars Calami the right to retain copies, hashes, logs, ratings, reviews, assessments, and other records reasonably needed for security, abuse prevention, plagiarism and AI-misuse investigations, billing, dispute resolution, legal compliance, and integrity of reputation or credit systems.

Reviewers must provide human-authored, good-faith critiques grounded in the writer's submitted text, context, and stated intent. Critiques may be stored, shown to the relevant writer, scored, summarized, audited, and used to evaluate reviewer quality, reputation, credits, disputes, and platform safety.

Reviewers do not receive ownership rights in the writer's underlying work. Writers do not receive ownership rights in the reviewer's independent critique except for the right to read, use, and keep it for personal revision and platform use.

Ars Calami is built for human writing and human critique. You may not submit AI-generated writing, AI-ghostwritten writing, AI-authored critiques, automated text inflation, or other synthetic work as your own human work unless Ars Calami has expressly allowed that use in a specific workflow.

You may use AI only where the Service permits tool-based or evaluatory support, such as organizing notes, reviewing critique patterns, surfacing possible contradictions, checking grammar, summarizing received critiques, or helping you evaluate revision options. AI may support evaluation and tooling, but it may not write, ghostwrite, complete, inflate, or replace your submitted prose or critiques. You remain responsible for anything you submit, publish, review, export, or send.

Ars Calami may use AI and automated systems to evaluate, classify, summarize, route, moderate, score, or protect workflows. These systems may affect matching, review validity, reputation, credits, eligibility, moderation, visibility, or publisher-readiness features. Automated outputs can be wrong, incomplete, biased, or miscalibrated. Ars Calami may review, override, correct, or decline to act on automated output.

You must not submit, upload, review, export, or claim rights in content you do not own or have permission to use. You are responsible for ensuring your work does not infringe copyright, trademark, privacy, publicity, contractual, or other rights.

Ars Calami may use plagiarism protections and provenance tools, including content hashes, audit logs, reporting flows, moderation queues, edit-history signals, paste or import controls, and review of complaints. These are protective measures, not guarantees.

Ars Calami does not promise anti-plagiarism, originality certification, copyright clearance, copyright registration, legal proof of authorship, guaranteed detection of copied work, or a determination of who legally owns a work. If a dispute arises, Ars Calami may preserve records, restrict content, suspend accounts, remove access, or cooperate with lawful requests, but legal claims remain between the relevant parties.

If you believe content on the Service infringes your copyright, use the legal, safety, or support contact channel made available in the Service and provide a notice with enough information to identify the copyrighted work, the allegedly infringing material, your contact information, a good-faith statement, an accuracy statement under penalty of perjury, and your physical or electronic signature. Ars Calami may remove or restrict content and process counter-notices where required by law.

Review assignment, deadlines, credit payouts, refunds, ratings, reputation changes, and writer assessments are governed by the rules, models, and workflows active at the time of use. Ars Calami may tune those systems to protect quality, fairness, safety, and platform integrity.

Peer critique is subjective. Ars Calami does not guarantee that any critique will be accurate, useful, kind, complete, timely, commercially valuable, or aligned with your goals. Ars Calami also does not guarantee any specific rank, score, badge, credit balance, review count, reviewer identity, reviewer expertise, or matching outcome.

Publisher-facing features, publisher-ready exports, publisher visibility, profile previews, request inboxes, message threads, manuscript badges, hidden validation, and similar workflows are discovery and workflow tools only.

Ars Calami does not guarantee that you will be seen by a publisher, contacted by a publisher, represented, accepted, edited, acquired, contracted, paid, published, distributed, reviewed, marketed, sold, or commercially successful. Any publishing opportunity, contract, rights grant, payment, or professional relationship is between you and the relevant publisher or third party unless Ars Calami separately agrees in writing.

You may not use the Service to harass, threaten, exploit, impersonate, defraud, spam, scrape, reverse engineer, interfere with, overload, or attack the Service or other users. You may not submit malware, unlawful content, private information without permission, sexual content involving minors, non-consensual intimate content, hate or harassment, plagiarism, rights-infringing content, or content designed to evade moderation, provenance, credit, billing, rank, or review-integrity systems.

You may not sell, transfer, share, or automate accounts, reviews, credits, badges, rankings, assignments, publisher access, or verification status without Ars Calami's written permission.

Ars Calami may investigate suspected violations, remove or restrict content, block submissions, withhold or reverse credits, adjust or freeze reputation signals, issue warnings, lock review access, suspend or terminate accounts, revoke badges, restrict publisher visibility, or take other action we reasonably believe is needed to protect the Service, members, third parties, or Ars Calami.

Moderation and assessment decisions may rely on member reports, human review, audit logs, automated tools, AI-assisted workflows, payment and identity records, content hashes, edit history, and other available context.

Our privacy practices are described in the Privacy Policy or other privacy notices made available in the Service. Ars Calami collects and uses information needed to operate the Service, including account records, payment metadata, submitted content, critiques, rankings, ratings, audit logs, moderation records, AI workflow inputs and outputs, and technical data.

Private submitted content is processed only for the permitted Service purposes described in these Terms and the Privacy Policy. Ars Calami does not use private submitted content to train AI models, sell personal information, or share content for cross-context behavioral advertising unless a separate notice and opt-in workflow expressly allows a different use.

Do not submit confidential, privileged, highly sensitive, or third-party private information unless you have the right to do so and accept the risks of using an online review and evaluation platform.

The Service, software, interfaces, designs, workflows, trademarks, branding, ranking systems, credit systems, rubrics, prompts, models of operation, documentation, and platform-generated non-user materials are owned by Ars Calami or its licensors. These Terms give you only the limited right to use the Service as permitted.

The Service may rely on third-party providers for hosting, authentication, payments, email, analytics, AI processing, moderation, storage, document export, and other functions. Ars Calami authorizes those providers to process submitted content and personal information only as needed to provide services to Ars Calami, comply with law, protect safety and security, or enforce applicable terms. Ars Calami is not responsible for third-party services, and your use of them may be subject to separate terms and policies.

The Service is provided as is and as available. To the fullest extent allowed by law, Ars Calami disclaims all warranties, express or implied, including warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, non-infringement, availability, accuracy, security, and uninterrupted operation.

Ars Calami is not a law firm, publisher, literary agent, school, plagiarism-certification service, copyright office, editorial guarantor, or professional publishing advisor. Information, scores, summaries, reviews, recommendations, exports, badges, and automated outputs are for workflow support only.

To the fullest extent allowed by law, Ars Calami will not be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost opportunities, lost contracts, lost data, loss of goodwill, publishing outcomes, content disputes, third-party conduct, or inability to use the Service.

To the fullest extent allowed by law, Ars Calami's total liability for any claim relating to the Service or these Terms will not exceed the greater of the amount you paid Ars Calami for the Service in the three months before the event giving rise to the claim or 100 US dollars.

You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless Ars Calami and its owners, operators, employees, contractors, service providers, and affiliates from claims, damages, losses, liabilities, costs, and expenses, including reasonable attorneys' fees, arising from your content, your critiques, your use of the Service, your violation of these Terms, your violation of law, or your infringement or misuse of another person's rights.

You may stop using the Service at any time. Ars Calami may suspend or terminate your access if you violate these Terms, create risk for the Service or others, fail to pay, misuse credits or review systems, submit plagiarized or AI-misrepresented work, abuse other users, or if continued access would be unlawful or commercially impractical.

After termination, Ars Calami may retain records as needed for legal compliance, billing, dispute resolution, audit integrity, safety, enforcement, backup, and legitimate business purposes. Provisions that by their nature should survive termination will survive, including content licenses needed for retained records, intellectual property, disclaimers, liability limits, indemnity, and dispute terms.

Ars Calami may update these Terms from time to time. If we make material changes, we will provide notice through the Service or another reasonable method. Updated Terms apply prospectively unless the notice says otherwise and lawful consent is obtained where required. Continued use after the effective date means you accept the updated Terms.

These Terms are governed by the laws of the jurisdiction where the Ars Calami operating entity is organized, without regard to conflict-of-law rules, unless mandatory consumer protection law requires otherwise. Courts located in that jurisdiction will have exclusive authority to resolve disputes unless mandatory law provides a different forum.

For legal, billing, safety, copyright, plagiarism, or account questions, contact Ars Calami through the support or contact channel made available in the Service.