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Terms of Use

Escape Artists Inc. (“EA”) is a publishing company, operating multiple short fiction venues. We’ll try to keep these short and sweet, but there are a few things you should know about what we do and how we do it.

By accessing or using our websites, you signify that you have read, understand and agree to be bound by these Terms of Use (“Terms of Use”), regardless of whether or not you are a registered member of our forum.

We reserve the right, at our sole discretion, to change, modify, add, or delete portions of these Terms of Use at any time and without further notice. It is your responsibility to regularly check this page to determine if there have been changes, and to review such changes.

If you have questions or concerns, you agree to contact us to try and resolve them.

Copyright

The material on our websites is copyrighted and may not be used without EA’s consent.

Each of our publications hosts a Press Kit containing images, key facts and promotional copy. All Press Kit materials are made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND licence described below.

Creative Commons Licensing

Our episodes are distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license (older episodes may be under the Unported 3.0 license). You are free to download, copy, redistribute and share them in their entirety, in any medium or format on any device, under the following terms:

  • Attribution — You must give appropriate credit to EA as the owner of the episode. You can do so in any reasonable manner; both machine- and human-readable is best. We’ve provided an example below of a great attribution.
  • Non Commercial — You can’t sell our episodes. You can’t use them, or any part of them, for commercial purposes. This includes making them available on websites that sell ads.
  • No Derivatives —You can’t change our episodes. You can’t take excerpts from them that exceed Fair Use. You definitely can’t take one of our narrations and sell it as an audio single, or post it to your YouTube channel. If you want to sample from it for your next dance music mashup, you need to contact us first for permission. (And send us a copy – we’d love to hear it!)
  • No additional restrictions — You can’t share our episodes with stricter legal terms, or technological measures (like DRM) that restrict others from doing anything the CC license permits.
Proper attribution example

Creative Commons License
This work by Escape Artists Inc. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Forum

EA runs a private forum, available at forum.escapeartists.net. Anyone can access and read its posts. However, in order to post or participate in polls and contests, you will need to first register an account.

Please don’t create an account if:

  • you’re under the age of 13; or
  • for whatever reason, it’s prohibited by law for you to do so.

If you do sign up for a forum account, you are telling us you are 13 or older and that you agree to abide by all of these Terms of Use. You also agree to maintain the security of your password and identification, and to be fully responsible for all use of your account and for any actions that take place using your account.

The forum is moderated, and governed by The One Rule. Your behavior and use of the forum is subject to The One Rule. EA may terminate your account, delete your profile, and/or delete any content or information that you have posted on the forum at any time and at its sole discretion, with or without notice.

We assume anything you post on the forum is in your own words, written by you, or are excerpts from the works of others covered by the Fair Use principle. Posting another’s copyrighted work without their permission is grounds for immediate revocation of your account. And is majorly uncool. Please respect an author’s work.

You also agree that it’s okay (although in no way guaranteed) that whatever you posted will remain there indefinitely to be viewed by anyone.

Third Party Content

EA does not take responsibility for the content of our authors, narrators, sponsors, etc., their web sites, or their products. We don’t take responsibility for anything on any sites we link to.

Likewise we don’t assert any ownership of material that isn’t ours. Authors retain their copyright and all rights to any other use of their stories. Any contractual rights we assert are covered by our contracts.

Views expressed by authors in their work are their own. Likewise hosts, musicians, and other contributors are responsible for their individual contributions to our episodes and EA takes no responsibility for anything they may say.

All other text appearing on our websites, not including story excerpts, but certainly including the magnificent legal literature you are now reading, is copyright Escape Artists Inc.

Mature Content and Content Warnings

Our episodes may contain mature language, situations and concepts. Each market maintains a Content Warning page detailing their approach to signaling this content to their listeners.

Governing Law, Venue, and Jurisdiction

EA is a US-based company, and our websites and their content are hosted in the United States.

If you live outside the United States, be advised that your personal information may be transferred to the United States and you consent to (a) such transfer, (b) the application of the laws of the State of Georgia, without regard to principles of conflict of laws, which will govern these Terms of Use and any dispute of any sort that might arise between you and EA.

Please don’t sue us. Please contact us if something on our websites upsets you or causes you concern. However, if you for some reason decide you do want to sue us, you’ll need to do so in the State of Georgia in the United States. By using our websites or listening to our episodes, you consent to and waive all defenses of lack of personal jurisdiction and forum non conveniens with respect to venue and jurisdiction in the state and federal courts of Georgia.

Other Bits

These Terms of Use (which include our Privacy Policy) constitute the whole agreement between you and EA regarding your use of our websites, and completely replace any prior agreements between you and EA relating to your use of the websites.

To the extent that a translation of these Terms of Use differ from the English language version, the English language version controls.

EA not exerting any right, remedy, or provision of these Terms of Use does not constitute a waiver of such right or provision in that or any other instance.

If any provision of these Terms of Use are held invalid, the remainder shall continue to be valid and enforceable in full force and effect. Likewise if any provision of these Terms of Use shall be deemed unlawful by any magistrate of competent jurisdiction, void, or for any reason unenforceable, then that provision shall be deemed severable from these Terms of Use and shall not affect the validity and enforceability of any remaining provisions.

Privacy Policy

This section outlines the information EA collects, how we use that information, and how you can control how your information is shared. It goes hand in hand with the Terms of Use above.

The policy only applies to our websites. When you follow a link to another site, this privacy policy does not apply, and EA has no control over what information that third party may collect from you.

We Don’t Sell Data

That’s not our business; we publish fiction. We don’t make any data available to third parties unless a law enforcement agency or court of competent jurisdiction tells us we have to, or if we’re working with them to publish fiction. See the Sharing Your Information section below.

What We Collect and What We Do With It

  • Site Visitors

When you visit our sites, our web server logs your IP address and the page you visited or file you downloaded.

We use our hosting provider’s logging and traffic analysis to determine our audience size, and report that size to potential sponsors. We don’t attempt to tie your IP address to you, and we don’t share this information with anyone else. We just want to know how many people are visiting and what they want.

We may ask for permission to keep your email address on file, for example to be considered for future narrations, or if you signed up to our mailing lists. When we ask you to opt in, we’ll also tell you how you can opt out. You can also contact us at any time to opt out.

  • Donors and Patrons

We’re primarily in the business of buying and producing audio fiction to distribute on the internet for free. We sell sponsorship of episodes, and ask for donations from listeners, to make that happen. In the process of accepting your donation, we may see the email address you use to log into one of our donation platforms, like PayPal, Patreon, and Dwolla.

We don’t receive any credit card or bank information from any site. Even if we did, we would freak out and immediately notify both you and the platform that something was horribly wrong. It’s never happened, but if it did, you’d know about it as soon as we did.

We’ll use the name you provide to your donation platform of choice to thank you in our monthly donor appreciation blog posts. We’ll use your email address to send you regular (usually monthly) updates to our Premium Content folder, along with news or other announcements. If you don’t want to be included, you can contact us at any time and we’ll remove you from the list. But thank you just the same!

  • Anyone We Contract With

If you’re an author, narrator, artist or other recipient of a contract, our editorial teams will ask for some personal information to complete the paperwork. This normally includes a mailing address (necessary for a valid contract with an individual), your email address (for communication), and your preferred payment method. We only use or store this information to process or communicate with you about your contract.

Collection of Information by Third Parties

We don’t currently sell website advertising. If that changes, so will this section. It’ll talk about how your IP address will be provided to third parties if you visit our site and see the ads, how those third parties might use cookies, and how you can opt out.

Likewise any business dealings you have with a sponsor, beginning with the act of visiting a sponsor’s website, isn’t visible to us. They don’t pass any information back to us, and we don’t see your transactions (if any).

Cookies

When you make an account on our forum, our server gives your browser a cookie that can be used to identify you the next time you visit. In its simplest form, cookies keep you from having to remember your password.

Getting a bit more technical, cookies are alphanumeric identifiers that are transferred to your computer’s hard drive through your web browser to enable its systems to recognize your browser. These cookies are persistent, identifying cookies that remember your information and link your activities to you. While you can take steps to warn off, block or disable these cookies, if you do, this website may not function and appear as it is designed. Nonetheless, if you want to take these steps, you can do so by following the instructions associated with your browser. These cookies collect information such as the following:

  • the domain name and host from which you access the Internet and the Internet address of the site from which you direct-linked to ours;
  • the date and time you access the website and pages you visit;
  • your computer’s IP address and information about its operating system, platform and the web browser type and version you use;
  • demographic and other non-personally identifiable profile information about you; and
  • information to combat fraud or misuse

Sharing Your Information

EA only shares your information with others in the following circumstances:

  • as described above;
  • with our contractors and vendors, and only to the extent necessary for them to process your information as outlined in this policy;
  • as required by law enforcement agencies or courts of competent jurisdiction; and
  • as we, in our sole judgment, deem necessary to investigate any breach of security or reported harassment.

If EA becomes involved in a merger or acquisition or any form of sale of some or all of its assets, and we hold any of your personal data, we will provide notice to you (via an update to this policy) of any personal data to be transferred and/or subject to a different policy.

We may also share with third parties aggregated, non-personal information, such as the number of people who download from us every month, or purchased a particular issue of Mothership Zeta over a certain date range.

 

That’s it! Thanks for reading all the way to the end, and for your cooperation. Enjoy the stories!

October 2017