Terms of Service

These are the terms on which you use PageLab, operated by Orbyt LLC, a New York limited liability company. Most of what follows describes how the service actually behaves — every factual statement in it is checkable in the product. The last few sections are the legal ones: what we promise and do not, who is responsible for what, and where a dispute would be heard.

Who you are agreeing with

PageLab is operated by Orbyt LLC, 73 Liberty St., Owego, NY 13827, United States. Where these terms say “we” or “us”, that is the company. Contact routes for legal, privacy and child-safety matters are on the Legal Contact page.

Who may use PageLab

• You must be at least 13. There is no younger tier and no parental route in. An account we learn belongs to someone under 13 is deleted rather than suspended.
• Some accounts are on a restricted tier. An account we have been told belongs to someone under 18 has direct messages limited to accepted connections, is kept out of every surface that suggests people, has groups and reading-together in read-only, and has no recommendation model run over it. The full list is on the Child Safety page, which is in force; where these terms and that page could be read differently, that page governs.
• Telling us your age can restrict your account and cannot unlock it. A date you type is acted on where we have no signal from the platform — in either direction. A verdict from the app store platform always outranks a typed answer, and no answer you give can lift a restriction the platform has applied.
• The restriction ends when it stops being true. Where a typed date put an account on the restricted tier, we work out from that same date the month the restriction stops applying, and lift it then. The account returns to the ordinary unrestricted state — not to a confirmed-adult one, because nobody confirmed it.
• One account per person, and you are responsible for what happens under yours. Keep your email address accurate; it is how we reach you about the account, and it is the address a deletion or password reset is confirmed through.

Creating and keeping an account

• There are two ways in: an email address and password, or Google Sign-In. An account created with Google is linked to that provider; if you lose access to it, contact us rather than creating a second account. If we add another sign-in method, this page will say so before it is switched on.
• An unverified email address makes an account read-only. You can read PageLab, but posting, replying, messaging and most other writes are refused until the address is confirmed. This is deliberate: an address nobody has proved they control cannot be used to reach the person behind the account.
• If you mistyped your address, you can correct it without verifying the wrong one first — being locked out by a typo is not a security property.

What you post and send

This section covers everything you write or upload on PageLab — posts, comments, replies, reviews, ratings, quotes, reading lists, written works and chapters, images and video you upload, your profile and cover, and direct messages. Where the word “post” appears below, it means all of it. A direct message is private and stays private, but the permission we need in order to store one and deliver it to the person you sent it to works the same way as for anything else.

You keep ownership of everything you post. Nothing here transfers your copyright. What we need is permission to run the service: to store what you post, show or deliver it to the people you posted or sent it to, include what you post publicly in feeds and search on PageLab, and keep serving it where others have already replied to or interacted with it. A direct message is delivered to the person you sent it to and is never placed in a feed, in search, or in front of other users. The one exception is moderation: if a message is reported, the staff handling that report can read it, and the copy retained as evidence is covered by the same rules as any other reported content.

That permission ends when you delete the content, with two exceptions that exist so deletion cannot be used as a cleanup tool: a copy may be retained where it is evidence in a moderation matter, and where a retention hold applies (see below). A reply you left on someone else's thread stays readable as [deleted] after your account is erased, so the conversation around it does not collapse.

Stated operatively: you grant Orbyt LLC a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, reproduce, cache, back up, transmit, and display the content you post or send, and to reformat it — resize, compress, transcode, generate thumbnails and previews — where doing so is necessary to deliver it to the people you posted or sent it to. The licence is sublicensable only to the service providers we use to run PageLab (hosting, storage, content delivery, backup, and push notifications), and only for that purpose. Push notifications are worth naming plainly: a notification is delivered through Google Firebase Cloud Messaging and carries its own contents, which for a message notification is the text of the message — our Privacy Policy sets out exactly what that involves. The licence is not transferable to anyone else except as part of a transfer of the business itself, in which case the buyer takes it on these same terms.

What this licence deliberately does not include. It is not a licence to sell your work, to license it to third parties for their own use, to use it in advertising or promotional material, or to create adaptations beyond the technical reformatting described above. If we ever want to feature something you wrote outside PageLab, we will ask you, and you are free to say no.

Duration. The licence lasts as long as the content is on PageLab and ends when you delete it, subject only to the three exceptions already described — moderation evidence, a live retention hold, and the anonymised [deleted] tombstone that keeps other people's threads coherent. Copies retained under those exceptions are used only for those purposes. Backups are overwritten on their ordinary cycle rather than searched and edited, so a deleted item may persist in a backup for a short period after it disappears from the service.

What you promise about what you post. That you own it or otherwise have the rights to post it, and that posting it here does not break the law or somebody else's rights. You are responsible for your content; we do not pre-screen it, and under 47 U.S.C. § 230 we are not the publisher or speaker of what our users post. That does not lessen what we do about it once it is reported — see the moderation section above and the Child Safety page.

Suggestions. If you send us an idea for how PageLab should work, we may act on it without owing you anything for it. This is about product feedback, not the writing and reading you do on the service — that is covered by the licence above and is yours.

What you may not do

What may and may not be posted is set out in the Content Policy; how the service may and may not be used is in Acceptable Use. Material involving the sexual exploitation of children is handled differently from everything else, and that is described on the Child Safety page.

Moderation, suspension and appeals

• Reports go to people, not counters, with narrow exceptions. Where an automatic step does exist, it limits distribution rather than access: a post stops being amplified, the author keeps it, and a moderator can undo it.
• There are four sanctions, and every one is recorded with its reason: a warning, a seven-day suspension, a six-month suspension, a permanent ban. A person chooses which, having seen the account's prior sanctions — nothing escalates automatically. A moderator below our senior level cannot ban anyone alone: a second moderator has to agree. A senior moderator can act alone, at any length of ban.
• You will be told, and you can appeal. An enforcement notice names the address to appeal to. Suspension does not delete your content, and it does not stop you deleting your own account.
• Reporting stays available to you whatever state your account is in — it is not behind email verification and not closed to restricted accounts. Someone who has been harmed must not lose the tool because of the state of their own account.

Copyright

Our designated agent, what a takedown notice must contain, how to counter-notify, and our repeat-infringer policy are on the Copyright and DMCA page, which is in force. In short: accounts that infringe repeatedly are terminated, on the same escalation ladder described above, and content removed for infringement stays down.

Ending your account

• You can delete your account at any time, from your account page or at /delete-account. That page does not require you to be signed in, because losing access to an account must never be what stops you deleting it.
• Deletion hides the account immediately and erases it on or after 30 days. Signing in during those 30 days cancels it and restores the account.
• What survives erasure: replies you left on other people's threads, anonymised as [deleted]; and moderation records, reports and safety evidence. Those are kept because an account being erased must not erase the record of harm done to somebody else.
• A retention hold outranks a deletion request — including your own. While a hold is live, erasure, the scheduled deletion sweep, media clean-up and the pruning of IP records all refuse to run. A hold placed because a report was made to the NCMEC CyberTipline runs for at least twelve months and cannot be shortened or lifted early. Every hold has an end date; none is open-ended.
• The deletion page cannot tell you a hold is the reason. It answers identically whatever address is typed into it, so that it cannot be used to find out who has an account here. If you asked to delete and no code arrived, write to us and we will tell you directly.
• We can end your access too, under the moderation process above.

What PageLab costs

PageLab is free to use. There is no paid tier, nothing to subscribe to, and no purchase inside the app. If that changes, the terms covering it will be published before anything is offered for sale, not afterwards.

Changes to these terms

We record which version of these terms an account accepted, and when. When the terms change in a way that affects your rights or obligations, we will say so rather than change the page quietly — the effective date at the top of every policy page moves whenever its substance does, and we ask you again rather than assuming your earlier agreement carried forward.

• Declining a revised version means leaving PageLab rather than carrying on under it. You are told the terms have changed and asked to agree. If you decline, the app closes and the website signs you out. Nothing is deleted, nothing is suspended, and declining writes nothing to your account.
• Coming back presents the revised terms again. Opening the app or signing in asks the same question, because agreeing is the only thing that ends the asking. Accepting at any point — the next day, or a year later — restores normal use, with your account and everything in it exactly as you left it. Declining settles that visit, not the account.
• Deleting your account never requires agreeing to anything. The deletion page at the deletion page linked here does not ask you to sign in, and it is not behind this prompt or any other. That is true whether or not you have accepted any version of these terms, and it is what keeps declining a real choice rather than a trap: you can refuse a revised agreement and still close your account, without first agreeing to the document you are refusing.

The service is provided as it is

PageLab is offered “as is” and “as available”. To the fullest extent the law allows, Orbyt LLC disclaims all warranties of any kind, whether express, implied or statutory, including the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, and non-infringement, and any warranty arising from a course of dealing or usage of trade.

In practical terms: we do not promise that PageLab will be available without interruption, that it will be free of bugs, that anything you post will be preserved indefinitely, that the book information we show is accurate, or that moderation will catch everything. Keep your own copy of anything you would be sorry to lose. The library export on your account page exists for exactly that.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of implied warranties, so parts of this section may not apply to you. Nothing here is meant to limit any right you have that cannot be waived under the law where you live.

What we are responsible for, and what we are not

To the fullest extent the law allows, Orbyt LLC and the people who work on PageLab are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data, loss of goodwill, or the cost of substitute services — whether the claim is brought in contract, tort, or on any other basis, and even if we were told such damages were possible.

Our total liability to you for all claims taken together is capped at US$100. PageLab is free, so that figure is a fixed floor rather than a share of anything you have paid.

What this cap does not cover, and is not intended to cover: our own fraud, our gross negligence or wilful misconduct, death or personal injury caused by our negligence, and anything else a limitation of liability cannot lawfully reach. Those are excluded from every limit in this section.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion or limitation of certain damages, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

If your account causes us a legal problem

If a third party brings a claim against Orbyt LLC because of something you posted or did — content you had no right to post, or a breach of these terms, the Content Policy or Acceptable Use — you agree to cover our reasonable losses, damages and legal costs arising from it.

Three limits apply to that obligation:

• It applies only to claims brought by someone else. It is not a way for us to recover our own costs from you in a dispute between you and us.
• It does not apply to the extent the claim arises from anything we did wrong.
• We will tell you promptly about any claim we expect you to cover, will not settle it in a way that admits fault on your behalf without asking you, and will let you participate in the defence at your own expense.

Disputes, governing law, and where a claim is brought

Talk to us first. If you have a problem, write to support@orbytgames.com and give us 60 days to sort it out before starting a formal claim. Most things can be fixed at that stage, and this is not a trap: the 60 days pause the clock on nothing you would otherwise be entitled to, and either of us may go straight to court if waiting would let a deadline pass.

Governing law. These terms, and any dispute arising out of them or out of your use of PageLab, are governed by the laws of the State of New York, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply.

Where a claim is brought. Except for small-claims matters, you and Orbyt LLC agree that claims will be brought exclusively in the state or federal courts located in New York State, and both of us consent to the personal jurisdiction of those courts.

Small claims are preserved. Either of us may bring an individual claim in a small-claims court that has jurisdiction, wherever that court is. Nothing above takes that away.

Consumer rights are not waived. If you live somewhere whose law gives you rights that cannot be waived by agreement — including the right to bring a claim in your local courts, or the protection of a consumer statute — nothing here removes them. Where this section conflicts with such a right, the right wins.

If you are under 18

PageLab is for people aged 13 and over, and an account we are told belongs to someone under 18 is on the restricted tier described above. If you are under 18, you should read these terms with a parent or guardian, and by using PageLab you are telling us that they know you use it and agree to these terms on your behalf.

Where a term in this agreement cannot lawfully be enforced against a minor, it is not enforced against you, and the rest of the agreement carries on without it.

The rest of the agreement

• If part of this fails, the rest stands. If a court finds any provision unenforceable, that provision is limited or removed to the minimum extent necessary and everything else remains in effect.
• Not enforcing something once does not give it up. If we do not act on a breach, we may still act on it, or on the next one.
• This is the whole agreement between you and Orbyt LLC about PageLab, together with the other policy pages it links to. Where this page and a linked page could be read differently on child safety, the Child Safety page governs; on copyright process, the Copyright and DMCA page governs.
• Assignment. You may not transfer your rights under these terms. We may transfer ours to a successor of the business, on these same terms.
• How we reach each other. We contact you through the email address on your account and through in-app notifications, which is why keeping the address accurate matters. You reach us at the addresses on the Legal Contact page.
• What survives. If your account ends, for any reason and by either side, these sections continue to apply: the content licence for anything lawfully retained, the disclaimers, the limitation of liability, the indemnity, and this dispute section.
• Things outside anyone's control. Neither of us is liable for a failure to perform caused by something genuinely beyond our reasonable control.
• No third-party beneficiaries. This agreement is between you and Orbyt LLC. It does not give anyone else the right to enforce it.