Terms of Service

1. Who these terms are with

These terms are an agreement between you and BlackSlate AI Ltd ("BlackSlate", "we", "us"), a company registered in England and Wales. They apply to the BlackSlate website, the producer app, BlackSlate for Writers and the agent submission portal (together, the "Service").

If you use the Service on behalf of a company, you confirm that you are authorised to accept these terms for it, and "you" includes that company.

By creating an account or using the Service you accept these terms, our Acceptable Use Policy and, for business customers, our Data Processing Addendum. Our Privacy Policy explains how we handle personal data.

2. The Service

BlackSlate provides research and workflow tools for film and television development, including public domain rights data, story and trend research, a development slate, a screenplay editor, and tools for managing options, deals and submissions. We may change, add or remove features, and will give reasonable notice of changes that materially reduce what a paid plan includes.

Deliveries and deadlines. The Service can record when drafts are due, when they are delivered through it, and what was delivered. We keep those records, but we are not a party to any agreement between a producer and a writer. We do not decide disputes between them, and we are not responsible for either side keeping to their agreement. Our records show what passed through the Service and when; what the agreement requires is a matter for the people who made it.

3. Accounts

• You must be 18 or over and give accurate information.
• Keep your sign-in details secure and tell us at once if you suspect misuse. You are responsible for activity on your account.
• Accounts are for one person. Share access by inviting colleagues, not by sharing a login.
• Writers join by invitation from a producer. Agents use the agent portal to submit work to a production company.

4. Plans, payment and cancellation

• The Free plan is free. Paid plans are charged in advance, monthly or yearly, at the price shown when you subscribe, and renew automatically until you cancel.
• Payments are processed by Stripe. Prices exclude any taxes we are required to charge.
• You can cancel at any time from your account page. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period, and we do not refund part periods except where the law requires it.
• We may change prices with at least 30 days' notice. A change applies from your next renewal, and you can cancel before then.
• If a payment fails, we may suspend paid features until it is resolved.

If you are a consumer in the UK, you may have a legal right to cancel within 14 days of subscribing. If you ask us to start the paid service straight away, you may have to pay for the service provided before you cancel. Nothing in these terms affects your statutory rights as a consumer.

5. Your content

You keep ownership of everything you write, upload or create in the Service, including scripts, drafts, notes and deal records ("Your Content").

You give us a worldwide, non-exclusive licence to host, store, copy, process and display Your Content only as needed to provide the Service to you and to the people you choose to share it with, including processing by our AI provider to run the features you use. This licence ends when you delete Your Content or your account, except for copies in backups, which are overwritten in the normal cycle.

Confidentiality. Scripts, drafts and other work you upload are your confidential information. We use them only to provide the Service to you and to the people you choose to share them with, and we keep them confidential, except where the law requires us to disclose them.

We never use Your Content to train AI models, ours or anyone else's. Our AI provider processes it only to return the result you asked for, under terms that do not allow it to train its models on it. We do not share Your Content with anyone you have not chosen to share it with, except as our Privacy Policy describes.

What the Service produces for you. As between you and us, you own the output the Service generates for you, such as script reports, draft comparisons and casting suggestions, to the extent any rights exist in it. This does not give you any rights in third-party material that output refers to or contains, such as other people's works, names, images or data, and the Service may produce similar output for other users.

You confirm that you have the rights to the content you upload, and that it does not infringe anyone else's rights or break the law.

Preview Links. A Preview Link lets the person you send it to read a script. You control its expiry and can revoke it. We cannot stop a recipient from recording or copying what they are shown, so only send work to people you trust.

6. Our content and data

The Service, its software and design, and our databases and the selection and arrangement of their contents belong to us or our licensors. Subject to these terms and your plan, we give you a non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to use the Service and its content for your own development work.

You must not copy, scrape, extract or republish substantial parts of our databases, or use the Service to build a competing product. Book covers, artwork, logos and trademarks shown in the Service belong to their owners and are shown to identify the works they relate to.

7. Important disclaimers

Not legal advice. Public domain dates, rights status, clearance scores, risk flags and other information in the Service are research, based on public records and standard rules. They are not legal advice and do not create a lawyer-client relationship. Before you option, adapt, finance or exploit any property, take advice from a qualified lawyer in each territory concerned.

Accuracy. We work to keep our data accurate and show where it has not been verified, but records can be incomplete, out of date or wrong, and we do not guarantee them. You are responsible for checking information before relying on it.

AI output. Some content is produced with AI. It may be inaccurate or incomplete and should be checked. Casting suggestions, forecasts and scores are starting points, not recommendations.

More detail is in our Disclaimer.

8. Availability

We aim to keep the Service available and secure, but we do not promise it will be uninterrupted or error-free. We may suspend it for maintenance, security or reasons outside our control.

9. Suspension and termination

You can close your account at any time. We may suspend or close an account that breaks these terms or the Acceptable Use Policy, that puts the Service or others at risk, or where the law requires it, and we will tell you why unless we are not allowed to. When an account closes, your right to use the Service ends; you can export Your Content before then.

10. Liability

Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot be limited by law.

Subject to that, we are not liable for loss of profits, revenue, business, opportunity or goodwill, for decisions made in reliance on information in the Service, or for any indirect or consequential loss. Our total liability arising from or in connection with the Service in any 12 months is limited to the amount you paid us in those 12 months, or £100 if greater.

If you use the Service for business, you will indemnify us against claims arising from Your Content or your breach of these terms.

11. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. We will give at least 30 days' notice of material changes by email or in the Service. If you do not agree, you can cancel before the change takes effect.

12. General

• These terms, with the policies they refer to, are the whole agreement between us about the Service.
• If any part is found unenforceable, the rest continues to apply.
• If we do not enforce a right straight away, we can still enforce it later.
• You may not transfer your rights under these terms without our consent. We may transfer ours to a successor business.
• No one else has rights under these terms under the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999.
• These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and its courts have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer living in Scotland or Northern Ireland, you may also bring proceedings there.

13. Contact

Questions about these terms: legal@blackslate.ai.