Ownership & Licence
Roleplay creates something unusual: a character written by one person, placed in a world assembled by another, playing a scene written half by a model and half by a third person. This document says who owns what in that picture, and what each party may do with it.
It supplements the Terms of Service, Section 6, which is the general rule for all content on the platform. Where this document is more specific about roleplay, this document applies.
Effective: 22 September 2026 · Version: 1.3 (Section 2's training paragraph: 1 October 2026 for works published from that day, 31 October 2026 for works published earlier) Operator: APERTURESyndicate OÜ (Republic of Estonia (EU), Registry code 17384111)
1. You own what you write
Characters, worlds, lore, scenarios, openings, images you made or lawfully uploaded — yours. We claim no ownership, publishing does not transfer any, and nothing here is a buy-out.
Whether a given piece of writing is protected by copyright at all is a question for the law, not for us. A distinctive character card is likely to be; the word "detective" is not.
2. The licence you give us
The one from Terms of Service §6: non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, and strictly for running the service — storing your work, showing it to you, showing published work to the audience you chose, making the technical copies that requires (thumbnails, previews, caches, backups).
It is not a licence to sell your characters, to license them on to third parties for their own purposes, or to put them in advertising.
It ends when you delete the content or close the account, with the two practical limits stated in the Terms: backups rotate out on their own schedule (Data Retention), and copies lawfully made by others while your work was published do not vanish because you changed your mind.
Training: your own scenes are your choice. Your own conversations and scenes are used to train models only if you switch that on yourself — AI Data & Training. Turning it off stops future use; it cannot retroactively remove content from a model already trained.
A published card also lives in other people's scenes. Scenes played in ASAI belong to ASAI's training material on the terms of the player who played them. When a player who has allowed training plays a scene with a character or a world you published, that scene — including your card as ASAI received it — may become part of the anonymised dataset, whoever wrote the card. Publishing grants us this use. A card you keep private is never part of anyone else's scenes, so it is used only from your own scenes and only if you allowed training. Unpublishing stops new scenes from starting with your card; scenes already played stay as they are.
3. What a reader gets when you publish
Publishing a character or a world grants everyone who can see it a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to play with it inside ASAI, for as long as it stays published.
That licence covers: starting scenes with it, adding your published character to their world's cast by reference, and reading the public page.
It does not cover: republishing it as their own, selling it, taking the card's text out of ASAI and passing it off as theirs, or using it as a base for a product elsewhere. Those need your permission, separately, outside this platform.
4. Worlds built from other people's characters
A world holds its cast by reference. The consequences are deliberate:
- The author of a character keeps it. Someone using your character in their world cannot edit it, cannot rewrite its history, cannot change its voice.
- A version is pinned. A world points at a specific published version. When you release a new one, the world's author decides whether to take it. Your update cannot silently rewrite someone else's scenes, and their world cannot freeze you out of improving yours.
- Unpublishing removes it going forward. If you unpublish a character, worlds that already include it keep the version they took, so those worlds do not break. If we take a character down for breaking the rules, it is removed from every world that includes it. Either way, already-played scenes keep their text, because that text has already been written and belongs to the people who played it.
- A world's author owns the world, not its cast. Their arrangement, lore, scenarios and map are theirs; your character remains yours inside it.
If you would rather nobody build on your character at all, keep it private. Publication is the act that grants the play licence, and it is reversible only going forward.
5. Who owns what a scene produces
A played scene is a mixture: your input, the author's cards, and model output.
- Your side of it is yours. What you wrote, in your own words, is your content.
- Model output is not licensed to you by us as a work we own — we claim no copyright in it, and we do not promise you can. Whether machine output is protected, and for whom, is unsettled in most jurisdictions and differs between them. We are not going to pretend otherwise in a product document.
- It is nobody else's to publish. No other user gets access to your scene transcripts. Ours is not a browsing right either — see Trust & Safety for the narrow, logged exceptions.
- Using an author's character does not give you rights in the character. A scene you played with someone's character is your transcript; the character stays theirs.
If you intend to publish a story that came out of a scene — a fanfic, a novel, a comic — the practical answer is: your own writing is yours to publish, the other author's character is theirs, and you need their permission the same way you would anywhere else. We do not arbitrate this.
6. Third-party universes and fan characters
A character can be marked as belonging to an existing universe. That marking is metadata; it does not grant rights. Whether a piece of fan work is lawful depends on the rightsholder and on your jurisdiction, not on the field you filled in.
The rules for that — what is generally tolerated, what is not, and how a rightsholder files a claim — are in IP & DMCA Policy.
7. What we may do without asking
Short list, and it is deliberately short:
- Store, back up and serve your content to run the service.
- Show published work on its public page, in the library, in search, and in link previews.
- Generate derivative technical assets: thumbnails, preview images, translations of a scenario's opening into the languages ASAI supports.
- Unpublish, remove, hide from the Discover list, or correct the published copy of content that breaks the rules, or where a rightsholder or an authority requires it — with a statement of which rule was involved (Publication & Review). A correction touches only the published copy, never the one in your library.
- Use published cards as part of the scenes players have allowed us to train on (Section 2).
Not on the list, and never without separate consent: selling your characters, licensing them to third parties, or using them in advertising.
8. Ending it
Unpublishing withdraws the public licence going forward: the page stops being served, new scenes cannot start from it, and chats that were started from it end — the next turn is refused. Worlds by other authors that already include an unpublished character keep the version they took (Section 4). It does not reach into scenes already played or copies lawfully made while it was published.
Deleting removes the content from our systems subject to Data Retention.
Closing your account does both, and you can export your library first — Privacy Policy.
9. If you think someone took your work
Write to [email protected] with links to both items and what you believe was copied. Publishing someone else's published character as your own is a breach of the Creator Program rules, and we act on it without needing a court to weigh in. For formal copyright claims use the notice procedure in IP & DMCA Policy.
Version history
- 1.3 — 4 October 2026 — Unpublishing described as it works: chats started from the work end, worlds that already include an unpublished character keep the version they took, and a character taken down by us is removed from every world.
- 1.2 — 1 October 2026 — Section 2: a published character or world is part of the scenes other players play with it, and when those players have allowed training, those scenes — card included — may be used in the anonymised training dataset. Your own private content is still used only under your own switch. Section 7 lists this use. For works published before 1 October 2026 this applies from 31 October 2026.
- 1.1 — 1 October 2026 — Section 7 now lists every moderation step we may take on a published work, including hiding it from the Discover list and correcting the published copy.
- 1.0 — 22 September 2026 — First publication. States ownership of cards and scene output, the play licence a reader receives, how cast-by-reference splits rights between a character's author and a world's author, and what unpublishing does and does not undo.
Contact
[email protected] · correspondence in English or Estonian.
Operator APERTURESyndicate OÜ Republic of Estonia (EU) · Registry code 17384111 · VAT EE102972654 [email protected]