Version 1.4 — accepted at every submission of a work to Creations, and when you create a collection. These terms cover submitting a work and offering a collection. The Selling Terms cover buying and selling. The Licence Terms cover reuse licences, if you choose to offer them.
1. You are the seller
You set the price, the access terms and the duration for your work. You sell to buyers directly; BSVSearch lists, displays and delivers. BSVSearch never holds your funds, never touches your keys, and is not a payment processor.
2. Ownership warranty
You warrant that you own the work you submit, or hold every right needed to sell the access you are offering. Submitting content you do not own is grounds for removal and account termination.
3. License to BSVSearch
You grant BSVSearch the non-exclusive right to host the work, display your chosen free preview publicly, and deliver the work to valid purchasers — for as long as the work is listed, plus as long as any purchased access remains active.
4. Pricing, and what you receive
Prices are set in satoshis, within the platform’s current maximums and above its current minimum — all shown on the form and checked when you submit or edit, never retroactively. Price changes apply to future purchases only.
Your price is split into two payments, and part of it is the platform fee. Half or more of the price comes to you. The platform fee — 10% of the price or 1000 satoshis, whichever is greater — goes to BSVSearch. The same fee applies to everything you sell here: access to a work, a reuse licence, or a subscription to you or to one of your collections. The buyer’s wallet sends both payments itself, directly to each of you, so nothing is deducted from either payment along the way; BSVSearch never holds your money at any point. The fee comes out of the price rather than sitting on top of it, which means you bear it, not the buyer.
Each of the two payments also carries a small unique offset — a few satoshis added so that the site can tell one payment from another. So the buyer’s total lands slightly above the advertised price, and your own payment lands slightly above the price minus the fee.
The minimum price is 2000 satoshis. Both payments need to stay clear of the very small amounts that many wallets refuse to send. The fee already reserves 1000 satoshis of headroom for BSVSearch’s side; 2000 gives yours the same. At that minimum the 1000-satoshi floor is half the price. Its share falls as your price rises, until it reaches a tenth at 10000 satoshis — and from there up the fee stays at a tenth of your price.
The submission form shows you, as you type, what you would receive at the price you have entered. Read it before you settle on a price.
5. Taxes
As the seller, any tax obligations arising from your sales are yours.
6. Moderation
All submissions pass through review before publication, and substantive edits to a published work pass through review again. BSVSearch staff can always access submitted content for review purposes.
7. Versioning
These terms are versioned rather than amended. The version you accepted is recorded with your submission and continues to govern it. A new version applies only to submissions made after it takes effect.
8. Taking your work off sale
You can withdraw a work from sale at any time, from the work’s own page. You do not need anyone’s permission and nothing is reviewed again.
Withdrawing stops new sales. The work leaves the Creations listing and the site’s search straight away, and the free preview goes with it — somebody arriving from an old link is told only that the work is no longer available.
It does not touch access anyone has already paid for. Everyone who bought it carries on reading it exactly as before, and their access clock is neither paused nor shortened. That is the whole point of the feature: taking a work off sale is a decision about future buyers, never about past ones.
It is reversible. You can put a work back on sale whenever you like.
⚠ Withdrawing is not the same as archiving. Archiving unpublishes a work and stops every buyer reading it until it is published again. Withdrawing leaves them untouched. If what you want is for existing buyers to keep their access, withdraw.
⚠ On a free work, withdrawing removes it from the listings and from search but does not hide the work itself. A free work is not sold, so there is nothing to stop selling. Archiving is the right tool there. Only BSVSearch can archive a work, so ask us to do it for you.
Withdrawal is also your exit if the Selling Terms change and you do not want to sell under the new version: withdrawing stops new sales under it without disturbing anyone who has already bought.
9. If someone says your work infringes their rights
Anybody can file a claim about a work published here. Filing one does nothing by itself — a person reads it first, and most of what arrives never goes any further.
If a claim is accepted for review, your work is quarantined: it comes down, and access is switched off, including for people who have paid. Their access is suspended rather than cancelled and their clocks stop, so a claim that fails costs them nothing.
We tell you — by email and on the site — what has been claimed, by whom, on what basis, and how to contest it. That notification includes the claimant’s name and email address, because you cannot answer an accusation you cannot see the source of, and it is what starts the clock.
You have 14 calendar days from that notification to send a counter-notice, saying why you believe your work does not infringe. We pass it to the claimant in full, with your name and reply address, for the same reason we gave you theirs. They then have 14 days to show they have started legal action. If they do not, your work goes back up, and everyone’s paused access is repaid the time it lost.
If no counter-notice arrives, the claim stands unopposed, it is treated as established, and the work is removed for good.
An established infringement is recorded against your account. More than one costs you the ability to submit new works, and after that the account itself. A single one may cost the account, depending on what it was.
The whole process, including what happens to works inscribed on the blockchain, is set out on the notice-and-takedown page.
10. Reuse licences
You may offer a reuse licence on a work — the right for a buyer to use it inside one named project of their own, on the terms set out in the Licence Terms. Offering one is optional and is done on the work's own form. Buying access to read a work and buying a reuse licence are different products; nothing in this section changes what a reader gets.
By offering a reuse licence you agree to grant it on the Licence Terms, in the version in force when the buyer accepts them. Read them before you offer one. They are the buyer's document, but they describe what you are selling, and five things in them bind you:
You warrant the rights to license, not only to sell access. Section 2 of these terms covers the access you offer; a reuse licence needs more — the right to let somebody else put the work inside a film, a book, a site. If you do not hold that right, do not offer a licence. A reuse licence sold on a work you had no right to license is the one thing that can be revoked under Licence Terms section 12, and the buyer's recourse is against you.
A licence, once sold, is permanent for the project it names and cannot be taken back by you. Withdrawing the work (section 8) stops new licences being sold. It does not touch a licence already sold, whether or not the buyer's project has been released yet.
If you sell or transfer the work itself, you must sell it subject to the licences already granted, and you must pass the Licence Terms on to whoever takes it over, so that they know what has been sold against it. Whoever acquires the work acquires it with those licences attached. If you do not pass them on, you remain responsible to each licensee for anything the new owner does against their licence — it was yours to pass on, and the buyer had no way to do it for you.
Editing a work extends every licence and every access already sold to the new version. When you edit a work instead of publishing a new one, you are saying this is what the work should be — and everyone who bought access or a licence to it has access or a licence to the edited version as well as to every version that has existed since they bought. They are not obliged to update anything they have already released. If you want a new version to be a separate product, publish it as a separate work. Editing the same one never creates a new sale.
Enforcing a licence is between you and the buyer. BSVSearch keeps the record — the certificate, the project declared, the dates, the payment, the fingerprint of the work at purchase — and will give it to both of you. It does not check whether a project was released, does not judge whether a use was inside the project, and settles nothing.
Money for a licence works exactly as in section 4: the buyer pays you directly, the platform fee comes out of the price, and BSVSearch never holds any of it.
11. Subscriptions, and collections
Readers can subscribe to you, or to a collection of yours. A subscription is one payment for an access period — one, three, six or twelve months — during which the subscriber can read everything the subscription covers, including what you publish into it during that period. A subscription to you covers every work you charge for here. A subscription to a collection covers what is in that collection. Both are sold on the Selling Terms; this section is what you take on by offering one.
A collection is a set of your own articles that you name, describe and may price — a newspaper, a magazine, a newsletter, a blog, a book, a series: the word is yours, the rules are the same. Only your own articles can go in it, and an article can be in more than one collection. A collection with a price of 0 is free: readers can browse its list, and no subscription is offered on it. When you create a collection you accept these terms again, and the version recorded with it governs it, as section 7 says. A collection can be priced only under version 1.4 or later of these terms — the version that first states this section.
You decide what is in a collection, and you can change it at any time. An article you add is opened to every live subscriber at once, at no extra cost. An article you take out leaves their reading at once; they keep the rest. The article itself is untouched — it stays on sale on its own terms, if it has any. Withdrawing an article from sale (section 8) is different from taking it out of a collection: a subscriber whose access period began before you withdrew it keeps reading it until their access period ends; an access period bought afterwards does not include it.
You may mark an article as subscribers-only — not sold on its own, readable only through a subscription to one of the priced collections it is in. A subscribers-only article is never free: if you later make its last priced collection free, the site asks you to untick subscribers-only on the article first.
A subscription is a promise about your future work, and BSVSearch cannot make it for you. The subscriber pays you directly and finally, for something that does not exist yet. So, while any access period you sold is running:
Do not price a collection with nothing in it, and do not empty a collection or your catalogue while access periods on it are live. What a subscriber paid for is the collection as it lives, not a fixed list — but a collection that is emptied, or was never filled, has sold an access period to nothing.
If a collection you sold access periods to is withdrawn from sale or taken down, every live access period on it stops running until it is back, and the subscribers are told both times. Withdrawing a collection is therefore not like withdrawing a work (section 8): a work withdrawn keeps serving its buyers, a collection withdrawn pauses them. The same happens to every access period if your account is blocked or closed. If a collection is not coming back — or your whole catalogue goes — the rest of every access period on it cannot be served. The subscriber’s payment went directly and irreversibly to you, so their recourse is against you; BSVSearch tells them so, puts their case to you where that is still possible, and tells them what you say.
A rights claim on one article (section 9) affects that article alone; the subscriber’s access period keeps running. A rights claim on the collection itself pauses every access period on it, in the same way.
A collection with live or paused subscriptions cannot be deleted; withdraw it instead, and the subscriptions on it stay on the record.
Money for a subscription works exactly as in section 4: the subscriber pays you directly, the platform fee comes out of the price, BSVSearch never holds any of it, and a price change applies to access periods sold after it, never to one already running. The price of an access period sits between the platform’s current minimum and its current cap, both shown on the form. Nothing here renews itself: a subscription ends when its access period ends, and extending is the subscriber’s choice to buy again.
Earlier versions
Earlier versions of these terms were development drafts, written before the service had any users. None of them is in force.