The agreement, in plain English.

A Board entry is a draft you write for the next beat of a script that is being written in the open — one moment, at the point the script has reached, up to 600 characters. You can also vote at the fork (choosing between two drafts, two at a time) and leave comments. All three are covered by these terms; where a section is only about entries, it says so. An entry is a piece of writing, not a screenplay and not a pitch for one.

You must be at least 18 years old to enter a round or vote at the fork. You can hold a CanonBoard account and read scripts at 16, but entering involves granting a licence, waiving claims, and being paid, and 18 is the floor for all three. You also need to be somewhere we're allowed to run a prize competition and send money — entry is void where prohibited, and we can't pay a prize into a jurisdiction that would make doing so unlawful. CanonBoard staff and their immediate households can't win a prize; they can still read, vote, and write.

When you enter, you're doing it voluntarily and in the open on the Board. You're not disclosing a secret, and nothing about entering creates a confidential, fiduciary, or agency relationship between you and the creator or between you and CanonBoard. Don't enter anything you intend to keep private or protected — a round is the wrong place for it.

Creators develop their own stories. It is entirely possible — and completely permitted — that a creator is already working on a beat identical or similar to yours, or writes one later, with no connection to your entry. You agree that a resemblance between your entry and anything a creator or CanonBoard makes, releases, or profits from is not, by itself, evidence that your entry was used, and is not a basis for any claim.

By entering, you give CanonBoard and the creator permission to do the things a round requires: show your draft on the Board (without your name on it while the round is open — see section 10), put it in front of readers to vote on, store it, and keep it as part of the permanent record of that round. That permission is non-exclusive, worldwide, and doesn't expire, because the record of a round doesn't expire. It is also the whole of what entering, by itself, gives us: entering does not put your beat into anybody's script and does not let us adapt it, sell it, or build on it. That happens only if your beat is chosen as canon — and section 7 sets out plainly what that transfers, because it is more than a licence and you should know it before you enter rather than after you win.

Each round has one winning beat, and the prize for that round is announced with the round — we don't promise a standing amount, because the amount is set per round. CanonBoard funds the prize out of subscription revenue and takes no cut of it: the full announced amount goes to the writer. If your beat wins, three things happen. It joins the script as canon. You're credited on it (section 9). And the prize is paid to you once you've signed the agreement in section 7 and a short holding period has passed — normally seven days from the day the win is confirmed, which is there so a disputed or manipulated round can be looked at before money moves. Payment is manual and goes to a PayPal address you give us; there's no minimum to clear.

This is the part worth reading before you enter rather than after you win, so here it is without the fog. If your beat is chosen as canon, it stops being a draft and becomes part of the script — and ownership of that beat passes to the project's owner, in full. Not a licence to use it: ownership. They can keep it, cut it, rewrite it, build on it, and use it in the finished script and in whatever that script becomes. The reason is practical rather than greedy — a script written by a hundred people can only be made if one owner holds all of it, and a beat still owned by its writer is a beat that stops the whole script being produced. What you get in return is the prize announced for that round, paid to you, and your name on that beat wherever the script is read, for as long as it is read (section 9). We think that is a fair trade and we would rather you weighed it now than discovered it later. Once your win is confirmed we email you a short agreement that says this in the form a production needs on file; you sign it and send it back, we countersign, and the prize goes out. Until it comes back signed we can't release the prize — that is a hard rule in the system and not a matter of discretion. If you'd rather not sign, tell us and nothing bad happens to you: ownership never moves, the beat is not used and does not become canon, the prize isn't paid, and you keep the credit for winning and the points on your leaderboard standing. You are never obliged to sign because you already entered. And everything you write that is not chosen as canon stays yours — entering a round does not take ownership of a draft that didn't win, and section 5 is the whole of what entering grants.

A prize is income and we have to treat it as such. If you're paid in the United States, we may need a completed W-9 from you before we can send anything, and if we pay you $600 or more across a calendar year we'll issue a 1099 for the total. If you're outside the United States we'll ask for whatever the equivalent form is for where you live. We're not able to give you tax advice and nothing here is any — what you owe on a prize depends on your own circumstances. We hold payment until the paperwork we need is on file, and we'll tell you plainly what's outstanding rather than leaving you to guess.

The writer of a winning beat is named on that beat, visibly, wherever the script is read — not only in a tooltip. Credit is automatic and doesn't depend on the prize, the paperwork, or anything else: it's a statement of who wrote what. You can ask us to change the name you're credited under, or to remove it, and we'll do that going forward. Credit is not a screen credit on a produced work; if a script CanonBoard develops is ever produced, credit on the finished thing is governed by whatever agreements and guild rules apply to that production, and we can't promise you anything about it here.

Rounds are decided by the Board, at the fork: readers are shown two drafts at a time and pick the better one, over and over, and those choices produce a ranking. Drafts are anonymous while a round is open — no name, no avatar, and no running vote count — so people are voting on the writing rather than on who wrote it. Only your first vote on any given pairing counts toward the score; you can keep voting as long as you like, and the repeats simply don't move anything. A person confirms the winner from the standings rather than the score releasing money on its own, and no plan, subscription, or payment of any kind is an input to that score. We can void a vote, an entry, or an entire round if we find manipulation, and we'd rather do that than pay out a rigged result.

You earn the right to enter a round by voting at the fork five times. If you'd rather not, a Canon Credit lets you skip that requirement — credits come with a paid plan or can be bought outright. We want to be exact about what that does and doesn't buy, because it involves money and a prize in the same sentence. It buys you past the voting requirement and nothing more. It does not make your beat more likely to win, show it to more people, show it earlier, or weight a single vote. The scoring has no access to your plan or your payments at all. Free accounts and paid accounts are judged identically, and the only difference a payment ever makes is whether you had to vote first.

To the fullest extent the law allows, you waive and agree not to bring any claim against the creator or CanonBoard arising from the use of your entry as described in these terms — including claims for idea misappropriation, breach of implied or express contract, unjust enrichment, or failure to compensate. This is about the ordinary running of a round: it does not waive anything we owe you for a prize you've won and signed for, and it does not cut off a claim that we failed to pay one.

You confirm that what you enter is yours to enter — that you wrote it, that it doesn't infringe anyone else's copyright, contract, or other rights, and that you're not barred from sharing it by an agreement with somebody else. Don't enter work generated for you by someone else and passed off as yours. If an entry of yours creates a problem, that's on you rather than the creator or us — see the indemnification section of our Terms of Service. We can withhold or claw back a prize for an entry that turns out not to have been yours.

We decide which scripts run rounds, when a round opens and closes, and what prize it carries. Creators decide what happens in their own stories outside a round. Within a round, the votes decide the winning beat and we confirm it — we don't overrule a result because we'd have preferred a different draft. What we can do is refuse or remove an entry that breaks these terms, void a round that has been manipulated, and decline to canonize a winning beat that turns out to be unusable, in which case no prize is owed for it and we'll say so.

Don't enter anything illegal, infringing, harassing, or off-limits under our Terms of Service. Don't manipulate votes, run multiple accounts, coordinate voting, or otherwise game a round. We can remove entries, void votes, suspend Board access, and withhold prizes for violations, following the same approach as the rest of our Terms.

We may need to extend a round, close one early, or cancel one — a technical failure, too few entries to judge fairly, or something that makes running it irresponsible. If we do, we'll say so on the Board. A cancelled round pays no prize and nothing in it becomes canon; entries stay yours and are released from section 5 on request. If a round has already been decided and its winner confirmed, we don't cancel it out from under them — that prize is owed and section 7 is the only thing standing between it and payment.

This section covers Live sessions only — everything above governs Boards and submissions, and nothing here changes it. When you appear on camera in a Live session, whether you are the creator hosting it or an invited guest, you grant CanonBoard a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to record the session and to use excerpts of it — clips, highlights, and stills — to promote CanonBoard. That use is limited to channels CanonBoard owns or operates: the CanonBoard site, CanonBoard’s own social accounts, and CanonBoard’s marketing materials. We don’t sublicense your footage to anyone else and we don’t sell it. You keep every other right in your appearance and in the work you discuss. You can withdraw this permission at any time by writing to us, and deleting or unpublishing the project does the same thing: we stop using the raw recording going forward and cut nothing new from it. Promotional material we published before your request stays up — once something is out in the world it cannot reliably be recalled. You must be 18 or older to appear on camera, for the same reason section 2 sets that floor for entering.

These terms are governed by the laws of the Commonwealth of Virginia, without regard to conflict-of-law rules, consistent with our Terms of Service.

We may update these terms. If they change materially, we'll show you the current version and ask you to agree again before your next entry. The version you agreed to is the version that governs the entries you made under it, and we keep every version we've published so that stays checkable.

contact@canonboard.com for anything in this document.