Commercial Publishing and Distribution Agreement

Key financial terms

You retain copyright. The license is nonexclusive and royalty-free. StorySprouts may commercially exploit the covered Work as described below and retain all revenue it receives, without paying you royalties, license fees, or a revenue share. A future creator program does not entitle you to payment unless you and StorySprouts enter a separate written agreement.

1. Parties and covered works

This agreement is between AI Fusion Technologies, LLC, operating as StorySprouts ("StorySprouts"), and the authorized rights holder accepting it ("you"). Creating or continuing to an account, or submitting a book for review, after receiving the linked terms notice constitutes acceptance, recorded once for your account. No separate signature, legal-name form, or per-book authorization is required. This acceptance covers books already submitted or published under your account and books and revised versions you later submit for review or publication, including associated text, covers, illustrations, and credits (the "Work"). Creating or editing a private draft alone does not grant this license. Withdrawn works remain excluded unless you expressly authorize them again.

2. Ownership and grant

You retain ownership of your copyright and may publish, sell, and license the Work elsewhere. In exchange for participation in the StorySprouts publishing and distribution service, you grant StorySprouts a worldwide, nonexclusive, royalty-free license during the term of this agreement to reproduce, publish, distribute, sell, license, publicly display, publicly perform, and prepare the adaptations of the Work specified below. StorySprouts may exercise these rights directly and through the partners permitted by section 6. No further approval or author payment is required for uses within this grant, subject to the separate recording permissions in section 4. Rights not expressly granted remain yours.

3. Authorized commercial uses

StorySprouts may offer the Work free or for a price through websites, apps, retailers, marketplaces, libraries, schools, and other distribution partners. Authorized editions include ebooks, downloads, printed books, print-on-demand books, audiobooks, narrated reading videos, and digital or physical collections containing the Work. Authorized business models include individual sales, rentals, subscriptions, memberships, paid access, bundles, institutional licensing, advertising, and sponsorship.

StorySprouts may format, edit, abridge, translate, narrate, and adapt the Work into these editions and into illustrated or animated story videos and accessible reading formats. It may set prices and choose platforms, release schedules, presentation, and promotional offers. It must preserve appropriate credits, identify translations or adaptations as such, and not imply that the original author personally created or approved an adaptation. Nothing in this agreement waives rights that applicable law does not permit you to waive. Merchandise, standalone character licensing, and licensing the Work for AI model training are not included and require separate agreement.

4. Reader-created recordings

You authorize StorySprouts to let participating readers narrate the Work and combine its pages and illustrations with a voice recording and optional camera image, and to distribute the resulting reading videos through the authorized service and channels. Readers receive only the permission needed to create and submit these readings through StorySprouts, not a general license to republish the Work independently.

This license covers the underlying Work. StorySprouts must separately obtain the permissions needed to use and monetize a reader's recording, voice, likeness, and any recorded children. Permission to publish a recording publicly must not be treated as permission to monetize it unless the recording consent expressly covers that use. A reader's public-feature request remains subject to administrator approval.

Unlisted YouTube videos can be watched and shared by anyone who obtains their link. StorySprouts may restrict the account page and avoid publicly listing the link, but cannot guarantee that only an authorized account holder can obtain it. This agreement does not expand the audience or permitted uses of an existing reader's recording beyond that reader's consent.

5. Promotion and attribution

StorySprouts may use the Work, its title, cover, excerpts, and supplied author and illustrator credits to advertise, demonstrate, and promote authorized editions, readings, and the StorySprouts service through its website, channels, distribution partners, and advertising placements. It must preserve appropriate attribution and must not imply personal endorsement of an unrelated product. Author or illustrator photographs and biographical details require separate permission unless expressly included in the covered materials.

6. Partners and platform licenses

StorySprouts may sublicense the rights granted here to service providers, printers, narrators, translators, retailers, distributors, libraries, schools, and other publishing or media partners only for the authorized uses. Each sublicense must remain within this agreement's scope and respect its termination provisions; it does not transfer ownership of your copyright. StorySprouts remains responsible for its contractual obligations to you.

For YouTube uploads you authorize StorySprouts to grant the content licenses required by YouTube's Terms of Service at https://www.youtube.com/t/terms. Platform use, sharing, and retention are governed by those terms. This does not authorize uses of recorded people beyond their separate permissions.

7. Revenue and future creator programs

StorySprouts may earn and retain all revenue it receives from authorized sales, subscriptions, advertising, sponsorship, distribution, and licensing of the Work. Except where required by nonwaivable law or a separate written agreement, it owes you no royalty, license fee, revenue share, or other monetary compensation for these uses. StorySprouts may pay its providers and partners from its revenue; those arrangements do not create a payment entitlement for you. StorySprouts does not guarantee sales, exposure, or earnings.

StorySprouts may introduce optional revenue-sharing or other benefit programs for selected creators in the future. Participation, eligibility, covered works, rates, deductions, reporting, payment schedules, and effective dates will be defined in a separate written agreement accepted by StorySprouts and the creator. Becoming a frequent user, reaching an audience threshold, or the existence of another creator's agreement does not automatically qualify you. No future program applies retroactively unless its agreement expressly says so. Once a separate agreement is accepted, its payment obligations govern the uses it covers; this clause does not let StorySprouts disregard those obligations.

8. Authority to grant rights

You confirm that you control the rights needed to grant this license, including commercial, adaptation, illustration, and sublicensing rights, or have sufficient authorization from their owners. You must disclose exclusions or restrictions before acceptance. Materials for which you cannot grant the required rights must be omitted or covered by separately accepted permissions. StorySprouts may request evidence and suspend distribution while a rights concern is investigated. If you are not legally able to enter this agreement yourself, an authorized adult or representative must accept it with the necessary authority; managing a child's account alone does not establish ownership of the child's work.

9. Withdrawal of future publishing rights

You may withdraw publishing rights for a Work at any time through the Publishing rights controls in My books. Withdrawal takes effect when StorySprouts records your confirmed request, and the recorded withdrawal time is the cutoff. Until then, the license continues for the duration of the applicable copyright. Account closure or withdrawal from the review queue alone does not withdraw publishing rights.

Withdrawal applies prospectively only. From the cutoff, StorySprouts must pause future publishing of the Work, including new editions, adaptations, print runs, reprints, print-on-demand copies, new digital sales or downloads, and new sublicenses. Publishing may resume only with your express authorization. A previously published edition does not authorize additional printing after the cutoff.

Withdrawal does not invalidate uses lawfully made before the cutoff. Physical copies already printed before the cutoff may continue to be sold and distributed until that existing inventory is exhausted; they do not need to be recalled, destroyed, or removed from circulation solely because of withdrawal. For example, withdrawal after a paperback print run stops the next print run but does not affect the copies already printed. Copies already lawfully delivered or downloaded may continue to be kept and used under the permissions already granted. Revenue from earlier authorized uses and permitted sales of existing printed inventory remains governed by section 7; withdrawal alone does not require a refund or create a payment entitlement.

StorySprouts will stop new access through its hosted book pages when withdrawal is recorded and arrange removal of hosted reading videos and withdrawal from partner distribution as promptly as reasonably possible. External removal may require processing or retries; that delay does not authorize new publishing. Partner sublicenses must respect the same cutoff and the limited rights preserved for existing copies. StorySprouts may retain nonpublic records and snapshots to document acceptance, earlier authorized uses, and withdrawal. Copies already obtained by others cannot be recalled.

This provision does not override statutory termination, remedies for breach, or other rights that applicable law does not permit the parties to waive. StorySprouts may suspend or remove content in response to copyright complaints, lack of licensing authority, legal obligations, or policy violations. Separate permissions for recorded people and deletion of their reading videos remain governed by the reading-video terms.

Previously accepted versions continue to govern the works and rights they cover, including any promised withdrawal rights. StorySprouts also offers holders of earlier ongoing licenses the option to stop future publishing on the prospective basis described above, without rewriting their recorded acceptance or expanding the earlier grant. Any broader withdrawal or removal rights promised by an earlier agreement remain available.

10. Acceptance and later changes

Acceptance is recorded once for your account through account creation or continuation, or book submission, with the notice, agreement text, version, and date. Book records track covered works without repeated authorization. The linked notice discloses the commercial license, prospective withdrawal with protection for existing printed copies and earlier authorized uses, and retention of all revenue without royalties. Publication of terms alone does not establish acceptance or retroactively change earlier grants. Material expansions of an existing grant require agreement with notice. Reader permissions remain separate.