Terms of Service

Please also see our Privacy Policy, Security Policy, and our Community Guidelines.

Welcome to Bushido!

To summarize: by using Bushido you agree to these terms.

These are Bushido's terms of use, and they apply to all users of the Bushido platform. “We,” “our” or “us” refers to Bushido Inc. and our subsidiaries. “Bushido” refers to this platform and the services offered by us. By using Bushido you agree to these terms and to the other policies we post. Please read them carefully and let us know if you have any questions. For information about our data practices, please see our Privacy Policy, including our Cookie Policy. We can collect and use your information in accordance with those policies.

Warranty disclaimer

To summarize: We do our best to make sure Bushido works as expected, but stuff happens.

Bushido is provided “as is” and without warranty of any kind. Any warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, and any other warranty is excluded to the greatest extent permitted by law. The disclaimers of warranty under this clause also apply to our subsidiaries, affiliates and third party service providers.

By uploading any Music or Artworks to the Site:

  • You represent and warrant, and can demonstrate to Company's full satisfaction upon request, that (i) you own or otherwise control all rights to your Music and Artworks (or that such Music and Artworks are in the public domain or have otherwise been directly licensed to the Artist in writing with a grant of rights sufficient to permit the Artist to enter into this Agreement and to grant all of the rights with respect to the Artist's Music or Artworks as set forth in this Agreement (hereinafter “Direct Licensed”); (ii) you have full authority to act on behalf of any and all owners of any right, title or interest in and to any Music you upload to the Service and to the Artworks; (iii) you have permission to use the name and likeness of each identifiable individual person whose name or likeness is contained or used within the Music and/or Artworks, and to use such individual's identifying or personal information (to the extent such information is used or contained in the Music and/or Artworks) as contemplated by these Terms of Use, and (iv) you are authorized to grant all of the aforementioned rights to the Music and/or Artworks to Company and all users of the Service.
  • You represent and warrant that the use or other exploitation of your Music and/or Artworks by Company and its authorized sublicensees and distributors and/or by users of the Site as contemplated by this Agreement will not infringe or violate the rights of any third party, including, without limitation, any privacy rights, publicity rights, copyrights, contract rights, or any other intellectual property or proprietary rights.
  • You represent and warrant that, to the extent you are the songwriter of any or all of the Musical Works embodied in your Sound Recordings or Music Videos, whether in whole or in part (e.g., as a co-writer), you have the full right, power, and authority to grant the rights set forth in this Agreement notwithstanding the provisions of any agreement you may have entered into with any performing rights organization (“PRO”), whether based in the United States (e.g., ASCAP, BMI or SESAC) or elsewhere, or any music publisher, and that you are solely responsible for taking all steps necessary to inform such PRO or music publisher of your grant of a royalty free license to Company for the public performances and communications to the public of your Musical Works, and that no fees or payments of any kind whatsoever shall be due to any PRO or music publisher for the public performance or communication to the public of your Musical Works.
  • You represent and warrant that no fees of any kind shall be due to any third party, including, but not limited to, any union, guild, non-featured vocalist or musician, engineer or producer, for the use or re-use of your Music as authorized under this Agreement.
  • If any agreement you have entered into with any third party, including, but not limited to a PRO, music publisher, union or guild, whether by law or contract, prohibits you from granting company the right and license set forth in this Agreement and making the representations and warranties set forth in the four paragraphs immediately above, then you are prohibited from uploading your music to the Service and shall be responsible for indemnifying and holding company harmless from and against any and all claims arising from the exploitation of your music on the Service, including all court costs and legal fees.

    Your account

    To summarize: You must be at least 13 years old to register for an account. You are responsible for your account.

    When you create an account you must provide us with accurate information, in good faith, and you agree to keep your information updated if it changes. To create an account you must be at least 13 years old. To join a creator's membership, or provide a membership as a creator, you must be at least 18 years old or have your parent's permission. You are responsible for anything that occurs when anyone is signed in to your account, as well as the security of the account. Please contact us immediately if you believe your account is compromised.

    Abusive conduct

    To summarize: Be responsible and don't violate our policies.

    You are responsible for all activity on your account. If you violate our policies we may terminate your account. Don't do anything illegal, abusive towards others, or that abuses our site in a technical way. If you are a creator raising funds on Bushido, we may be held accountable for what you do with those funds. As a result, we also look at what you do with your membership off our platform. You can find more detailed information in the Community Guidelines and Security Policy. These policies cover most issues, but if you find a new and creative way to hurt Bushido or our community we may take action to prevent it.

    All about being a creator

    To summarize: A creator is someone who creates a membership page on Bushido to engage with community members who have purchased memberships from Bushido to support the creator's creations. There are a lot of details below involving payments, fees, taxes and restrictions that you should read in full if you are a creator.

    Membership

    To become a creator, simply launch your page to start your membership. When you join Bushido, you become part of the Bushido community. You can use creator tools that Bushido provides, showcase your creations, provide merchandise to subscribers through Bushido's Merch service, and receive recurring revenue from your page. Memberships are for your most passionate fans. On Bushido, you can provide your subscribers something exciting that gives them unique benefits they want, like additional access, merchandise, exclusivity, and engaging experiences. In turn, you will receive loyal support from your subscribers, and recurring revenue from memberships that subscribers have purchased from Bushido.

    Payments

    As a creator you make your membership available on Bushido, and we provide membership to your subscribers on a subscription basis or one time payments. We also handle payments issues such as fraud, chargebacks and resolution of payments disputes. We try to provide timely access to your funds, but you may occasionally experience delays in accessing your funds. We may also block or hold payments for violations of our policies or for compliance reasons, including collecting tax reporting information. When payments are delayed or blocked we try to communicate the reason to you promptly. If you have questions about a payments block, please reach out to us. In order to protect creators, we may block subscribers' payments if we believe them to be fraudulent. Sometimes activities like refunds can put your account balance into the negative. If your balance becomes negative then we reserve the right to recover those funds from future payments. If you are a creator of 18+ content, to comply with payment processing rules you must verify that participants in your content are the age of majority, and you must store their consent to participate.

    Fees

    Creator shall receive 80% of all revenue received from Channel with an option to earn up to 90% based on annual earnings & volume of quality media uploaded over time. The remaining fees go to Bushido and Stripe (2.9%) paid out in 48 hours tracked in creators real time revenue dashboard.

    Tax

    We collect tax identification information and report this to tax authorities as legally required. You are responsible for reporting any income or withholding taxes which may be due as a result of payments received. You can learn more in our Tax Help Center. We are additionally responsible for a number of transactional taxes across the world. These include but are not limited to VAT on payments for electronically supplied services to subscribers in the EU, GST as an operator of an electronic distribution platform (EDP) within Australia, and state sales tax as a result of ‘marketplace laws' within the United States. For the purpose of electronically-supplied services, creators make a supply of those services to us, and then we supply them to the subscriber. To learn more about how we handle transaction taxes, please check our VAT guide. In locales where Bushido is required to collect transaction tax from subscribers, pledges processed from subscribers will reflect the tier or custom pledge amount plus the applicable tax. Applicable tax will not be taken from a pledge, but rather will be charged in addition to the pledge. Once settled, the tax amount will be automatically deducted for remittance to the applicable taxing authority. A record of the transaction tax portion of the pledge will be available on your earnings details page. As a creator on our site, it is your responsibility to provide accurate information when you are engaging with the sales tax weighting tool and, generally, when listing benefits transferred within your tiers.

    Restrictions

    We don't allow creations and benefits that violate our policies. You can learn more by visiting our Community Guidelines and Benefit Guidelines. A summary of those rules is that we don't allow:

    • Illegal creations or benefits.
    • Creations or benefits that are abusive towards other people.
    • Creations or benefits that use others' intellectual property, unless you have written permission to use it, or your use is protected by fair use.
    • Creations or benefits with real people engaging in sexual acts.
    • Benefits that involve raffles or prizes based on chance.

    If your fans include people under the age of 18, then please remind them that they need permission to join your membership, and those under the age of 13 cannot use Bushido. We are not required to allow any particular person or group of persons to be your subscriber.

    As a creator you are also responsible for keeping subscriber data safe. You can see what is required in our Data Processing Agreement. An account is tied to your creative output and cannot be sold or transferred for use by another creator.

    All about being a subscriber

    To summarize: A subscriber is someone who purchases memberships from Bushido to support their favorite creators' creations. Through a paid membership on Bushido, subscribers directly interact with creators they support, using tools supplied by Bushido, and through our platform have the opportunity to engage with a greater community of subscribers and creators.

    As a subscriber, you're joining Bushido to be part of an exciting movement to support a creator's membership while you get special benefits, which may include access to your creator, merchandise (when offered), exclusivity, and engaging experiences with the creator and subscriber community. In exchange, you pay Bushido for membership programs, on a subscription basis, to access and support creators you like.

    The timing and amount of each membership subscription depends on the type of membership agreement you enter into, and the creator you support. You can see the details as you join, as well as in the receipt sent to you after each successful payment. You can view all your active membership subscriptions and billing history on your membership page.

    To become a subscriber, simply create an account, add your preferred payment method, and join a membership program on Bushido to start supporting your creator! There are three types of membership subscriptions. One is a monthly subscription where you pay per month. The second is a per creation subscription where you pay based on the number of creations a creator posts in that month. You can set a limit on the number of creations you pay for in a single month under the per subscription model. The third membership option is an annual membership, where you pay for a year of access up front, at a discounted rate. Not all offerings allow for all three subscription types. Your options will be presented to you in the payment flow.

    You may cancel your membership payments at any time. Annual memberships may be cancelled, or increased, but not lowered. Terminating or lowering the tier support of membership will go into effect in the subsequent (not current) payment term, except for annual memberships which can be terminated or increased but not lowered. Increasing your payment to a higher tier level in an annual membership will go into effect in the current payment term. When you increase your payment for an annual membership during the term, you will get a credit for any payment already made in that term.

    For monthly or per creation payments, canceling your support may result in your loss of access to a creator's subscriber-only posts and benefits.

    These include when you cancel your membership subscription, your payment method fails, the creator blocks you, or the creator deletes their account. We are not required to allow you to be a subscriber of any particular creator.

    Creators' memberships vary and we have limited control over the quality and specific offerings. We attempt to screen for fraudulent creator pages, but cannot guarantee the identity of creators or the validity of any claims they make. We appreciate your help reporting suspicious creator pages so we can keep Bushido safe.

    If you are located in a jurisdiction in which Bushido is required to charge and collect tax (e.g. VAT or, sales tax), then this tax is added to the total charge. Except in limited circumstances, this tax is shown when you set up the initial membership subscription. Bushido remits all tax collected to the applicable taxing authority. As tax is largely dependent on your location, you are responsible for keeping your address complete and up to date.

    Depending on your location, some banks may charge you a foreign transaction fee for your membership subscription. Bushido does not control this charge, but it is typically around 3% . Please contact your bank for more information.

    Refunds

    Our policy is No Refunds, though we will allow for some exceptions where refunds are granted in our sole discretion.

    Bushido's role

    To summarize: We proactively look at some pages and posts on Bushido and review reported pages to identify potential violations of our guidelines.

    We proactively look at some pages and posts on Bushido to make sure creators follow our Community Guidelines and Benefit Guidelines. We also investigate reports of potential violations. These investigations may take a while to resolve and may include looking at what is supported by funds received through Bushido.

    In most situations we will work with creators to resolve any potential violations and allow the creator to continue using Bushido. Terminating accounts is not an action we take lightly and is done in only the most extreme cases.

    Bushido reserves the right to remove a creator or subscriber from participating in annual memberships. Removal of the creator or subscriber from participation in annual memberships will prohibit the creator from accepting new annual payments, and prohibit the subscriber from making new annual payments, but will not result in an automatic removal of the creator or subscriber from the platform, unless there is an independent basis for their removal from the platform.

    Please let us know if you see potential violations of our Community Guidelines. You can learn how to report them here.

    We are constantly testing out new features with the goal of making Bushido better. We may add or remove features, and often test features with a random subset of our community. If we believe a feature is significantly different from these terms, then we explain those differences in the test.

    With your permission, we may give other websites or services the ability to verify information about your Bushido account or perform actions on your behalf. This permission is asked for when you connect your Bushido account to these other websites or services. You can learn more in our Privacy Policy.

    Account deletion

    To summarize: You can delete your account here. We can disable your account at our discretion.

    You can permanently delete your account at any time by going to our Privacy Center. On that page you can also see what information is deleted and what we continue to store after the account is deleted. We can terminate or suspend your account at any time at our discretion. We can also cancel any membership subscriptions and remove any descriptions, posts or benefits at our discretion. You may not bring a claim against us for suspending or terminating another person's account, and you agree you will not bring such a claim. If you try to bring such a claim, you are responsible for the damages caused, including attorneys fees and costs. These terms remain in effect even if you no longer have an account.

    Your creations

    To summarize: You keep complete ownership of all creations, but you give us permission to use them on Bushido. Make sure you have permission to use creations that you offer on Bushido.

    You keep full ownership of all creations that you offer on Bushido, but we need licenses from you to operate Bushido effectively. By posting creations on Bushido you grant us a royalty-free, irrevocable, non-exclusive, sublicensable, worldwide license to use, reproduce, distribute, perform, publicly display or prepare derivative works of your creation. The purpose of this license is strictly limited to allow us to provide and promote memberships to your subscribers. We will never try to steal your creations or use them in an exploitative way. You may not post creations that infringe others' intellectual property or proprietary rights. We may ask you for consent verification for collaborators depicted in content funded through Bushido. subscribers may not use creations posted by creators in any way not authorized by the creator.

    Indemnity

    To summarize: If we are sued because of your use of or conduct on Bushido, you have to help pay for it.

    You will indemnify us from all losses and liabilities, including legal fees, that arise from these terms or relate to your use of Bushido. We reserve the right to exclusive control over the defense of a claim covered by this clause. If we use this right then you will help us in our defense. Your obligation to indemnify under this clause also applies to our subsidiaries, affiliates, officers, directors, employees, agents and third party service providers.

    Warranty disclaimer

    To summarize: We do our best to make sure Bushido works as expected, but stuff happens.

    Bushido is provided “as is” and without warranty of any kind. Any warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, and any other warranty is excluded to the greatest extent permitted by law. The disclaimers of warranty under this clause also apply to our subsidiaries, affiliates and third party service providers.

    Limit of liability

    To summarize: If you lose money as a result of using Bushido, any payment to you is limited to the amount of money we have earned through your use of Bushido.

    To the extent permitted by law, we are not liable to you for any incidental, consequential or punitive damages arising out of these terms, or your use or attempted use of Bushido. To the extent permitted by law, our liability for damages is limited to the amount of money we have earned through your use of Bushido. We are specifically not liable for loss associated with unfulfilled benefits and from losses caused by conflicting contractual agreements. For this clause “we” and “our” is defined to include our subsidiaries, affiliates, officers, directors, employees, agents and third party service providers.

    Dispute resolution

    To summarize: If you have a problem please talk to us. Any disputes with us must be resolved in San Francisco under California law.

    We encourage you to contact us if you have an issue. If a dispute does arise out of these terms or in relation to your use of Bushido, then the dispute will be resolved in the federal or state courts located in San Francisco, California. Both parties consent to the exclusive jurisdiction and venue of the San Francisco courts for the purpose of resolving any such dispute. California law, excluding its conflict of law provisions, governs these terms, all other Bushido policies, and any dispute that arises between you and Bushido.

    Everything else

    To summarize: These terms are the final word on Bushido's policies and we will tell you if we change them.

    These terms and any referenced policies are the entire agreement between you and us, and supersede all prior agreements. If any provision of these terms is held to be unenforceable, then that provision is modified to the extent necessary to enforce it. If a provision cannot be modified, it is severed from these terms, and all other provisions remain in force. If either party fails to enforce a right provided by these terms, it does not waive the ability to enforce any rights in the future. We may sometimes make changes to these terms and policies. If we make material changes that adversely affect your rights, then we will let you know before the changes come into effect. Continuing to use Bushido after a change means you accept the new terms or policies. These terms are an agreement with Bushido, Inc.,