Terms of Service

1. Who we are and what this covers

First Verse ("First Verse", "we", "us") runs the website at firstverse.app and the services on it (together, the "Service"). These Terms of Service (the "Terms") are the agreement between you and us.

By creating an account, posting a poem, or otherwise using the Service, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree to them, please don't use the Service.

Our Privacy Policy explains what personal information we hold and what we do with it. It forms part of these Terms.

2. Your account

2.1 Age

You must be at least 13 years old to create an account. If you are under 18, you may only use the Service with the knowledge and permission of a parent or guardian, who agrees to these Terms on your behalf.

2.2 Signing up

You can create an account with an email address and a password, or by signing in with Google. Whichever you choose, give us an address you actually read: we use it to confirm the account, to tell you when your poems publish, and to reply if you write to us.

2.3 One person, one account

Your account is yours. Keep your password to yourself, and tell us promptly if you think someone else has access to it. You are responsible for what happens under your account.

2.4 Email confirmation

You need a confirmed email address before a poem can publish and before you can use the contact form. This is how we keep the site from filling up with disposable accounts.

3. Your poems and your rights

3.1 You keep your copyright

Posting a poem on First Verse does not transfer ownership of it. You keep every right you had in your work before you posted it, including the right to publish it elsewhere, sell it, enter it in competitions, or collect it in a book.

3.2 What you allow us to do

So that we can actually run a website, you grant First Verse a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, reproduce, display and distribute the poems, comments, profile text and images you post, and to make the technical copies and format changes needed to do that (for example, generating a preview card, or an excerpt in an email telling you your poem went live).

This licence exists only for the purpose of operating and promoting the Service. It is not perpetual and not irrevocable: it ends when you delete the work or your account, except for (a) copies that remain in routine backups for a limited period, and (b) copies other people may have already saved or shared, which we cannot recall.

We will not sell your poems, license them to third parties for their own use, or use them to train machine-learning models. Poems are sent to our moderation and evaluation provider only as described in section 5.

3.3 You must own what you post

You promise that the work you post is yours, that you have the right to post it, and that posting it does not break anyone else's rights or any agreement you have made (including exclusivity terms from another publisher). Posting somebody else's poem as your own is the fastest way to lose your account.

3.4 Attribution and editing

Your poems are published under the name on your profile. You can edit or archive a poem at any time while signed in. Editing a published poem sends it back through the same automated checks described below.

3.5 Feedback about the Service

If you send us ideas or suggestions about First Verse itself (not your poems), we may use them without owing you anything. This does not apply to your creative work.

4. What you may not post

Don't post anything that:

• is not yours to post, or infringes someone else's copyright, trademark or other rights;
• sexualises a minor, in any form;
• threatens, harasses or incites violence against a person or a group, or targets them for who they are;
• is a credible plan to harm yourself or someone else, rather than writing about harm;
• publishes private information about a real person without their consent;
• is spam, advertising, SEO filler, or bulk-generated text posted to game the feed;
• is unlawful where you are, or where we operate.

Poetry gets to be dark. Writing about grief, violence, addiction, sex between adults, cruelty or despair is not against these rules — that is a great deal of what poetry is for. The rules above are about doing harm, not about depicting it.

You also agree not to scrape the Service, hammer it with automated requests, break its security, or use it to distribute malware.

5. Review, moderation and AI checks

Every human submission passes through automated checks before the public can see it. Those checks look for the categories in section 4, and for work that appears to be somebody else's.

Those checks are performed in part by an AI service (currently Anthropic's Claude API). This means the text of your poem, its title, and the author name attached to it are transmitted to that provider for the purpose of running the check. The provider processes it to return a result; it is not used to train their models. The same applies to the optional craft evaluations described in section 7.

If a check flags something, a person looks before anything is decided. We may hold, decline to publish, unpublish, or remove work, and we may limit or close an account, when we believe these Terms have been broken. We will tell you by email when your poem publishes and when it does not. Automated checks get things wrong sometimes; if you think we have, write to us and a person will read it.

We are not obliged to review everything, and not reviewing something is not an endorsement of it.

5.1 Posting pace

To keep the feed readable, there are limits on how many poems one poet can publish in a given period, and how many poems the site publishes in a day. If a day is full, your poem is scheduled for the next available one. You can see and change the schedule while a poem is pending.

6. Poems that First Verse publishes

Alongside work by poets who post here, the Service publishes two other kinds of poem, both labelled where they appear:

• Public-domain poems. Curated reprints of work whose copyright has expired, shown with an attribution line.
• AI poems. Poems generated by First Verse and published under a byline that says so. They do not carry stars, and they are never presented as a person's work.

Neither kind is offered as, or mixed in with, anybody's own writing.

7. Paid features

Reading is free. Posting is free. There is no submission fee and no paywall on poems. Two optional things cost money:

7.1 Craft evaluations

You can buy credits and spend them on a detailed, private AI evaluation of one of your poems. An evaluation is an opinion generated by a language model against a fixed rubric. It is not a guarantee of publication, quality, or anything else, and it is never shown to anyone but you. The first evaluation credit is granted free when your first poem publishes.

7.2 Expedited publishing

When a day's publishing slots are already full, you can pay to have a poem published the same day instead of waiting. Your card is authorised at the time you ask and is only charged if we approve the expedite. If we do not, the authorisation is released and you are not charged.

7.3 Payments and refunds

Payments are handled by Stripe. We do not see or store your full card number. Prices are shown before you pay and include no hidden charges.

Unused evaluation credits are refundable on request within 30 days of purchase. A credit that has been spent — an evaluation has been generated and delivered — is not refundable, because the work has been done. If an evaluation fails to generate, the credit is returned automatically. If something has gone wrong with a charge, write to us; we would rather fix it than argue about it.

7.4 Changes to pricing

We may change prices. Changes never apply to credits you have already bought.

8. Tips to poets

Readers may be able to send a tip directly to a poet. A tip is a voluntary gift, not a payment for goods or services, and it is not a transaction with First Verse: we pass it through the payment provider the poet has set up and are not a party to it. Tips are not refundable by us. Poets are responsible for any tax owed on money they receive.

9. Copyright complaints

If you believe something on First Verse copies your work, tell us through the contact form or by email, and include:

• a link to the page on First Verse;
• a description of your work and where it was published;
• your contact details;
• a statement that you believe in good faith the use is not authorised, and that the information in your notice is accurate;
• your signature (typed is fine) as the rights holder or someone authorised to act for them.

We act on credible notices promptly. If your work was removed and you believe that was a mistake, tell us and we will look again. We close the accounts of people who infringe repeatedly.

10. Ending your account

You can delete your account at any time from your account page. Deleting it clears your personal details and takes your poems down with it. It cannot be undone, so export anything you want to keep first.

We may suspend or close an account that breaks these Terms. Where we can, we will tell you why and give you a chance to respond first — unless doing so would put someone at risk or is not possible.

Sections 3.2 (the licence, as limited there), 9, 12, 13 and any accrued payment obligations survive the end of this agreement.

11. Changes to the site and to these terms

First Verse is actively being built, and features come and go. We may change or discontinue parts of the Service.

We may also update these Terms. When we make a material change we will update the date at the top and, for changes that affect your rights, tell registered users by email before it takes effect. If you keep using the Service after a change takes effect, you accept the updated Terms.

12. Disclaimers and limits on liability

The Service is provided "as is". We do not promise it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that anything posted here will be read, starred, followed or paid for. We do not endorse the opinions in poems or comments posted by users.

To the fullest extent the law allows, First Verse is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data or lost opportunity, arising from your use of the Service.

To the fullest extent the law allows, our total liability to you for any claim relating to the Service is limited to the greater of (a) the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose, or (b) US$100.

Nothing in these Terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law, including liability for fraud, or for death or personal injury caused by negligence. Some jurisdictions do not allow some of these exclusions, in which case they apply to you only as far as the law allows.

13. Disputes and governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. Any dispute that cannot be resolved between us will be brought in the state or federal courts located in California, and you and we consent to their jurisdiction — except that either of us may bring a claim in small-claims court where it qualifies.

If you are a consumer resident in a country whose law gives you the right to bring proceedings locally, this section does not take that right away.

If any part of these Terms is found unenforceable, the rest stays in force. Our not enforcing a term on one occasion is not a waiver of it.

14. Contact

Write to us through the contact form, or at support@firstverse.app. Legal notices can be sent to legal@firstverse.app.

Questions about these terms? Use the contact form — it goes to a person.