Terms of Use

These Terms of Use govern access to WritingDesk Guardian™, its websites, protected reader, author area and associated features (the Service). “CombDesk”, “we”, “us” and “our” mean CombDesk LLC. Legal, support, security, rights complaints and appeal notices may be sent to contact@combdesk.com. The Service’s official website is https://writingdeskguardian.com.

An Author is a user who uploads, manages or shares a work. A Reader is a user invited to view a work or request permission. A Work includes a manuscript, book, lyrics, poem, essay, thesis, research paper, report, script or other supported written material. A Permission is an Author’s recorded approval for a defined action, version, section or page and, where specified, purpose and period.

These Terms do not automatically govern unrelated CombDesk products. A separately signed enterprise agreement takes precedence for its expressly covered matters. A data processing agreement governs processing carried out on a customer’s behalf. Mandatory local law takes precedence over conflicting provisions. The Privacy Policy explains personal-data practices; acknowledging it does not itself give consent to optional processing.

These Terms describe the conditions for using the Service. Read them before creating an account or using restricted features. Publishing these Terms does not itself record your acceptance. Where affirmative acceptance is required, it must be obtained at a clearly identified contracting step. Material new obligations require appropriate notice and acceptance where applicable law requires it.

Accounts are intended for people aged 18 or older who have capacity to contract. If a higher local age applies, that age governs. The Service is not directed to children. Do not create an account for a child or invite a child unless we separately approve a lawful supervised programme with suitable notices and protections. An age rule does not remove obligations arising if children’s data is actually received.

If you act for an organisation, you confirm authority to bind it and identify the correct rights holder. You must not use the Service where doing so is prohibited by applicable law or restrictions governing the Service’s lawful availability.

Provide accurate account and billing details, confirm your email when requested, and keep your credentials confidential. Do not share a Reader account to bypass named-reader controls, impersonate another person or register misleading identities. Tell us promptly through contact@combdesk.com about suspected account compromise.

You are responsible for authorised actions taken through your account and for reasonable care of credentials. You are not automatically responsible for every unauthorised event regardless of fault, and mandatory consumer protections remain intact. We may ask for proportionate verification to protect accounts or resolve ownership disputes. Do not send passwords, full payment-card numbers or unnecessary identity documents to support.

An organisation is responsible for its authorised users and for promptly removing access that is no longer needed. Access to an account is not proof of copyright ownership.

The Service supports importing works, sharing a link with a named reader, expiry and revocation controls, protected page viewing, permission requests, decisions, approved text or PDF release and activity records. Available features depend on file type, the applicable plan and the published feature description.

PDF viewing uses protected page images to present the original visible page appearance. Word and text imports are text-based and may not preserve fonts, images, spacing or layout. Extracted text can differ in reading order or contain extraction errors. Scanned PDFs can be viewed, but text copying requires OCR where available; do not assume OCR is included. Check the import and any export before relying on them.

Guardian controls actions within its own reader. It cannot prevent operating-system screenshots, photography, manual transcription, external OCR, previously obtained copies or every form of circumvention. It cannot observe where approved text is pasted later, compel an external AI service to honour a restriction or retrieve an already downloaded copy. Watermarks and activity records provide context; they do not conclusively establish infringement, identity or authorship.

The Service is not a copyright-registration authority, an AI-authorship detector, a plagiarism verdict, a legal adviser or a guarantee against unauthorised copying. We do not promise academic acceptance, successful enforcement or any particular commercial outcome.

You retain your rights in your Works. Uploading a Work does not transfer its copyright to CombDesk or grant us a general publishing licence. You confirm that you own or have the rights and permissions needed to upload, reproduce, process and share it, including third-party images, coauthored material and personal information.

You grant us a non-exclusive licence, limited to operating and supporting the Service, to store, reproduce, render, extract text from, create page previews of, watermark and transmit your Work according to your instructions. We may permit contracted service providers to perform these tasks subject to appropriate restrictions. The licence does not authorise public publication, resale or unrelated exploitation of your Work.

The licence lasts while needed to provide the Service and to complete permitted retention, backup expiry, legal preservation or dispute handling after deletion. It ends for copies no longer lawfully retained. Your account settings and sharing instructions determine which Readers receive access; providers and authorised personnel may process material as explained in the Privacy Policy.

CombDesk retains rights in its software, interface, documentation and branding. You receive a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use them for their intended purpose during authorised access. No trademark rights are transferred. Feedback may be used to improve the Service, but submission of feedback does not grant rights in a Work embedded in it.

Authors are responsible for choosing Readers, expiry dates, approved pages or sections, permitted actions and purposes. Check the request before approving it. A pending or declined request releases no approved copy. Permission for one action does not automatically approve another: for example, AI-testing text release does not itself approve downloading a PDF.

Readers must request permission through the provided workflow for restricted copying, downloading or submission to an AI-testing service. A request should accurately state the intended service, purpose and pages or sections. Do not misrepresent the purpose or use another person’s account. Unless an approval expressly says otherwise, it permits only the named Reader, approved action, identified material and recorded purpose; it does not permit redistribution, sublicensing, publication or model training.

A Reader must respect approval expiry and revocation for future use to the extent legally enforceable, and must not remove a watermark, misrepresent the permission notice or attempt to access unapproved content. Authors should understand that revocation cannot physically recall copies already released. Editing a Work or replacing its file can invalidate earlier approvals and require a fresh request.

An approval does not establish that the Author owns every embedded right or that an external AI service’s retention, training or disclosure terms are acceptable. Authors and Readers must consider those external terms before approving or submitting material. Guardian does not automatically submit Works to external AI-testing services merely because a request names one.

Nothing here extinguishes statutory exceptions or rights that cannot lawfully be restricted, including applicable fair use, fair dealing, accessibility or research exceptions. Their existence does not guarantee a technical bypass or make every requested use lawful. Contact the Author or support where an accommodation or rights issue needs resolution.

Treat nonpublic Works and information obtained through authorised access as confidential when their nature or accompanying notice reasonably indicates confidentiality. Use them only for the permitted purpose and disclose them only where authorised or legally required. Confidentiality does not apply to information lawfully public without breach, independently developed or lawfully received without restriction.

Do not upload material subject to secrecy, export, health, financial, legal-professional, defence or research restrictions unless you have confirmed that the Service’s contract, location and security controls meet those requirements. The Service is not presented as a certified repository for regulated records. Use redaction and data minimisation where possible. A separate NDA or research agreement may be needed; a watermark is not an NDA.

You must not use the Service to infringe intellectual-property or privacy rights; unlawfully disclose confidential information; upload malware; commit fraud; distribute unlawful sexual exploitation material; threaten, harass or unlawfully discriminate; impersonate rights holders; send unsolicited abusive invitations; or facilitate unlawful activity.

Do not circumvent authentication, permission checks, watermarking, storage or plan limits; scrape or mass-extract protected Works; access another account or private original file without authority; forge payment confirmations; interfere with availability; or mislead users about approvals. Reverse engineering restrictions apply only to the extent lawful and do not restrict nonwaivable interoperability or other statutory rights.

Do not use another person’s Work to train or fine-tune a model without the rights needed for that processing. Do not label a detector score as conclusive proof of misconduct or use the Service to fabricate accusations. Lawful criticism, research and responsible reporting are not prohibited merely because they are unfavourable to CombDesk.

Report security vulnerabilities privately to contact@combdesk.com. Conduct testing only within an expressly authorised scope. Do not extract other users’ data, degrade the Service or publish exploitable personal information.

Send alleged infringement, unlawful-content or privacy complaints to contact@combdesk.com. Identify the material and its Service location, your rights or authority, the alleged violation, your contact details and a good-faith explanation. We may request supporting information, notify the affected user where lawful and restrict disputed access while assessing the complaint.

Where a statutory notice-and-counter-notice process applies, we follow its requirements, including any applicable restoration or repeat-infringer procedures. A US DMCA safe-harbour designation is not asserted until a designated agent is registered and its details are published. Knowingly false reports may have legal consequences. We do not finally adjudicate ownership disputes or promise that every report will result in removal.

We may suspend offending access, remove unlawful content or terminate accounts for serious or repeated violations, subject to applicable notice, reasons and appeal requirements. Contact contact@combdesk.com for review. Urgent action without advance notice may be needed for security, legal obligations or a serious risk; we provide explanation afterward where permitted. We do not undertake general surveillance of every Work.

Readers are not charged for ordinary authorised reader access. Paid Author plans, when offered, are described at checkout with their price, currency, tax treatment, billing frequency, included features, limits and cancellation terms. The final checkout and order confirmation govern your selected subscription. No sample price or allowance in a demonstration is a launch offer.

Payments marked TEST or sandbox are simulations using the payment provider’s test environment and do not move real money. Do not enter real payment credentials into a test flow. Live billing begins only when expressly offered through a live checkout accepted by you.

Live charging is currently disabled. Any future paid subscription must disclose its renewal interval, payment provider, seller and applicable payment terms before purchase. We do not acquire ownership of your Work through subscription payment.

We may change future subscription prices after reasonable advance notice and subject to applicable law. Changes do not retroactively change an already paid period. Where required, you may reject a material change or cancel before it takes effect. Do not assume foreign-exchange costs, bank fees or locally assessed taxes are included unless checkout says so.

Use the Billing controls or contact contact@combdesk.com to cancel. The current test flow uses immediate cancellation. Future live checkout terms must state when cancellation takes effect. Cancellation and account deletion are separate actions.

After cancellation, expiry or failed payment, new uploads, new Works and new share links may be paused under the plan rules. Cancellation alone does not delete existing Works, original files, requests or activity. Existing links continue subject to their permission, version, expiry and revocation controls unless separately restricted for another lawful reason. We explain restoration steps in Billing. A failed payment is not restored merely by a browser success screen; confirmation from the provider is required.

No voluntary refund promise is made unless disclosed at checkout or in an agreed order. This does not remove statutory withdrawal, conformity, repair, price-reduction or refund rights. Consumers in the EEA or UK may have a cooling-off right. Immediate performance requires the specific request and acknowledgments required for the type of service; accepting these Terms alone is not a blanket waiver. For a continuing service, any lawful proportionate charge and loss of withdrawal rights depend on the applicable conditions, not merely use of the Service.

Mandatory local cancellation and renewal rules apply in all regions. Contact support for a statutory remedy. Any approved refund is handled through the applicable seller or provider. We do not deny a lawful remedy solely because a subscription was cancelled.

Storage includes originals and generated page previews and may include other stored components disclosed in your plan. The server reserves storage during uploads, verifies sizes and may refuse an upload exceeding your allowance. Concurrent uploads share the same allowance. Preview generation must fit within it; a failed new import may be rolled back, including its original and unfinished Work.

Abandoned upload reservations currently expire after 15 minutes. Cleanup of associated partial files is triggered on a subsequent upload; expiry is not a promise of immediate background deletion. This temporary-upload behaviour is separate from retained account Works and backups.

Maintain independent copies of your originals. An upload service is not a guarantee of permanent archival preservation. We will not automatically delete Works solely because billing has stopped. Deletion following an account-closure request, lawful takedown or service discontinuation follows the Privacy Policy and applicable notice obligations. Retention and export arrangements must be described before any inactivity-deletion programme is introduced.

We use reasonable care and skill in providing the Service but do not promise uninterrupted availability or support for every file or device. Maintenance, provider outages and security incidents can affect access. A separate signed service-level agreement is required for a guaranteed uptime commitment.

We may update the Service and security controls. For material adverse changes to paid functionality, we provide the notice and remedies required by law. If we discontinue the Service, we provide reasonable notice and a reasonable opportunity to retrieve Works where lawful and practicable, together with applicable prepaid-fee remedies.

External websites, AI-testing services and payment providers have their own terms and privacy notices. Links and named-service fields do not imply endorsement. We remain responsible for our own obligations and for processors where applicable law places responsibility on us.

Nothing excludes or limits liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including applicable liability for fraud, intentional misconduct, death or personal injury caused by negligence, mandatory consumer remedies or statutory data-protection obligations. We remain responsible to consumers for foreseeable loss caused by our failure to use reasonable care or comply with the contract, subject to applicable law.

For business customers only, and to the extent permitted by law, neither party is liable for indirect or consequential losses or lost profits arising from this contract. CombDesk’s aggregate contractual liability is limited to the greater of the fees paid for the Service during the preceding 12 months and USD 100. The cap does not apply to the nonexcludable matters above; separate enterprise terms may provide different caps. Privacy rights and claims are not waived by describing the Service as provided as available.

A business customer will indemnify CombDesk against third-party claims caused by that customer’s unlawful Work or deliberate or materially wrongful misuse, to the extent attributable to the customer. We give prompt notice, allow reasonable defence control and cooperation, and do not agree to an admission or obligation binding the customer without its consent. This indemnity excludes claims caused by CombDesk’s own breach or wrongdoing and does not apply to consumers.

Please first contact contact@combdesk.com with a dispute so we can try to resolve it. This informal step does not prevent urgent relief, regulator complaints or compliance with a limitation period.

No exclusive governing-law or court-selection provision is designated in these Terms. Applicable law determines jurisdiction. Consumers retain the mandatory protections of their habitual residence where applicable, including rights to bring proceedings in a local court.

These Terms impose no mandatory arbitration or class-action waiver. A future arbitration provision would require separate legal analysis and valid acceptance. Local rights prevail over limitations that are unenforceable in your jurisdiction.

Europe and the United Kingdom: mandatory consumer-contract, digital-service, accessibility, privacy and electronic-marketing protections prevail. Required local-language information and statutory withdrawal controls must be provided where applicable. A choice of foreign law does not remove mandatory local protections.

North America: applicable US federal and state privacy, consumer, automatic-renewal and intellectual-property laws and Canadian federal or provincial requirements remain applicable. Canadian consumers retain mandatory provincial rights, including required French-language contracting protections where applicable. No US-only disclaimer is intended to waive them. Mexico is covered by applicable local consumer and privacy requirements, not by an assumption that US law applies throughout North America.

South America: local consumer, data-protection and cross-border-transfer requirements apply, including Brazil where applicable. Required Portuguese, Spanish or other local-language notices and consumer cancellation rights must be provided for markets actually served.

Asia, Africa and the Middle East: there is no single regional legal regime. Country-specific privacy, content, consumer, international-transfer, localisation and representative requirements may restrict availability or require additional notices. We may limit a feature or a market where its requirements cannot be met. These Terms do not constitute a local licence, regulatory registration or representation that hosting in one country satisfies another country’s law.

Any additional country terms will be identified before they apply. Where a mandatory regional rule conflicts with the global core, the mandatory rule controls to the required extent. We do not require users to waive regulator access or nonwaivable remedies as a condition of sharing a Work.

We send operational notices through the account, your registered email or another lawful channel. Keep contact information current. Important changes are communicated with reasonable advance notice unless urgent security or legal needs require faster action. Changes are not retroactive; fresh agreement is obtained where required. You may stop using the Service and exercise applicable cancellation remedies if you reject a material change.

A failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver. If a provision is unenforceable, it is severed or limited only to the lawful extent, with the remaining agreement preserved where possible. Neither party is responsible for events beyond reasonable control to the extent permitted by law, but this does not erase accrued payment obligations, statutory refunds or duties to protect data.

You may not transfer an account to evade named-reader or rights controls. CombDesk may transfer the contract in a genuine reorganisation or sale only consistently with your rights, notice obligations and the Privacy Policy. These Terms, the selected order and any applicable signed agreement form the contract for the Service. Required translations and local-law interpretation take precedence where law requires; an English-language precedence rule cannot override them.