PLEASE REVIEW BEFORE USING THIS WEBSITE – IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO THESE TERMS OF USE, DO NOT USE THIS WEBSITE.

Introduction

Welcome to AKIKIRO.com. The mission of AKIKIRO (the “Services” or the “Site”) is to publish on the website creative materials in the form of short fiction and poetry that have been created by third-party writers for the entertainment of other website visitors, and to process submissions from writers using Submittable.com.

To provide the Services, we have to set out in this document some basic terms for using the Site (the “Terms”).

By using the Site, you represent and warrant that you are 13 or older and that you agree to and to abide by all of the terms and conditions of the Terms.

By accessing, using, or contributing to the Services or the Site, and in consideration for the Services we provide to you, you agree to abide by the Terms.

AKIKIRO may change the Terms from time to time, at AKIKIRO’s sole and unfettered discretion. Your continued use of the Site following the posting of such changes will constitute your consent, agreement and subscription to all such changes. Please periodically visit this section of the Site to review the current version of the Terms.

Limitation of Liabilities and Disclaimer of Warranties

THE SITE IS PROVIDED ON AN “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE” BASIS WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, OR OTHERWISE. WITHOUT LIMITATION, WE DISCLAIM ANY AND ALL WARRANTIES REGARDING THE SECURITY, RELIABILITY, TIMELINESS, AND PERFORMANCE OF ALL SERVICES ASSOCIATED WITH USE OF THE SITE. WE MAKE NO WARRANTY, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, THAT YOUR USE OF THE SITE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, TIMELY, OR ERROR-FREE. SOME JURISDICTIONS DO NOT ALLOW THE DISCLAIMER OF CERTAIN WARRANTIES, SO PORTIONS OF THE ABOVE DISCLAIMER MAY NOT APPLY TO YOU.

TO THE EXTENT NOT PROHIBITED BY APPLICABLE LAW, AKIKIRO AND ITS OWNER(S), FOUNDER(S), EDITOR(S) AND STAFF WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY DAMAGES OF ANY KIND ARISING FROM THE USE OF OR INABILITY TO USE THE SITE.

YOU EXPRESSLY AGREE THAT YOUR USE OF THE SITE IS SOLELY AT YOUR OWN RISK. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHALL AKIKIRO AND ITS OWNER(S), FOUNDER(S), EDITOR(S) AND STAFF BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, SPECIAL, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO LOSS OF PROFITS, INCOME, OR BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES, REGARDLESS OF THE NATURE OF THE CLAIM OR THE FORM OF ACTION, ARISING OUT OF OR CONNECTED WITH THE SITE (INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO ITS OPERATION, ITS RESPONSE TO SUBMISSIONS, ITS CONTENTS, OR THE INFORMATION OR MATERIALS CONTAINED THEREIN, OR THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE ANY OTHER SITE LINKED TO THE SITE, OR ANY CONTENT CONTAINED IN ANY SUCH SITE, OR THESE TERMS, OR THE PRIVACY POLICY APPLICABLE TO THE SITE) EVEN IF AKIKIRO, ITS SUPPLIERS, OR LICENSORS HAVE BEEN NOTIFIED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF ANY DAMAGES.

Privacy

AKIKIRO respects the privacy of our users and contributors. The Privacy Statement is expressly incorporated herein by reference and made a part of these Terms. 

Providing us with personal biographical information as part of your submission implies that you consent to its publication on our site and storage on our servers if your story or poem is selected for publication.

We do not require, so please do not send us, your street address or phone number.  Published biographies or profiles include only city, state and country, if at all.

Our policy is never to call submitters or contributors. If you ever receive any phone call from anyone purporting to represent Akikiro,  please hang up immediately.

Submission Fee and 24-hour Personalized Response

We may charge a Submission Fee at our discretion to assist the running costs of our operation.  You acknowledge that your payment of the Submission Fee at the Submittable.com website does not imply, warrant, confer or guarantee any benefit to you, including but not limited to receiving any correspondence from us or receiving writing advice, reviews or editorial services of any kind.  Your payment of such Submission Fee also does not imply that this Site will exist in perpetuity, or that your submission has any more likelihood of being published on Akikiro.com. 

You further agree that you shall hold AKIKIRO and its owner(s), founder(s), editor(s) and staff blameless and harmless if your submission is or is not selected for inclusion on our website, or if you do not receive a personal response or writing feedback, or if you do not receive a personalized response within one week of your submission, and that the decision to publish or not publish your submission on Akikiro.com is ours and ours alone.

Further, you agree that in any event related to AKIKIRO, whether it occurs on the Submittable platform, or via emails, or on the Akikiro website, or on social media, or elsewhere, your sole and maximum compensation shall be a full refund of the Submission Fee, if any, that you paid and no more, and that you have incurred no personal or professional harm or damages, whether emotional, financial or any other kind, and that you hold Akikiro blameless and harmless and not liable for damages of any kind.

No Payment to Contributing Writers

AKIKIRO is unable to compensate contributing writers, except where expressly stated in advance in writing. The Site generally features the stories and poems of writers who have generously and voluntarily contributed their creativity to AKIKIRO without the inducement of financial compensation because they see intrinsic value in having their work appear on our website. If you do not hold that position, please do not submit your work to us.

Works of Fiction

All poems and short stories on our Site are works of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the authors’ imagination or used in a fictitious manner and subject to fair use. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Licenses Applicable to Contributed Content

(a) License to Authors Contributing to the Site and Services. Any and all content contributed by you to the AKIKIRO Services or the Site is owned by you and you retain sole copyright over the materials you have submitted.

(b) License to AKIKIRO. By contributing content to the Site using these Services, you are granting AKIKIRO a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, and worldwide license to use your content in connection with the operation of the Site and Services, including, without limitation, the license rights to copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, edit, translate and reformat your content. You agree that we may also from time to time make a post or tweet using a brief excerpt from your content on Twitter, Instagram or other social media outlets which includes a link to our website. You maintain the right to publish your content elsewhere, online or offline, at any time and without any credit to AKIKIRO.

Editing

By contributing content to the Site using these Services, you are granting AKIKIRO the right to edit your story, poem or biography as we see fit without your express permission. Such editing may include corrections for spelling and grammatical errors, or more substantive alterations made to ensure that your content meets our editorial standards. In the event that you are unhappy with such changes and we are unable to reach an agreement with you on an accepted version, you maintain the right to ask us to remove your content from the Site, and we will delete your content within 72 hours of receiving your take-down request. We are not responsible for persistent or residual versions of your content which may exist on the web as a result of third-party web crawlers or search engines, or for any downloads, reposts or copies of your content, in whole or in part, made by us or by others anywhere on the Internet before your content was removed from our Site.

Photography

By submitting content to AKIKIRO, you grant us the sole right to select the photograph which will appear on the page with your written content.

Correspondence

You hereby agree and understand that any correspondence you receive from AKIKIRO and its owner, founder, editor and staff in the course of your submission process or at any other subsequent time is not to be construed as advice or counsel you should or must follow, and that any decision you make to pay heed to our correspondence and to take, or not take, any action based upon it shall be yours, with full knowledge that you are solely responsible for the consequences of actions you take, or do not take, during or after any correspondence with us.

Unacceptable Conduct

AKIKIRO has a zero-tolerance policy for real or implied threats, aggression, sexual abuse, bullying, racial or gender prejudice, abusive behavior or foul language. We maintain a blacklist of names of persons who have, in correspondence with us via email or on the Submittable submission platform transgressed, the policy.  All communication received from submitters and contributors is saved electronically and will be forwarded immediately to the appropriate law enforcement authority whenever we see fit.

Termination

AKIKIRO reserves the right to terminate and take down this entire website or delete any content posted on this website, including your submission, at any time with or without notice, for any or for no reason, and without any liability whatsoever to you. By submitting material to us, you acknowledge that you understand that AKIKIRO may remove any contributor’s presence on our website, including your own, with or without notice, for any reason, without any liability.

Updating website

AKIKIRO reserves the right to redesign or modify this entire website or any part of it, including any pages containing your name, submission or biography, at any time with or without notice, for any or for no reason, and without any liability whatsoever to you.

Browsing

You understand and acknowledge that material made available by AKIKIRO is a product of a community effort and does not necessarily represent the views of AKIKIRO or its owner(s), founder(s), editor(s) and staff. AKIKIRO assumes no responsibility for the accuracy, suitability, or completeness of any content provided.

Linking

You understand that AKIKIRO does not and cannot review all material made available through websites linked or linking to any part of the Site. You also understand that no such linking implies in any way that AKIKIRO endorses or is affiliated with any third-party website. You agree that AKIKIRO and its owner(s), founder, editor and staff bear no responsibility or liability for any content accessed or harm caused from any third-party website.

Acts Against the Site/Services

You shall not attempt or engage in potentially harmful acts that are directed against the Site or Services including, without limitation, the following:

(a) Using the Site or Services in contravention of any other agreement to which you are a party, including without limitation any employment agreement to which you may be a party; (b) causing, allowing, or assisting any other person to impersonate you; (c) forging user names, manipulating identifiers, or otherwise impersonating any other person or misrepresenting your identity or affiliation with any person or entity; (d) emulating or faking usage of the Site or Services; (e) violating or attempting to violate any security features of the Site; (f) using manual or automated software, devices, scripts, robots, or other means or processes to access, “scrape,” “crawl,” or “spider” any pages contained in the Site; (g) introducing viruses, worms, software, Trojan horses, or other similar harmful code into the Site or Services; (h) interfering or attempting to interfere with the use of the Site by any other user, host, or network, including without limitation by means of submitting a virus, overloading, “flooding,” “spamming,” “mail bombing,” “pinging,” or “crashing” the Site; (i) causing, allowing or assisting machines, bots, or automated services to access or use the Site or Services without the express written permission of AKIKIRO; (j) tampering with the operation, functionality, or the security of the Site or Services; (k) attempting to override or circumvent any security or usage rules embedded into the Site or Services that permit digital materials to be protected; (l) attempting to probe, scan, or test the vulnerability of the Site, or any associated system or network, or breach any security or authentication measures; (m) misusing, tricking, disrupting, or otherwise interfering with the functioning of the Site or Services; (n) harvesting or collecting email addresses or other contact information of other users or clients from the Site by electronic or other means; (o) reverse engineering, decompiling, disassembling, deciphering, or otherwise attempting to derive the source code for any underlying intellectual property used to provide the Site or Services; (p) engaging in “framing,” “mirroring,” or otherwise simulating the appearance or function of the Site; and (q) forging any TCP/IP packet header or any part of the header information in any e-mail or newsgroup posting.

Violations of system or network security may result in civil or criminal liability. You agree that it is your responsibility to install anti-virus software and related protections against viruses, Trojan horses, worms, time bombs, cancelbots, or other computer programming routines or engines that are intended to damage, destroy, disrupt, or otherwise impair a computer’s functionality or operation.

Restricted Access to Mature Content

Please be aware that the majority of the content found on or through the AKIKIRO service is for general audiences, but there may be certain adult or mature content. Where there is mature or adult content, individuals who are less than 18 years of age or are not permitted to access such content under the laws of any applicable jurisdiction.

Prohibition of Access to Children Under 13 Years Old

The AKIKIRO Service and its content are not directed to persons under 13 years of age. We do not knowingly collect or solicit personal information from children under 13 or knowingly allow such persons to use the Service.

If you are under the age of 13 you are not permitted to access or use the AKIKIRO Service under any circumstances. Such prohibited access to the AKIKIRO Service for children under the age of 13 applies to, but is not limited to, providing us with personal details of any kind, watching videos posted on the Site, submitting stories or poems to be considered for inclusion on Akikiro.com, writing or reading comments, using the contact form to contact AKIKIRO, or reading or sharing stories and poems published on AKIKIRO.

If we become aware that a child under 13 has provided us with personal information or that we have collected personal information from a child under age 13, we take steps to remove such information as quickly as possible. If you are a parent who becomes aware that your child under 13 has provided us with personal information without your consent, or you believe that we might have any information from or about a child under 13, please contact us.

Parental Notice

Pursuant to 47 U.S.C. Section 230(d) as amended, AKIKIRO hereby notifies you that parental control protections (such as computer hardware, software, or filter services) are commercially available that may assist you in limiting access to material that is harmful to minors. Information identifying current providers of such protection is available on the Internet (e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_content-control_software).

Content

Content contributed to the Site should be relevant to the subject scope of AKIKIRO. Content may not be illegal, obscene, defamatory, threatening, infringing of intellectual property rights, invasive of privacy or otherwise injurious or objectionable.

AKIKIRO pre-screens all contributed content, but AKIKIRO has the right (though not the obligation) to remove, without notice, any content posted which AKIKIRO considers, for any reason, to violate these Terms or to be outside the subject scope of the Services.

User Representations and Warranties

By submitting any content for posting on AKIKIRO, you represent and warrant that (a) you have all right, title, and interest to such content, including but not limited to any consent, authorization, release, clearance or license from any third party (such as, but not limited to, any release related to rights of privacy or publicity) necessary for you to provide, post, upload, input or submit the content, or (b) that such content is in the public domain or that your use of such content constitutes fair use.

You further represent and warrant that posting such content does not violate or constitute the infringement of any patent, copyright, trademark, trade secret, right of privacy, right of publicity, moral rights, or other intellectual property right recognized by any applicable jurisdiction of any person or entity, or otherwise constitute the breach of any agreement with any other person or entity.

You further represent and warrant that you are who you say you are, that you have not submitted fictitious, false or inaccurate information about yourself, and that all information contained in the posted content is true and your own work or work you are authorized to submit, and that the posted content does not contain any threatening, harassing, libelous, false, defamatory, offensive, obscene, or pornographic, material, or other material that would violate any other applicable law or regulation.

You agree that you will not knowingly and with intent to defraud provide material and misleading information. You represent and warrant that the content you supply does not violate the Terms.

Copyright Complaints

If you are a copyright owner and you believe that your copyrighted materials have been used in a way that constitutes copyright infringement, please comply with our Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA) policy set out as follows.

DMCA Policy

Akikiro respects the intellectual property rights of others. In accordance with the DMCA, Akikiro will respond expeditiously to claims of copyright infringement on the Site if submitted to Akikiro’s Copyright Agent as described below. Upon receipt of a notice alleging copyright infringement, Akikiro will take whatever action it deems appropriate within its sole discretion, including removal of the allegedly infringing materials and termination of access for repeat infringers of copyright protected content.

If you believe that your intellectual property rights have been violated by Akikiro or by a third party who has uploaded materials to our website, please provide the following information to the designated Copyright Agent listed below:

1. A description of the copyrighted work or other intellectual property that you claim has been infringed;
2. A description of where the material that you claim is infringing is located on the Site;
3. An address, telephone number, and email address where we can contact you and, if different, an email address where the alleged infringing party, or Akikiro, can contact you;
4. A statement that you have a good-faith belief that the use is not authorized by the copyright owner or other intellectual property rights owner, by the owner’s agent, or by law;
5. A statement by you under penalty of perjury that the information in your notice is accurate and that you are the copyright or intellectual property owner or are authorized to act on the owner’s behalf;
6. Your electronic or physical signature.

Akikiro may request additional information before removing any allegedly infringing material.

If Akikiro removes the allegedly infringing materials, Akikiro will immediately notify the person responsible for posting such materials that Akikiro removed or disabled access to the materials. Akikiro may also provide the responsible person with your email address so that the person may respond to your allegations.

Pursuant to 17 U.S.C. 512(c). the Akikiro designated Copyright Agent is:

Editor

Akikiro
Tel: 713 701 1482
Email: info@akikiro.com

Indemnities

You acknowledge and agree to indemnify and hold AKIKIRO and its owner, founder, editor, staff, affiliates, officers, employees and agents, harmless, including costs and attorneys’ fees, from any claim or demand made by any third party due to or arising out of your use of the Site or Services, your violation of these Terms, or the infringement by you of any intellectual property or other right of any person or entity.

Other Terms

Modifications

AKIKIRO reserves the right to change, at any time, at our sole and unfettered discretion, the Terms under which these Services are offered. You are responsible for regularly reviewing the Terms. Your continued use of the Site and Services constitutes your agreement to all such Terms.

Termination of Service

AKIKIRO disclaims all responsibility and liability for the availability, timeliness, security or reliability of the Services or Site, or any software provided through the Site. AKIKIRO reserves the right to modify, suspend, or discontinue the Services or access to the Site without any notice at any time and without any liability to you.

Scope of Terms

The Terms apply to use of and contribution to the Site and any account provided therefore. AKIKIRO may operate additional projects or services which require separate or additional terms. Such different terms are made available through the individual project or service and are not addressed further herein.

No Waiver of Terms

The failure of AKIKIRO to exercise or enforce any right or provision of these Terms shall not be deemed a waiver of such right or provision in that or any other instance.

Governing Law and Entire Agreement

These Terms constitute the entire agreement between the parties with respect to the subject matter hereof and supersedes and replaces all prior or contemporaneous understandings or agreements, written or oral, regarding such subject matter. If for any reason a court of competent jurisdiction finds any provision or portion of these Terms to be unenforceable, the remainder of the Terms will continue in full force and effect.