Version 1 This document is under legal review and may change.
Terms of Service
These terms are the agreement between you and BlackForge for using the BlackForge application during its private beta. They are written in plain language on purpose. The short version: you must be 16 or older; this is pre-release software; what you make stays yours; be decent to the people and the gear you share it with.
Contents
- Accepting these terms
- This is a beta
- Your account
- Acceptable use
- What you make, and licenses
- Personal use and commercial use
- Third-party services
- Reporting content and takedowns
- BlackForge's own property and brands
- Ending the agreement
- No warranty
- Limits on our liability
- Governing law
- Changes to these terms
- Contact
1. Accepting these terms
By requesting access, signing in, or using BlackForge you agree to these terms and to our Privacy Policy. You must be at least 16 years old to use BlackForge. If you are using it on behalf of a company or band, you confirm you can bind them to these terms.
2. This is a beta
BlackForge is pre-release software. That means:
- Availability is not guaranteed. The service may be down, slow, or reset without notice.
- Features may change or disappear. Something you rely on today may work differently tomorrow.
- Keep your own copies. We work hard to keep your rigs and devices safe, but during the beta you should export anything you cannot afford to lose.
- Access is by invitation and can be paused or withdrawn while we manage the beta.
3. Your account
- Give us a real email address and keep your password to yourself. You are responsible for what happens under your account.
- One person per account. Do not share sign-in details or use someone else's account.
- Tell us at privacy@blackforge.io if you think your account has been used without your permission.
4. Acceptable use
Use BlackForge to make music and to build things for people who make music. Do not:
- abuse, harass, or threaten anyone, or upload content that is hateful, sexual, or unlawful;
- upload or publish anything you do not have the rights to share, including other people's captures, artwork, recordings, or brand marks;
- scrape, crawl, bulk-download, or otherwise copy the service or other users' content by automated means;
- try to get around access controls, rate limits, or licensing checks, or probe the service for weaknesses without our written permission;
- reverse-engineer, extract, or redistribute protected devices, packs, or the AI generation service;
- upload malware, or use the service to send spam or to attack anything;
- pretend to be someone else, or imply that a real manufacturer made or endorsed something you built.
5. What you make, and licenses
You own your work
Devices, rigs, presets, captures, recordings, artwork, and names you create or upload are yours. We claim no ownership of them. We never sell your content or your data.
The permission we need to run the service
So that BlackForge can store, back up, display, and play your content for you, you give us a limited, non-exclusive, worldwide license to host, copy, process, and transmit it. This license exists only to operate the service (and to show your published work to other users under the license you chose) and ends when you delete the content, except where you have already published it under a license that permits others to keep using it.
Publishing, and the license you choose
When you publish a capture or a device, you pick the license and that license governs what everyone else may do with it. The choices BlackForge offers today are:
| License | What it lets others do |
|---|---|
| BlackForge | Any signed-in BlackForge user may play it inside BlackForge. You keep ownership. It is never exported or redistributed outside the service. |
| CC0 | Public domain. Anyone may use it anywhere, for anything, with no credit required. |
| CC BY | Use anywhere, including commercially, with credit to you. |
| CC BY-SA | Use anywhere with credit; anything built on it must be shared under the same license. |
| CC BY-NC | Non-commercial use only, with credit. |
| CC BY-NC-SA | Non-commercial use only, with credit; derivatives share alike. |
| CC BY-ND | Use anywhere, including commercially, with credit, but no altered versions. |
| CC BY-NC-ND | Non-commercial use only, with credit, no altered versions. |
The Creative Commons licenses are the standard ones published by Creative Commons; the linked license text is what applies. BlackForge enforces these choices where it can (for example, a capture under a license that does not allow redistribution is never bundled into an exported rig), and you agree to respect the license on anything you use that someone else published.
Your promise about what you upload
When you upload or publish something you confirm that it is original or licensed: you made it, or you have the rights to share it under the license you chose. Captures of real hardware you own are fine. Captures of commercial software without the rights holder's permission are not. If a claim arises because you uploaded something you did not have the rights to, you are responsible for it.
Brand names on your work
You may name the real gear a capture or device was inspired by, in words, to describe it. You may not use a manufacturer's logo, wordmark, lettering, or distinctive look, or suggest that the manufacturer made or endorsed your work.
6. Personal use and commercial use
BlackForge is built as an open core with a paid layer on top. During the beta everything you can reach is free to use. The boundary is about what you resell, not about how you use it to make music:
- Making music with BlackForge, including music you sell or perform for money, is always allowed. The free core never restricts your right to run the engine or to use the built-in devices in your own recordings.
- Sharing what you build is governed by the license you pick when you publish (section 5).
- Selling or redistributing devices, captures, packs, or artwork made by other people is allowed only where their license permits it. Content published under the BlackForge license, or any non-commercial license, may not be resold or redistributed.
- Protected content and paid features: premium devices and packs, the AI generation service, and any future marketplace are the paid, protected layer. They may not be extracted, copied, re-hosted, or resold, and the specific terms, prices, and revenue shares for them will be published when those features launch. Nothing in this document sets a price.
7. Third-party services
- Sign-in with Google or GitHub is subject to that provider's own terms.
- TONE3000. If you connect your TONE3000 account, your use of TONE3000 captures is governed by TONE3000's terms and by each capture's own license. BlackForge only fetches captures you choose, on your own account, and does not copy or redistribute the TONE3000 catalog.
- AI providers. Prompts and reference images you submit to AI features are processed by AI providers, as described in the Privacy Policy.
8. Reporting content and takedowns
If you believe something on BlackForge infringes your rights, breaks these terms, or should not be there, email privacy@blackforge.io with "Takedown" in the subject and include a link or name for the content, what you believe is wrong with it, and how we can reach you. We review every report, remove content that violates these terms or a valid rights claim, and honor removal requests from manufacturers about content that trades on their brands. Accounts that repeatedly infringe are closed.
9. BlackForge's own property and brands
The BlackForge application, engine, design system, house devices and artwork, AI pipelines, name, and logo are owned by BlackForge or its licensors. Open-source parts are available under their own licenses, which are the terms for those parts. Apart from those, these terms give you a personal right to use the service, not a right to copy or resell it.
All trademarks, logos, and brand names are the property of their respective owners. Any references to brands in BlackForge are for descriptive purposes only and do not imply endorsement by or affiliation with the original manufacturer.
10. Ending the agreement
You can stop using BlackForge at any time, and you can ask us to delete your account (see the Privacy Policy). We can suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, that puts other users or the service at risk, or as part of winding down the beta; where reasonable, we will tell you why and give you a chance to export your work. Sections 5, 9, 11, 12, and 13 continue to apply after the agreement ends.
11. No warranty
BlackForge is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including any implied warranty that it will be fit for a particular purpose, uninterrupted, error-free, or that it will not lose data. Some places do not allow these exclusions, so some of them may not apply to you.
12. Limits on our liability
To the fullest extent the law allows, BlackForge is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, or consequential loss, or for lost profits, lost data, or lost recordings, arising from your use of the beta. Our total liability for anything arising from these terms or the service is limited to the amount you paid us for it in the twelve months before the claim, which during the free beta is zero. Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law, including for fraud or for death or personal injury caused by negligence.
13. Governing law
These terms are governed by the laws of the operator's home jurisdiction, and any dispute will be heard by the courts there, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. Where consumer-protection law in your country gives you rights that cannot be waived, those rights still apply.
14. Changes to these terms
This is version 1. As the beta evolves and legal review completes we will update these terms; the version and effective date at the top will change, and for material changes we will tell you in the app or by email before they take effect. Continuing to use BlackForge after that means you accept the updated terms.
15. Contact
Questions about these terms: privacy@blackforge.io.