Terms and Conditions: +Fiction Shield

These Specific Terms and Conditions ("Shield Terms") govern the use of the cryptographic prior art certification and technical custody infrastructure known as +Fiction Shield & Sovereign Proof, operated by the +Fiction platform ("Platform", "We", or "Us"), headquartered in the Federative Republic of Brazil. By enabling custody, generating snapshots, issuing PDF certificates, downloading the Sovereign Technical Package (.ZIP), or using the public verification interface (/verify), the user ("Author", "Holder", or "User") declares to have read, understood, and fully accepted the clauses below.

1. Nature of the Service and Evidentiary Limitations (Proof of Existence vs. Authorship)

1.1. Technical Attestation of Temporal Existence: +Fiction Shield operates strictly as a technological tool for proof of anteriority (Proof of Existence) and mathematical data integrity. The service certifies that a specific sequence of bytes (normalized text in UTF-8/NFC) and its associated metadata existed on the Platform at a specific date and time, whose cryptographic digest (Merkle Root) was anchored on the decentralized Polygon PoS public network.

1.2. No Substantive Audit or Originality Verification: The Platform computes cryptographic hashes (SHA-256 and HMAC-SHA256) in an automated, blind, and deterministic manner at the time of submission or update of the work. +Fiction does not perform prior plagiarism audits, external prior art searches, or legal assessments regarding the intellectual originality of the submitted content.

1.3. Non-Replacement of Government Registries & Evidentiary Standards: +Fiction is not a notary public, government agency, or statutory registry office. While copyright protection in the 181 signatory countries of the Berne Convention (including Brazil under Law No. 9.610/1998 and the United States under 17 U.S.C. § 102) arises automatically upon the creation and fixation of the work without requiring formal registration, the certificates and technical manifests issued by +Fiction Shield constitute cryptographic and technical evidentiary proof of temporal existence (admissible under Articles 369 and 411 of the Brazilian Code of Civil Procedure, Rule 901(b)(9) and Rule 902(13) of the U.S. Federal Rules of Evidence regarding certified records generated by an electronic process or system, and Article 41 of the EU eIDAS Regulation No. 910/2014 regarding electronic time stamps). They do not replace optional statutory registration with government authorities (such as the U.S. Copyright Office, the Brazilian Fundação Biblioteca Nacional, or analogous national bodies), which may be required in specific jurisdictions (such as the United States under 17 U.S.C. § 411) to claim statutory damages or attorney's fees in federal court.

1.4. Derivative Works and Fanfiction: In the case of fanfiction (fanfics) or derivative works utilizing universes, trademarks, or characters owned by third parties, the certificate attests exclusively to the temporal anteriority of the specific textual arrangement submitted by the User on that date, granting the User no intellectual property rights, commercial licenses, or ownership over the underlying third-party original work.

2. Legitimate Use and Express Prohibitions (Abuse of the Tool)

2.1. Declaration of Ownership and Good Faith: +Fiction Shield must be used strictly for its legitimate purpose of historical documentation and protection of the User's own creative process. By submitting a text, the User represents and warrants, under penalty of civil and criminal law (including perjury), to be the legitimate author of the material or to hold express authorization to register it.

2.2. Prohibited Conduct: It is strictly prohibited to use +Fiction Shield for:

• a) Bad-Faith Timestamping (Fraudulent Anteriority): Submitting third-party works (plagiarism) with the intent to fabricate artificial proof of anteriority or attempt to shift the burden of proof against the true original author;
• b) Abusive Takedown Notices and Misrepresentation (17 U.S.C. § 512(f)): Using certificates, verification links (/verify), or technical manifests to submit false, defamatory, or bad-faith copyright infringement notices (DMCA Takedown Notices or equivalent mechanisms) against third parties on external platforms (such as Wattpad, Spirit Fanfics, Archive of Our Own / AO3, Amazon KDP, among others);
• c) Injection of Unlawful Content: Using text or metadata fields to anchor materials that violate applicable laws, personality rights, trade secrets, or third-party personal data without consent.

2.3. Sanctions and Revocation of Live Custody: Upon detection of fraudulent or bad-faith use via substantiated report or court order, +Fiction reserves the right to immediately revoke "Live Custody" on the /verify page, remove the content from the Platform, and permanently suspend or ban the offending User's account, without prejudice to providing connection and access logs to competent authorities.

3. Civil Liability and Safe Harbor Provisions

3.1. Exclusive User Liability: Pursuant to Articles 18 and 19 of the Brazilian Civil Rights Framework for the Internet (Law No. 12.965/2014 — Marco Civil da Internet), as well as international equivalents including Section 230 of the U.S. Communications Decency Act (47 U.S.C. § 230), Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. § 512), and the European Union Digital Services Act (Regulation EU 2022/2065), +Fiction acts strictly as an internet application and technical service provider. The User is solely and exclusively liable in civil, administrative, and criminal spheres for the content they publish, store, or submit for cryptographic certification.

3.2. Retention of Access Logs: In strict compliance with Article 15 of the Brazilian Marco Civil da Internet, the Platform maintains application access logs under confidentiality in a controlled and secure environment for the statutory period of six (6) months, which may be disclosed pursuant to a valid court order to instruct authorship disputes or investigate unlawful acts.

3.3. Indemnification (Hold Harmless): The User agrees to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless +Fiction, its partners, directors, and affiliates from any claims, lawsuits, damages, liabilities, costs, and attorney's fees arising from the misuse of +Fiction Shield, infringement of third-party intellectual property rights, or issuance of fraudulent DMCA notices (including liabilities under 17 U.S.C. § 512(f)) based on artifacts generated by the Platform.

4. Data Protection (LGPD & GDPR) and Blockchain Immutability

4.1. Data Minimization and Pseudonymization by Design (Privacy by Design): In strict compliance with the Brazilian General Data Protection Law (Law No. 13.709/2018 — LGPD, Art. 6, III and VII) and the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (Regulation EU 2016/679 — GDPR, Art. 5 and Art. 25), +Fiction Shield never records plaintext personal data on the public blockchain.

4.2. Cryptographic Architecture and Email Confidentiality:

• a) On the Public Blockchain (Polygon PoS): Only the Merkle tree root (merkle_root)—a 64-character alphanumeric string representing an irreversible mathematical digest of batched records—is recorded. No names, emails, user IDs, or story excerpts are transmitted to the blockchain.
• b) In the Cryptographic Leaf (leaf_hash): Ownership binding utilizes solely the internal numeric identifier (user_id) and a keyed-hash message authentication code (email_hmac), generated from the User's normalized email combined with a unique 256-bit (32-byte) cryptographic random salt (email_salt).
• c) Redaction in Public APIs: To prevent enumeration or Targeted Guessing attacks, email_salt and email_hmac values are omitted from public queries on the /verify page and delivered exclusively to the Author within their private Sovereign Technical Package (technical_manifest.json). The email ownership verification tool on the /verify page computes the hash locally inside the User's browser (via Web Crypto API), without transmitting the typed email address to the Platform's servers.

4.3. Legal Basis for Processing: The processing of the email address to generate the email_hmac and persist the snapshot is grounded in the performance of a contract and provision of the service requested by the data subject (Art. 7, V of the LGPD / Art. 6(1)(b) of the GDPR) and the establishment, exercise, or defense of legal claims in judicial, administrative, or arbitral proceedings (Art. 7, VI of the LGPD / Art. 17(3)(e) of the GDPR), ensuring the Author a perpetual technical means to prove ownership of their work.

4.4. Right to Erasure ("Right to be Forgotten") and Account Deletion:

• Should the User request the deletion of their work or termination of their account (Art. 18 of the LGPD / Art. 17 of the GDPR), the story text, profile data, and internal records will be erased or anonymized on +Fiction's servers, and the /verify page will immediately cease displaying author details or links to the work.
• The User acknowledges that the merkle_root previously anchored on the public Polygon blockchain is technically immutable, but without the technical_manifest.json file (held exclusively by the User) and following the purge of the Platform's database, the on-chain hash remains a purely random digest, mathematically impossible to reverse or link to any natural person (effectively anonymized data pursuant to Art. 12 of the LGPD and Recital 26 of the GDPR).

5. Data Custody, Sovereign Package (.ZIP), and Disclaimer of Warranties

5.1. Duty to Safeguard the Sovereign Technical Package: While +Fiction offers "Live Custody" (real-time online verification on the /verify page as long as the work remains published on the Platform), the Sovereign Proof mechanism was engineered to operate autonomously and independently of the Platform's future existence. It is the User's sole and exclusive responsibility to download and maintain secure backup copies of their Sovereign Technical Package (.ZIP)—containing certificate.pdf, content_canonical.txt, and technical_manifest.json.

5.2. Removal of Work by the User: If the User unpublishes or deletes the work from the Platform, live URL verification will be disabled. From that point forward, mathematical proof of anteriority before third parties or forensic experts will depend exclusively on the User presenting the files contained in the Sovereign Technical Package downloaded at the time of registration. +Fiction does not guarantee the recovery of technical manifests for works deleted by the User.

5.3. Reliance on Third-Party Infrastructure (Polygon Blockchain): External batch anchoring utilizes the public Polygon PoS blockchain network. +Fiction exercises no managerial control over Polygon network validators and shall not be liable for:

• a) Delays in block confirmation (network congestion), extreme fluctuations in transaction fees (gas fees), or temporary block reorganizations (chain reorgs);
• b) Potential hard forks, critical consensus failures, or future technological discontinuation of the Polygon PoS network.

5.4. No Guarantee of Outcome in External Disputes: +Fiction provides technical and cryptographic artifacts based on open international standards (RFC 6962, RFC 8785, FIPS 180-4 SHA-256), on an "AS IS" and "AS AVAILABLE" basis, without warranties of any kind. +Fiction does not guarantee that third-party platforms (such as Wattpad, Amazon, Spirit, AO3) or courts/arbitral tribunals will automatically uphold a plagiarism claim, as substantive textual comparison and legal judgment rest solely with the moderators, DMCA agents, or magistrates of each respective jurisdiction.

6. General Provisions, Language, and Governing Law

6.1. Amendments: These Terms may be updated periodically to reflect cryptographic improvements or legal compliance. Snapshots generated under prior versions remain technically valid according to the specification contained in their respective technical_manifest.json.

6.2. Prevailing Language: These Terms are originally drafted in Brazilian Portuguese (pt-BR). Translated versions in English, Spanish, or other languages are provided for international operational convenience. In the event of any conflict, ambiguity, or divergence in legal interpretation, the Brazilian Portuguese version shall prevail.

6.3. Governing Law and Jurisdiction: These Terms are governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the Federative Republic of Brazil. The courts of the judicial district of the Platform operator's headquarters in Brazil shall have exclusive jurisdiction to settle any disputes arising out of this instrument, without prejudice to mandatory consumer protection or data privacy rules applicable to the User's country of residence.