Draft pending legal review. Not yet reviewed by a lawyer.
Terms of Service
Effective date: [Effective date]
1. Who we are and accepting these Terms
ChopVOD (the “Service”) turns long stream recordings into short vertical clips. It is operated by [Operator legal name] (“we”, “us”), [Mailing address]. These Terms of Service (“Terms”) are a contract between you and us.
By creating an account, signing in or using the Service you agree to these Terms, to our Privacy Policy and to our Copyright and DMCA Policy. If you don’t agree, don’t use the Service.
2. Who can use ChopVOD
- You must be at least 13 years old.
- If you are under 18 (or under the age of majority where you live), you may only use ChopVOD with the permission of a parent or legal guardian, who agrees to these Terms for you and is responsible for your use.
- Paid plans and top-ups may only be bought by an adult (18 or over, or the age of majority where you live) who is allowed to use the payment method.
- If you use ChopVOD for a channel, team or business, you confirm you are authorized to accept these Terms for it.
3. Your account
You sign in with a one-time link sent to your email address, or with Twitch or Google where offered. Sign-in links expire after 15 minutes and a session lasts up to 30 days. Keep access to your email and sign-in accounts secure: you are responsible for what happens under your account. Use an email address you control, one account per person, and tell us at [Contact email] if you think someone else has used your account. Don’t create extra accounts to get more free hours.
4. Your content and the license you give us
“Your content” means the links and video files you submit, the creator name and titles you enter, and the clips, thumbnails, captions and titles made from them. You keep all the rights you have in your content. We claim no ownership of it, and to the extent we have any rights in the clips and text the Service generates for you, we assign them to you.
You give us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to download, copy, store, convert, transcribe, analyze and edit your content, and to share it with the service providers listed in our Privacy Policy, only as needed to make, store, deliver and re-render your clips, to run and secure the Service, and to meet our legal obligations. We don’t publish your clips, sell your content or use it in our marketing without your permission, and we don’t train AI models on it. This license ends when your content is deleted from the Service, except for copies the law requires us to keep.
Your ratings, downloads and title edits are used to tailor future clip picks for your account (see the Privacy Policy). If you send us ideas or suggestions, we may use them without owing you anything.
5. Only submit videos you have the rights to
You may only submit a video (a link or an uploaded file) that you own, or that you have the creator’s permission to clip and republish. Each time you submit a video you confirm this by ticking the box on the form, and we record when you did. If you can’t confirm it, don’t submit the video.
Videos, and streams especially, often contain other people’s material: game footage and soundtracks, music, other creators and guests, and viewers’ chat messages. You are responsible for having every right and permission you need for the clips you make and publish. We may ask you to show that permission, and we act on copyright notices as described in section 12.
6. Twitch, YouTube and where you post
ChopVOD fetches videos from the links you give it: Twitch past broadcasts and highlights, and YouTube videos where we offer that. For a Twitch link it also reads the video’s information, its public chat replay and the channel’s most-viewed viewer clips, to find the best moments. Twitch, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and other platforms are not affiliated with us. Their terms apply to you, and following them is your responsibility: that includes their rules on downloading, reposting, monetizing and labeling content, both for the platform the video comes from and for wherever you post clips.
A platform may remove a video (Twitch deletes past broadcasts after 7 to 60 days) or block our access to it, and we may stop supporting a source at any time. We can’t process a video we can’t fetch.
7. AI-generated clips, titles and captions
ChopVOD uses automated systems, including third-party AI models, to transcribe the audio, choose which moments become clips, decide where they start and end, cut quiet stretches, place the webcam in the Split layout, and write the captions, titles and emoji. This output is generated automatically and may be wrong, incomplete, out of context or offensive: captions can mishear words and names, a title can misdescribe what happened or say something you would never say, and a clip can leave out context that matters. Clean captions masks common swear words but will not catch everything. Similar output may be generated for other users.
Review every clip, title and caption before you post it. You are responsible for what you publish. You can rename a clip, which re-renders it with the new title, for 48 hours after its job finishes.
8. Acceptable use
You agree not to use ChopVOD to:
- process or publish material you don’t have the rights to (section 5);
- process anything illegal, including sexual content involving minors, intimate images shared without consent, or content that harasses, threatens or exposes private information about others;
- make clips that impersonate someone or deceptively present edited footage as something that didn’t happen;
- upload malware or files designed to harm the Service;
- get around the hour meter, plan limits, rate limits or access controls, for example with multiple free accounts;
- access the Service by automated means other than the app, probe or overload it, or copy, resell or reverse engineer it without our written permission.
We set technical limits, such as the longest video or largest file we accept and how many jobs can run at once, and show them in the app. We may change them.
9. Plans, video hours and billing
Usage is measured in video hours: each job uses hours equal to the length of the whole source video (not of the clips), rounded up to the next whole minute, with a minimum of one minute. The length is checked when processing starts. If you don’t have enough hours left, the job stops and nothing is charged. A job can’t start with less than one minute left.
- Free: no charge, 2 video hours per calendar month (UTC), clips up to 720p with a small ChopVOD watermark, up to 5 clips per job.
- Starter: US$12 per month, 20 video hours per billing month, clips up to 1080p without a watermark, up to 15 clips per job.
- Creator: US$24 per month, 60 video hours per billing month, clips up to 1080p without a watermark, up to 15 clips per job.
- Full-time: US$49 per month, 160 video hours per billing month, clips up to 1080p without a watermark, up to 15 clips per job.
- Top-up: US$5 for 10 video hours, a one-time purchase available on any plan (up to 10 packs at a time).
The number of clips per job is a maximum: shorter videos get fewer. Plan hours are used first, then top-up hours. Plan hours don’t roll over: they reset at the start of each period. Top-up hours don’t expire, but they have no cash value and end if your account is closed.
Subscriptions and renewal
Paid plans are monthly subscriptions, billed in advance in US dollars through our payment processor, Stripe. They renew automatically each month until you cancel, and you authorize us (through Stripe) to charge your payment method at each renewal. Your plan hours refill when the renewal payment succeeds. If a renewal payment fails, you keep your plan’s features while Stripe retries the payment, but your hours aren’t refilled until it is paid; if it is still unpaid after the retries, the subscription ends and your account moves to the Free plan. [Tax treatment: state whether prices include sales tax/VAT and whether tax is added at checkout.]
Changing plans
Plan changes are made on the Billing page. Because hours can’t be prorated the way money can, neither is:
- Upgrading (to a plan with more hours) starts a new monthly billing period immediately. You pay the full price of the new plan, your plan hours reset to the new plan’s full allowance, and your renewal date moves to the day you upgraded. There is no credit or refund for the rest of the previous period. If the payment is declined, your plan stays as it was.
- Downgrading (to a plan with fewer hours) takes effect immediately: your allowance for the current period becomes the new plan’s, and the hours you’ve already used this period still count. The lower price applies from your next renewal. There is no charge, credit or refund for the change.
We may change prices or plan allowances. We’ll tell you by email at least 30 days before a change applies to your subscription, and you can cancel before it does.
10. Cancellations and refunds
- Cancel any time on the Billing page under “Manage billing”, which opens Stripe’s customer portal. Your plan and its remaining hours continue until the end of the period you’ve paid for, you won’t be charged again, and then your account moves to the Free plan. Your clips and any top-up hours stay in your account.
- Deleting your account (section 11) cancels your subscription immediately instead. The rest of the period isn’t refunded, and any unused plan or top-up hours are lost.
- No refunds for partial periods or unused hours. We don’t refund the rest of a billing period after you cancel, upgrade or downgrade, or unused plan or top-up hours, except where the law requires it or these Terms say otherwise.
- Hours for failed jobs come back automatically. If a job fails, or you cancel it, before any clip is delivered, the video hours it used go back to your balance. Once at least one clip has been delivered, the job’s hours count as used. Plan hours are only returned within the billing period they were charged in; if the period has reset in the meantime, only top-up hours are returned.
- If you think you were charged by mistake, contact us at [Contact email] and we’ll look into it.
- If you are a consumer with a legal right to cancel a purchase or get a refund (for example the 14-day withdrawal right in the EU and UK), nothing in these Terms limits that right.
11. How long we keep your files
- Uploaded videos are deleted when their job fails or is canceled. When a job finishes, we keep the upload for the 48-hour editing window (so a renamed clip can be re-rendered) and delete it once the window closes. An upload that never becomes a job is deleted after 24 hours.
- An audio-only copy of each finished job’s source video is kept for the same 48-hour window, then deleted. Working files on our processing servers are deleted when each job ends.
- Clips and thumbnails, with their titles, captions and transcript excerpts, and your job history (including the link or file name you submitted) stay in your account until you delete them. When you rename a clip, the previous version’s files are deleted.
- You can delete things yourself. Delete a clip, or a whole job with all its clips and files, from the job’s page; deleting a job that is still running stops it first. Delete your whole account on the Account page: this cancels any subscription immediately (see section 10) and deletes all your jobs, clips and files. Deletion takes effect right away, files are removed from our storage within minutes, and it can’t be undone. The Account page also lets you download a copy of your data.
- For anything else, email [Contact email] from your account’s email address. We keep billing and payment records (held by Stripe) for as long as the law requires.
ChopVOD is not a backup service: download the clips you want to keep.
12. Copyright and DMCA
We respond to notices of alleged copyright infringement under the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act. How to send a notice or a counter-notice is set out in our Copyright and DMCA Policy. When we receive a valid notice, we remove or disable the clips it identifies and let the account holder know. We terminate, in appropriate circumstances, the accounts of users who are the subject of repeated valid notices.
13. Suspension and termination
You can stop using ChopVOD at any time: cancel your plan and, if you want, delete your account on the Account page (section 11). We may suspend or end your access, or remove content, if you break these Terms (especially sections 5 and 8), if the law requires it, or to protect the Service, other users or third parties. Where it is reasonable, we’ll tell you why first and give you a chance to download your clips. If we close your account for a reason other than your breach of these Terms, we’ll refund the unused part of your current paid period. If we shut the Service down, we’ll give you at least 30 days’ notice and refund the unused part of your current paid period and any unused top-up hours.
Sections 4 (for content we may keep by law), 7, 10, 12 and 14 to 18 continue to apply after your account ends.
14. Disclaimers
To the fullest extent the law allows, the Service is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy and non-infringement. We don’t promise that the Service will be uninterrupted or error-free, that any platform will keep allowing us to fetch its videos, that clips will be accurate, suitable or successful on any platform, or that stored files will never be lost. Some jurisdictions don’t allow these exclusions, so some of them may not apply to you.
15. Limitation of liability
To the fullest extent the law allows: we are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits, revenue, followers, data or goodwill, arising from or related to the Service or these Terms; and our total liability for all claims relating to the Service or these Terms is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim, or US$50. Nothing in these Terms limits liability that can’t be limited by law, such as liability for fraud or for death or personal injury caused by negligence.
16. Indemnity
To the extent the law allows, you will defend and indemnify us, and our officers, employees and contractors, against third-party claims, losses and costs (including reasonable legal fees) arising from the content you submit, the clips you publish, your breach of these Terms, or your violation of anyone else’s rights or of a platform’s terms.
17. Changes to these Terms
We may update these Terms. If a change is material, we’ll tell you by email or in the app at least 14 days before it takes effect, unless it is required sooner by law. If you keep using the Service after a change takes effect, the new Terms apply. If you don’t agree, stop using the Service and cancel your plan before then. The effective date above shows when these Terms last changed.
18. Governing law and disputes
These Terms are governed by the laws of [Governing law: state/country], without regard to its conflict-of-law rules, and disputes will be resolved in the courts located there. If you are a consumer, you also keep the protection of the mandatory laws of the country where you live and may bring a claim in its courts.
These Terms, with the Privacy Policy and the Copyright and DMCA Policy, are the whole agreement between you and us about the Service. If a part is found unenforceable, the rest still applies. If we don’t enforce a right, we haven’t waived it. You may not transfer these Terms without our consent; we may transfer them to a successor of the Service.
19. Contact
[Operator legal name]
[Mailing address]
Email: [Contact email]