Licensing & your work
1. Nothing is paid by you, ever
Echtborn never charges you to write, to use the tool, or to license your work. There is no upfront fee, no subscription required to license, and no hidden cost. If your licensed work earns money, you receive a share of that revenue. If it earns nothing, you owe nothing. The arrangement only ever flows money toward you, never away.
2. Licensing is opt-in, per piece, and revocable
By default, everything you create in the Studio is private and is not licensed to anyone. Licensing applies only to the specific pieces you explicitly switch on. You can turn it on or off for any piece at any time. When you switch it off, we stop capturing new process data for that piece immediately and discard any pending unsent data. Work already delivered under a license that was active at the time cannot be recalled from a buyer who already received it — but no new licensing of that piece happens after you opt out.
3. What is actually captured
For pieces you license, Echtborn records: the finished work; a detailed record of how you wrote it (your keystrokes and the actual characters, edits, pauses, and pasted passages — flagged as pastes); periodic full snapshots of your draft as it evolved, each fingerprinted with a cryptographic hash so the record is tamper-evident; and any reasoning notes you choose to add. Together this is the "audit trail" — and it is what makes the data genuinely valuable, because it evidences not just that a human made the work, but how and why, in real time. The more complete and honest this record, the more your work is worth, and the larger your share.
4. What the audit trail does and does not prove
We want to be precise, because honesty here matters. The process record is strong evidence that the work was created by a human in the manner shown. It is not an absolute, tamper-proof, or court-certified guarantee of authorship, and we do not claim it is. It is a detailed, timestamped record of activity in our editor. We describe it to buyers as exactly that — high-quality provenance signal — and never as something it is not.
5. Where your data is stored
The process record is stored separately from any public-facing part of Echtborn. It is never displayed publicly, never attached to your work in any feed, and is not served to anyone browsing the site. It exists only for the licensing relationship you opted into.
6. About protection from scraping — an honest limit
We try to protect your work, but we will not pretend to do the impossible. Any work that is displayed publicly anywhere can, in principle, be copied. What we can offer concretely: the process data lives off-site in a form that is not exposed to ordinary scraping of the public site, and if we detect misuse we will share with you the evidence we hold, so you can decide whether to pursue it. We cannot promise to prevent all scraping, and we cannot promise legal outcomes. Anyone who tells you otherwise is overselling.
6b. The free tier, honestly
If you never opt into licensing, you can still use Echtborn to write and keep your work privately, and we still try our best to protect it from scrapers — that protection isn't reserved for paying or licensing users. The free version is more limited (no process capture, no reasoning notes, no draft history) for one honest reason: those features and the storage behind them cost money, and we can't carry the full cost alone. Licensing is how the people who opt in help fund the tool for everyone. We'd rather tell you that plainly than pretend the limits are arbitrary.
7. The 14-day window before any deal
Opting a piece into licensing is your informed consent to the program — and it's the only way any process data is ever captured in the first place. Separately, before your piece is included in any specific deal with a buyer, you are notified and given at least 14 days to pull it out. If you remove it in that window, it is not included. This is a second chance for a change of heart, on top of the opt-in you already made — not the basis of consent by itself.
8. Revenue share
When your licensed work is included in a deal with a buyer, you receive a share of the revenue attributable to it. The specific share and payment mechanics will be presented to you clearly before any money changes hands, and recorded in your account. Because Echtborn is early, we will not invent a precise number here that we might not honor; what we commit to is that the share is real, disclosed in advance, and never zero for work that earns.
9. You keep ownership
Licensing is a permission, not a sale of ownership. You continue to own your work. You grant Echtborn the right to license it (and its process record) to buyers under the terms shown to you. You may keep using, publishing, and exporting your own work however you like, including elsewhere.
10. Your rights over your data
You can view what you have licensed, opt out going forward, delete your documents, and request deletion of your account and associated data. For data-protection questions (including your rights under Swiss revDSG and the GDPR), contact us and a real person will respond.
11. Contact
Questions about any of this? Email info@echtborn.com.