Terms & Conditions

1. Who we are and what Maru is

Maru is operated by [Operator legal name](“we”, “us”, the “operator”). It provides an account and website, an early preview of an experimental audio engine and creation tools, a community where people publish and play each other’s work, and products that may be offered for free or for purchase (together, the “Service”).

Preview tools, prototypes, experiments, and unreleased features are under active development. Unless we expressly state otherwise, those preview surfaces are provided for research and evaluation only and are not intended for production, safety-critical, or mission-critical use.

2. Your account

You must be at least 13 years old to hold an account, or older where your local law sets a higher minimum age for consenting to an online service on your own behalf. If you are under that age, do not create an account. You are responsible for all activity under your account and for keeping your credentials secure.

3. Your content, and the license you grant us

You keep ownership of what you make. Projects, source, presets, sounds, samples you upload, descriptions, artwork and comments (together, “your content”) remain yours. These terms do not transfer ownership of your content to us.

To run the Service we need permission to handle your content. You therefore grant [Operator legal name] a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, fully paid, transferable and sublicensable license to host, store, cache, reproduce, adapt for technical purposes (for example transcoding, compiling, packaging or building your project), publicly display, publicly perform and distribute your content, and to let other users of the Service play, audition, embed, download where the surface offers it, and fork your content where you have made it public or unlisted. This license exists so that the Service can do the things you asked it to do; it is not a license to sell your content as our own product.

You confirm that you have the rights to the content you upload, including to any samples, recordings, models or third-party code you include, and that publishing it through Maru does not infringe anyone else’s rights.

4. Public by default, and what public means

New modules you create in Studio are created as public. You can change a project’s visibility at any time from the Share control, which offers three settings: private (only you), unlisted (anyone with the link) and public (anyone, and listed on your profile).

When a project is public or unlisted, anyone who can open it can:

• play and audition it in the browser;
• read its latest saved source — the current revision, not your edit history;
• fork it into their own account (see section 5); and
• embed it on another website.

Your unsaved edits, your original brief, your agent conversations, your private projects and your revision history are not shown to other users. Publishing is your decision and you can reverse it for the future, but you cannot un-see what was already public: assume that anything you published may have been copied, forked or archived by someone while it was available.

5. Forks (the fork rule)

A fork is a new project in the forker’s own account, created from the source your project made available at the moment of the fork. A fork is an independent work from then on. It is owned and controlled by the person who made it, not by you and not by us.

Because of that, forks survive. If you later make your project private, archive it, or delete your account, forks that were already taken from it remain in their owners’ accounts and stay reachable at their own addresses. The same is true of the underlying content: Maru stores file bodies by their content digest, so identical bytes are stored once and shared between the original and its forks. Deleting your project or your account removes your project rows and the objects only your rows name; it does not and cannot reach bytes a surviving fork still depends on.

What deletion does remove is the attribution: once your account is gone, the fork’s lineage no longer resolves to a public parent and the fork is shown without a named original. If you need a fork of your work taken down rather than merely unattributed, that is a request under section 7 — write to us and say why.

6. Acceptable use

By using the Service you agree that you will:

• Use each part of the Service under its applicable access terms or product license. Preview tools and prototypes remain for research and evaluation unless we expressly state otherwise.
• Comply with all applicable laws and not use the Service to create, distribute, or facilitate anything unlawful, infringing, harmful, deceptive or abusive.
• Not publish content you do not have the rights to, including samples, recordings or code under a license that forbids it.
• Not attempt to disrupt, overload, reverse-engineer for circumvention, or gain unauthorized access to the Service or the systems and accounts of others.
• Take responsibility for the content you submit and for any output you choose to use, publish, or distribute.

7. Reporting and takedown

If you believe something published on Maru infringes your rights, breaks these terms, or should not be there, write to hello@maruaudio.com. Tell us what you are reporting (a link is best), and why. Community module pages also carry a Report link that opens a message to the same address with the page URL already filled in. A human reads it.

We may remove first and discuss after. Where a report looks credible we may hide or remove content, and suspend or terminate an account, before the matter is resolved, and we may do so without prior notice. We are a small team and we do not promise a response time; what we do promise is that the address above is read.

8. Suspension, termination and changes to the Service

We may suspend or terminate your access at any time, with or without notice, if we believe these terms are being violated, if it is needed to protect the Service or its users, or if we are required to. You may stop using the Service at any time and may delete your account from your account settings or by writing to us.

The Service is under active development. We may add, change, restrict or remove features, limits, quotas, storage allowances and surfaces, and we may do so without notice. A limit that is generous today is not a commitment.

9. Deletion, and what we keep

When you delete your account we remove your creator data — your projects, their revisions and the stored objects those rows name — as described in the Privacy Policy. Two carve-outs, both already stated above: forks taken from your public content survive (section 5), and we may retain records we are required to keep for legal, tax, accounting, security or dispute-resolution reasons. We aim to complete a deletion request within 30 days.

10. Products and product licenses

A product page, acquisition flow, or order may provide a separate product license. That product license supplements these terms and governs your rights to the specific product. If its terms conflict with the preview restrictions above, the product license controls for that product only. Acquiring a product does not grant rights to unrelated preview tools, source code, SDKs, online services, or future products unless the product license expressly includes them.

When the store describes a product as having a perpetual license, that means a one-time acquisition and continued use of the major version acquired, without a subscription. Future major versions, online services, and other products may be offered separately. The license recorded with your order is the record of the product terms presented at acquisition.

11. No warranty

Except where a product license expressly states otherwise, the Service is provided “as is” and “as available,” without warranties of any kind, whether express, implied, or statutory, including without limitation any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, secure, error-free, or that any output will be accurate, complete, or suitable for any purpose. Preview features may break, preview data may be lost, and their behavior may change without notice. Content published by other users is theirs, not ours, and we do not warrant it.

Keep your own copy. Do not treat Maru as the only place your work exists.

12. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, in no event will [Operator legal name], its maintainers, contributors, or affiliates be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for any loss of profits, revenue, data, goodwill, or other intangible losses, arising out of or relating to your access to, use of, inability to use, or misuse of the Service, content published by other users, or the access or misuse of the Service by anyone using your account, whether based in contract, tort (including negligence), strict liability, or any other theory, and whether or not we have been advised of the possibility of such damages.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, our total aggregate liability for all claims relating to the Service is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us to use the Service in the twelve months before the claim (if any) or CA$100.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties or the limitation of certain damages. Where that is the case, the exclusions and limits above apply to the fullest extent those laws permit, and nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited.

13. Your responsibility and indemnity

You agree to indemnify, defend and hold harmless [Operator legal name] and its maintainers, contributors and affiliates from any claims, damages, liabilities, losses and expenses (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of or relating to: your content and its publication; your use or misuse of the Service; your violation of these terms; or your violation of any law or of anyone else’s rights.

14. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of [Operator: jurisdiction], without regard to its conflict-of-law rules, and the courts of that jurisdiction have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising from them, except where mandatory local law gives you the right to bring proceedings elsewhere.

15. Not affiliated with similarly named companies

Maru is an independent research project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to any other company, product, or service that may share a similar name. Any resemblance in name is coincidental, and references to other products or trademarks, if any, are the property of their respective owners.

16. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms from time to time. When we do, we will revise the version and date above. Your continued use of the Service after changes take effect constitutes acceptance of the revised terms.

17. Contact

Questions, concerns, takedown requests, or deletion requests: hello@maruaudio.com. We read every message, though as a small team we cannot promise a specific response time.

See also our Privacy Policy for how we handle your data.