Terms of Use

Last updated: 12 October 2026

This document has not been reviewed by a lawyer. Sections 3, 11 and 12 in particular carry real legal consequence and are worth settling with counsel before RISE is promoted widely.

1. Agreement

These terms govern your use of RISE at https://rise.syberlabs.io/, the still-available https://rise.syberlabs.space/, and any other address at which we publish it (the "Service"), operated by Mateo Robles, doing business as SyberLabs ("we", "us").

By using the Service you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, do not use it.

2. What RISE is, and what it is not

RISE is an experimental browser-based reader that presents public-domain texts over generative visuals and imagery held by museums and archives.

Reading is offered without charge, as an experiment, and RISE is under active development. RISE Plus, a voice tier that would voice readings of your own material, is not currently offered, and nothing in the Service is for sale. If it is offered again, its price, allowance and any tax will be shown on the customer page before any checkout, and these Terms will say so. Legacy subscriptions retain their existing invoice-derived allowance; the amount remaining is shown in RISE Plus.

When live checkout is enabled, Stripe processes the recurring monthly subscription. The checkout states the amount due before you confirm payment. You can open Manage billing from RISE Plus to update your payment details, view invoices, or cancel renewal. Access continues through the paid period unless the payment is refunded, disputed, or otherwise invalidated. Use Restore Plus with your purchase email to recover access on another browser. Recovering a subscription does not restore browser-local text or audio.

New voicing requests use your character allowance. Replaying audio already stored in the same browser does not. Changing the voice, clearing the audio, or voicing on another device may use the allowance again. A request the voice provider bills can count even if delivery fails; contact syberlabs.support@gmail.com for help with a failed paid render or a billing problem. If a limit or service interruption prevents voicing, free reading remains available. Nothing in these terms limits mandatory consumer rights.

Administrator voice access requires separate Cloudflare Access authorization and has separate shared daily and monthly limits. If authorization lapses or a limit is reached, reading continues without the voice. Features appear, change and are withdrawn. Nothing here is a product commitment.

RISE is not a medical, therapeutic, educational, diagnostic or professional service, and nothing in it is advice of any kind.

RISE in ChatGPT and Claude. If you add RISE to your assistant, the card it shows holds words your assistant's model wrote. RISE presents them, but does not author them or check them for accuracy. The card needs no account.

3. Health and safety — please read this one

Photosensitivity. RISE renders moving light, and some compositions flash or change brightness rapidly. A small number of people can experience seizures when exposed to flashing light or patterns, including people with no history of seizures or epilepsy.

The Service shows a photosensitivity warning before a session that may flash, and offers a setting to disable the effects. If you have epilepsy or any photosensitive condition, use that setting, and consult a doctor before using the Service.

Stop immediately and seek medical advice if you experience dizziness, altered vision, eye or face twitching, disorientation, involuntary movement, or loss of awareness.

Audio. RISE plays soundscapes and spoken recitation. Set your volume to a comfortable level before you begin, and take breaks.

Attention. Do not use the Service while driving, operating machinery, or doing anything else that requires your attention.

4. Your content stays yours

Anything you bring to RISE or make in it — text you paste, journals you write, compositions you build, media you attach — remains yours. We claim no ownership or licence in it.

Your working copies are stored in your browser, on your device. An enabled SyberLabs account can also hold a text-work backup you explicitly choose to save; it can be downloaded or restored through Account. Backups do not automatically synchronize browser storage. Storage at the .space site stays at that origin and does not appear at .io. Chamber reading and pacing run locally. Optional AI features run on a connection you own: your own OpenRouter account, whose usage is billed to you by OpenRouter under its terms, or Kev running on your own computer through local RISE. RISE does not pay for, resell, or proxy AI requests, except the Plus voice: when it is used (by authorized administrators, or by subscribers if Plus is offered), it sends the text of a reading through RISE's server to ElevenLabs on our account. See the Privacy Policy for what each feature sends. These actions do not create a backup of your saved work. Two consequences follow:

• We cannot recover it. If you clear your browser storage, use private browsing, switch device or browser, or your device fails, your work may be gone unless you separately saved an account backup of that text work. Keep independent copies of your own source files.
• We cannot moderate browser-local work. We have no access to copies kept only on your device, so we neither review nor police what you keep locally.

Browser storage is not a durable archive. Browsers may evict it under storage pressure. The Settings export is incomplete and there is no complete import path between .space and .io; do not treat it as a full backup or migration.

5. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• use the Service unlawfully, or to infringe anyone's rights;
• upload or process material you do not have the right to use;
• attempt to breach, probe or disrupt the Service or its infrastructure;
• use automated means to place unreasonable load on the Service or on any third-party source it reaches;
• circumvent an access gate, safety warning or usage limit;
• misrepresent material taken from the Service as your own where it is not, or strip the attribution that accompanies it.

The texts and artworks reached through RISE come from institutions with their own terms. Respect them.

6. Third-party content

RISE holds texts and artworks by reference. Your browser requests them from the holding institution — Project Gutenberg, arXiv, Wikimedia Commons, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Rijksmuseum and others.

We do not own that material, do not redistribute it from our servers, and do not control it. Its accuracy, availability and licensing are the responsibility of the institution that holds it. Sources may become unavailable at any time; RISE is designed to degrade quietly when they do.

Attribution and licensing for material presented in RISE is set out in ASSET-LICENSES.md.

7. Public-domain texts

Archive texts presented in RISE are public domain in the United States and remain so. Our presentation of them creates no new claim over the underlying work.

Editorial selection, division and composition — which passage, in what order, against which imagery — is our work, and section 8 applies to it.

8. Our rights

The RISE application code is released under the Apache License 2.0 and you may use it on those terms.

That licence does not cover everything. The RISE and SyberLabs names and marks, authored Journeys and compositions, curated text selections, and the visual works held by reference each carry their own terms. See ASSET-LICENSES.md; the NOTICE file travels with any redistribution.

9. Availability

The Service is provided as available. We may change, suspend or discontinue it, in whole or in part, at any time and without notice. We may restrict access, including by access code, during development.

10. Privacy

Our handling of data is described in the Privacy Policy, which forms part of these terms.

11. No warranty

The Service is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title or non-infringement.

We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, timely, secure or error-free, that defects will be corrected, or that any text, artwork or attribution presented is accurate or complete.

Nothing in these terms excludes any warranty or liability that cannot lawfully be excluded.

12. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we and our contributors are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or exemplary damages, nor for any loss of data, work, profits, goodwill or opportunity, arising from or connected with your use of or inability to use the Service — including loss of anything you stored in your browser (see section 4).

To the fullest extent permitted by law, our total aggregate liability arising from or connected with the Service is limited to one hundred United States dollars (USD 100). Reading is free, and nothing in the Service is currently for sale.

Nothing here limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited. If you use the Service as a consumer, your statutory rights are unaffected.

13. Indemnity

You agree to indemnify us against claims, losses and reasonable costs arising from your breach of these terms or your misuse of the Service, save to the extent caused by us.

14. Children

The Service is not directed at children and is not intended for anyone under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children; there is no age collection in SyberLabs account sign-in; if Plus is offered, Stripe would hold what a Plus purchase requires. If you believe a child has provided us with personal information, write to syberlabs.support@gmail.com.

Some readings are drawn from adult literary and philosophical works, and section 3 applies to everyone. If you are under the age of majority where you live, use the Service only with the involvement of a parent or guardian.

15. Changes

We may revise these terms. The date at the top will change and the revision will appear in the public repository history. Continuing to use the Service after a revision means you accept it.

16. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. The state and federal courts located in California have exclusive jurisdiction, save that if you are a consumer you may bring proceedings in the courts of your own country or state of residence and keep the protection of its mandatory consumer law, which these terms do not displace.

17. General

If any provision is held unenforceable, the rest stands. Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it. These terms, with the Privacy Policy and ASSET-LICENSES.md, are the entire agreement between us about the Service.

18. Contact

Mateo Robles, doing business as SyberLabs syberlabs.support@gmail.com https://rise.syberlabs.io/