Terms of use

1Who we are, and what this is

Seedcut is structured financial infrastructure for creative projects. We give creators a way to present a project to buyers and backers with its rights, budget and delivery plan in one place, and we give buyers and backers a structured record to judge it by.

These terms are the agreement between you and Seedcut. By creating an account or using the platform, you accept them. If you are using Seedcut for a company, you confirm you may accept them on its behalf.

2What Seedcut is not

We are not a crowdfunding site. Projects are not open to the public for pledges; every project is reviewed before it is listed, and every buyer and backer is verified before they can act.

We are not a broker, dealer or investment adviser. Nothing on Seedcut is an offer of securities, a recommendation, or financial, legal or tax advice. We do not assess whether a project suits your circumstances. Take your own advice before committing to anything.

We do not hold or move your money. Seedcut collects no payment. Everything recorded on the platform is an expression of intent; funds move between the parties outside it, under documents the parties sign.

3Your account

You must be old enough to enter a binding contract where you live, and you must give accurate information and keep it current. You are responsible for what happens under your account, so keep your sign-in to yourself.

Accounts come in kinds - creator, investor, fund, reviewer, admin - and what you can see and do follows from that kind and from whether you have been verified. We may suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, misrepresents who it belongs to, or puts other users at risk.

4Verification

Before you can read a project in full, make an offer, back a project, or commit to a fund, we verify who you are - as an individual or as a registered business. You give us your legal name, your country, a registration number where one applies, and an identity or registration document.

We check it and either verify the account, or come back to you with what we could not confirm. Verification is our decision and we may decline it or withdraw it. It confirms identity; it is not a statement that anyone is a good counterparty.

5If you bring a project

You are telling us, and everyone who sees it, that:

• the work is yours, or you hold the rights to offer it;
• nobody else has a claim on it that you have not disclosed - no unsigned co-writer, no undischarged option, no prior sale;
• the budget, schedule and attachments you present are honest to the best of your knowledge.

A project is reviewed before it is listed. Review checks that a submission is complete and coherent; it is not a guarantee of quality, of financing, or of the accuracy of what you have told us. We may ask for changes, decline to list a project, or take a listing down.

6Intellectual property and confidentiality

Your work stays yours. Putting a project on Seedcut does not transfer any right in it to us. You grant us only what we need to run the platform: to store your material, to show it to the people you have chosen to show it to, and to display the public parts of a listing - title, logline, cover, category and headline figures - to promote the project and the platform.

Protected material is gated. A synopsis, script, budget breakdown, chain of title or any document you upload is shown only to verified accounts, to the reviewers assessing the project, and to nobody else. Draft projects are visible to their owner alone.

Every read is recorded. When a verified user opens a project’s protected details, we write it to an append-only audit log and show it to you, the creator: who opened it, and when. That record cannot be edited or deleted by anyone, us included.

If you are shown someone’s work, it is confidential. You may use it only to decide whether to deal with them. You may not copy it, share it, or develop anything from it. This obligation survives the closing of your account. Seedcut records who saw what, and a creator can act on that record.

7Offers, backing and how investing works

There are two kinds of project and two ways to act on them. A story is bought outright: you make an offer at a figure, and the creator accepts it, declines it, or counters. A package is funded: you record backing toward its target, and the creator sees it against the raise.

Nothing you do here moves money. An accepted offer and a recorded commitment are the beginning of a transaction, not the transaction. Terms are then papered between the parties - assignment of rights, milestones, escrow arrangements and payment - and the money moves under those documents, not through Seedcut.

Where a project is structured with a project company, milestone escrow and revenue distribution, those arrangements bind the parties who sign them. Seedcut provides the structure and the record; it is not a party to your deal and does not guarantee performance.

You can lose everything you commit. Creative projects fail often. They run late, they run over budget, they are abandoned, and they earn nothing. Past outcomes of other projects tell you nothing about this one. Commit only what you can afford to lose entirely.

8Funds

Some vehicles on Seedcut are funds: a single commitment across a slate rather than one project. A fund page states its objective, its target size and its minimum. Recording a commitment expresses interest at a figure; it does not make you a member of anything and it does not transfer money. The fund’s own documents govern what follows, and you should read them with your own adviser.

9How to behave here

Do not:

• take, copy or redistribute anyone’s material outside the platform;
• misrepresent who you are, who you act for, or what you hold;
• approach a creator to cut Seedcut out of a deal you found here;
• scrape the platform, work around its access controls, or probe its security;
• upload anything unlawful, or anything you have no right to.

10Liability

The platform is provided as it is. We do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, or that anything a user tells you is true.

We are not liable for the decisions you take, for the performance of any project, or for any loss of profit, opportunity or anticipated return. Where liability cannot be excluded by law, ours is limited to the fees you have paid us in the twelve months before the claim.

Nothing here excludes liability for fraud, for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for anything else the law does not permit us to exclude.

11Changes, and ending the agreement

We may change these terms. If a change matters, we will tell account holders before it takes effect; using the platform afterwards means you accept it.

You can close your account whenever you like. Obligations that are meant to outlast it do: confidentiality, the audit record, anything you have already agreed with another party, and the clauses on liability.

12Your data

What we collect, who sees it, and how long we keep it is set out in the privacy policy, which forms part of these terms. Two things worth knowing before you use the platform: every read of protected work is recorded permanently, and the creator sees it.

13Law

These terms are governed by the laws of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, and the courts of Lagos State have jurisdiction over any dispute. Nothing in this clause removes a consumer protection you have where you live.