Acceptable Use Policy

Last updated: 23 August 2026

1. Who this applies to

Everyone using Paperwall: readers, publishers, site admins, and anyone acting on their behalf. It covers what you publish and sell, how you use the checkout and unlock flow, and how you interact with the service itself.

2. Content you may not sell or distribute

Don't use Paperwall in connection with content that:

• Is illegal where you are or where your readers are.
• You do not own or hold the rights to monetise, including plagiarised work, pirated material and content republished without permission.
• Infringes someone's copyright, trademark, or other intellectual property.
• Sexually exploits or endangers children, in any form.
• Is non-consensual intimate imagery, or sexual content involving anyone who has not consented.
• Incites violence, harasses or targets a person or group, or promotes hatred based on protected characteristics.
• Encourages self-harm, or gives instructions for making weapons or explosives.
• Is deceptive in a way that causes real harm, such as fabricated news presented as fact, misleading health or financial claims, or impersonation of a real person or organisation.
• Promotes a scam, a pyramid or Ponzi scheme, or an investment opportunity you are not licensed to promote.
• Contains malware, or links to it.
• Discloses someone's private information without their consent.
• Breaks the rules of our payment processors or the card networks.

We do not pre-screen what publishers write. We do act on content that falls into the categories above once we know about it.

3. Pricing and disclosure

Publishers must be straightforward with readers about money. Do not:

• Hide, obscure or misstate the ticket cost of an article, or show a cost the reader will not actually be charged.
• Imply an unlock is a subscription, or a subscription an unlock.
• Sell access to content you know is broken, empty, missing, or not what the headline promises.
• Raise the cost after a reader has committed to an unlock, so that they are billed more than they agreed to.
• Sell the same article to the same reader repeatedly to inflate charges.
• Imply that unlocking charges the reader immediately, or otherwise misrepresent when they will be billed.
• Bury the fact that content is paid, or design your page to trick readers into unlocking accidentally.

4. Payments and financial abuse

Do not:

• Use stolen, unauthorised, or otherwise fraudulent payment methods.
• Create transactions that are not genuine sales, such as self-unlocking to manufacture revenue, laundering money, or testing card numbers.
• Use Paperwall to sell anything other than access to your own digital content.
• Abuse the refund or cancellation tools to manipulate payouts or reader balances.
• Redeem articles you have no intention of paying for, or open accounts to accrue unlocks and abandon them before the billing cycle runs.
• Manipulate ratings, votes or read counts — including rating your own articles, coordinating ratings, or inflating reads — to move an article's ticket cost or your share of the payout pool.
• Raise chargebacks in bad faith on articles you have read.
• Structure transactions to avoid fees, taxes, limits or reporting requirements.

5. Don't tamper with the service

The widget, checkout, unlock ledger and payment flow are what make Paperwall trustworthy. Do not interfere with them. Specifically, do not:

• Modify, patch, proxy or spoof the Paperwall widget, bootstrap loader or checkout.
• Circumvent the paywall or unlock flow to read paid content without paying, or help others do so.
• Forge, replay, alter or delete unlock records, sessions, tokens or receipts.
• Share, resell or bulk-distribute content you unlocked, or share account credentials so others can read on your unlock.
• Scrape, crawl or bulk-download paid content, or automate unlocks.
• Probe, scan or stress-test our systems, or attempt to gain unauthorised access to accounts, data or infrastructure. Section 6 covers responsible security research.
• Overload the service, or send volumes of traffic that degrade it for others.
• Reverse-engineer or decompile Paperwall software, except where the law expressly permits it.
• Use Paperwall's name or branding in a way that implies we endorse you.

6. Security research

If you find a vulnerability, tell us at legal@paperwall.io before disclosing it publicly. Do not access other people's data, degrade the service, or run destructive tests. Report in good faith and we will work with you rather than against you.

7. What happens if you break this policy

Depending on how serious it is, we may:

• Ask you to fix the problem.
• Remove or disable specific content, articles or pricing.
• Reverse or cancel transactions.
• Delay, reduce or withhold payouts.
• Suspend or terminate accounts and the integration.
• Report the matter to a payment processor or to law enforcement.

Where the harm is serious, such as fraud, child exploitation or imminent danger, we act immediately and without notice. Otherwise we usually contact you first, and tell you why where we can.

8. Reporting a problem

Report content or behaviour that breaks this policy to legal@paperwall.io, or use the contact form. Include the article URL, the site, and what you think is wrong. Copyright complaints should identify the original work and where it is being infringed.

9. Changes

We update this policy as new kinds of abuse appear. The date at the top shows when we last did.