These Terms are the legally binding version. A Traditional Chinese translation is provided for convenience only; in case of conflict, this English version governs.

1. Who you are contracting with

The Service is operated by OpenStela, a sole proprietorship established and operating in Taiwan ("OpenStela", "we", "us"). Contact: [email protected].

Name change. The Service operated under the name Avatar Lab at avatar-lab.app until 16 September 2026, when it was renamed OpenStela and moved to openstela.io. The operator, your account, your registrations, registry numbers (AVL-…), deals and records are unchanged. References to "Avatar Lab" in earlier versions of these Terms, in contracts signed before that date, and in anchoring records mean OpenStela. Old addresses redirect for at least one year.

If the business is later incorporated, we will update this section and notify registered users; the contracting party will change to the incorporated entity from the date stated in that notice.

2. What the Service does

OpenStela is a registry and marketplace for original characters. You define a character pack — a written specification, a set of reference images, and platform-specific anchor text — the Service issues the character a registry number, records the works you bind to it, and lets you show, license or sell the character with that record attached.

• Lab — guided questions that turn a character idea into a verifiable, discrete specification.
• Generation — we call third-party image models (currently Google's Gemini API) on your behalf to produce reference images. This consumes credits.
• Consistency scoring — a measurement of how alike your reference images are. Free of charge; it does not consume credits.
• Platform adapters — downloadable packs for platforms we cannot automate (e.g. Midjourney), for you to use in your own account.
• Character ID and registry record — an identifier of the form AVL-XXXXXX, fingerprints of the specification and of every work bound to it, a public verification page, and daily anchoring of those fingerprints to a public blockchain (Section 9).
• Works and evidence — registration of music, video, images and links under a character, automated checks of how each work relates to the character, and verification of the channels you publish on (Section 4A).
• Market and deal room — public listing, in-app negotiation, standard contract templates, electronic signature, and execution of the agreed transfer or licence (Section 4B).

We may add, change or withdraw features. Where a change materially reduces what a paid plan provides, we will give notice before it takes effect.

3. Eligibility and accounts

You must be at least 18 years old and legally able to enter into contracts. The Service is not directed at children.

Accounts are created by signing in with Google or GitHub. We only accept a verified email address from those providers, because your quota, files and payments are all attached to the identity derived from that address. You are responsible for the security of the account you sign in with.

You may not share, sell or transfer your account. One human, one account; creating additional accounts to obtain further free credits is a breach of these Terms.

4. Your content, and what we may do with it

You keep ownership. Character specifications, uploaded images and generated outputs remain yours as between you and us. We claim no ownership of them.

Licence to us. You grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, store, reproduce, transmit and display your content solely to operate and support the Service — including transmitting it to the third-party model providers listed in the Privacy Policy so that generation and analysis can be performed. This licence ends when you delete the content, except for backups pending deletion and for anything already anchored to a public blockchain (Section 9).

We do not train models on your images. Uploaded and generated images are not used to train any model, ours or anyone else's. We do use metadata about generation events — parameters, model used, token counts, consistency scores, failure modes — to operate, debug and improve the Service. See the Privacy Policy for detail.

Public content. One endpoint is public by design: the verification link (/api/verify/<fingerprint>). Anyone holding a fingerprint can check when a specification was registered and whether it has changed since. It returns no images, no specification text and no account details. A character's public page is visible only if you list it on the market (Section 4B) — off by default, chosen per character, and reversible.

4A. Works you register (music, video, images, links)

What registering a work does. When you register a work, the Service computes a cryptographic fingerprint (SHA-256) of the uploaded file — or, for a link, of a snapshot fetched at the moment of registration — and includes that fingerprint in the daily batch anchored to a public blockchain (Section 9). This proves the work, exactly as fingerprinted, existed and was registered under your character on that date. It does not prove authorship, non-infringement, or any right to sell — the same limits as Section 9.

Links are snapshots. Content behind an external link (e.g. Instagram, YouTube) can be changed or removed by its host at any time. What is certified is the snapshot taken at registration, and the Service says so wherever a linked work is displayed.

Your declaration. Registering a work requires you to declare that it is your own work or that you hold the rights to publish it; for music, that you hold both the composition and the recording rights. This declaration is stored with a timestamp. Registering a work you have no rights to is a breach of these Terms and may lead to removal and account action.

Deletion. Deleting a work removes the file from the Service. The blockchain record cannot be recalled: anyone holding the fingerprint can still verify that it was registered on a given date. The verification endpoint will say the work has since been deleted.

Evidence records. For each registered work the Service runs a set of automated checks on how the work relates to the character — for example whether the work's file dates fall after the character's registration, whether the linked page names the character or its holder, whether the character's declared identity markers or palette are detectable in the work, and (for image and video works, on request and metered per plan) whether a face or body model matches the character's reference set. Each check is recorded separately with one of four results — pass, partial, fail or not applicable — a timestamp and the method version used, and its fingerprint is anchored (Section 9). Checks are evidence, not findings. They are performed by software on the material available at the time, can be wrong in either direction, are not reviewed by a person, and do not establish authorship, ownership or non-infringement. A fail is not an accusation and a pass is not a certificate. Evidence records are never altered after the fact; a later run adds a new record.

Channel verification. You may verify that you control a channel (a website, a social or video account) by placing a one-time code where the Service tells you to. Verification records that the code was found at that location on that date; it lapses after 90 days unless renewed, and it does not establish that you own the content published there. Works you link from a verified channel inherit the channel's verification status for display purposes only.

Storage. There is no limit on the number of works per character. Uploaded files count against the storage allowance of your plan (Section 7); links count only for the size of the snapshot taken. Registration of a new upload is refused, not silently truncated, when the allowance is full.

Infringement reports. If a registered work or a listed character infringes your rights, follow the procedure in Section 4C.

4B. Market listings and the deal room

What a listing is. You may list a finalised character publicly on the market. A listing — including any asking price — is an invitation to negotiate only, not an offer. You may only list a character you hold; a character under an exclusive licence, or locked in a pending deal, cannot be listed.

The deal room. The Service provides a deal room in which the parties may draft a contract from the Service's standard templates (an assignment or an exclusive licence), adjust the parameters and optional clauses those templates expose, add their own clauses, negotiate revisions, and sign electronically. Each signature is recorded against the SHA-256 fingerprint of the exact text signed; a change to the text after one party has signed voids that signature. You agree that an electronic signature given in the deal room is your signature for the purposes of the U.S. Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act, the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act, Regulation (EU) No 910/2014 and equivalent laws, and that the signed text is a written instrument for the purposes of 17 U.S.C. § 204(a) and equivalent writing requirements.

Templates are not legal advice. The standard templates are general-purpose documents drafted for transactions between creators, primarily with United States law in mind. They are provided as-is. Whether a template suits your transaction, the parameters you choose, and any clause you add or edit are your own responsibility and are not reviewed by the Service. The Service is not a party to any contract concluded in the deal room and is not your lawyer.

Payment stays between the parties. The Service does not process payments, hold funds or act as escrow. The buyer records in the deal room that payment has been sent; the seller records that it has been received. The Service currently charges no transaction fee; any future fee will be announced in advance and shown before signature.

Lock and execution. From the moment both parties have signed, the seller's character pack is locked: its files cannot be changed until the transfer completes or the deal is cancelled. When the seller confirms receipt of payment, the Service executes the agreed transfer automatically. For an assignment it moves the character pack — files, works, evidence records and registry number — from the seller's account to the buyer's, leaving the seller a read-only record without files. For an exclusive licence it delivers a copy of the pack to the licensee, marks the licensor's character as exclusively licensed for the term, and removes the copy when the term ends. In both cases the event is appended to the registry record and the fingerprints of the signed contract and of the transfer event are anchored on the next daily batch (Section 9). The contract text itself is never published.

Acceptance and disputes. After execution the buyer has an acceptance window (72 hours unless the contract states otherwise) in which the Service's machine acceptance check — a per-file fingerprint comparison of what was delivered against what was frozen at signature — is available to both sides. A dispute raised in the deal room within that window freezes the transaction for our review. We may uphold the transfer, reverse it, or cancel the deal, based solely on the machine check and the deal record. That decision governs only what the Service does with the accounts and records concerned; it is not an adjudication of the parties' rights, which remain governed by their contract and the law. We do not resolve disputes about payment, quality or fitness, and we do not recover funds.

What goes public. Listing a character makes its public page visible to anyone: reference images, identity markers, registered works and their public evidence summary, verified channels, and the registry record including its history of transfers and licences by platform handle. The full specification text, per-platform prompts, your original import prompt and the detail of evidence records remain private. Listing is off by default and chosen per character; you can unlist at any time.

Contact details. If you add a contact method to a listing, it is shown publicly. Beware of impersonation and off-platform scams; we never ask either side to pay us to complete a sale.

4C. Copyright complaints and repeat infringers

We respond to notices of alleged copyright infringement in accordance with the notice-and-takedown procedure of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. § 512) and apply the same procedure worldwide.

Designated agent. Our agent for receiving copyright notices, as registered in the U.S. Copyright Office's DMCA Designated Agent Directory (registration no. DMCA-1079983), is:

Copyright Agent
Chen Law Cultural Business Ltd.
2 F., No. 88, Jinzhuang Rd., Neihu Dist., Taipei City 114, Taiwan
Phone: +886 981 182 935
Email: [email protected]

Sending a notice. Send your notice to the designated agent, preferably by email with the subject line "Copyright notice", including: (1) identification of the copyrighted work you claim is infringed; (2) the URL, registry number or fingerprint of the material you claim is infringing; (3) your name, address, telephone number and email address; (4) a statement that you have a good-faith belief that the use is not authorised by the copyright owner, its agent or the law; (5) a statement, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notice is accurate and that you are the owner or authorised to act for the owner; and (6) your physical or electronic signature. Incomplete notices may not be acted on.

What we do. On receipt of a valid notice we remove or disable access to the material, notify the account holder and forward the notice to them. The registry record is not deleted — a public blockchain cannot be edited — but the verification endpoint will state that the material was removed following a complaint.

Counter-notice. An account holder who believes material was removed by mistake or misidentification may send a counter-notice to the same address containing: identification of the material and its former location; a statement under penalty of perjury of good-faith belief that it was removed by mistake or misidentification; consent to the jurisdiction of the federal district court for their address (or, if outside the United States, of any judicial district in which we may be found) and to accept service from the complainant; and their name, address and signature. We forward counter-notices to the complainant and may restore the material in not less than 10 and not more than 14 business days unless the complainant informs us that it has filed a court action.

Repeat infringers. We terminate, in appropriate circumstances, the accounts of users who are repeat infringers. Knowingly sending a false notice or counter-notice may make you liable for damages under 17 U.S.C. § 512(f) and equivalent laws.

5. Rules of use

You must not use the Service to create, upload or generate:

1. The likeness of a real person without their permission — including public figures, celebrities and deceased persons where local law protects them. This is the single most important rule on this platform, because the product is about persistent, recognisable characters.
2. Sexual content involving minors, or any depiction of a minor in a sexualised manner. This is prohibited absolutely and will be reported where the law requires.
3. Content that is unlawful, defamatory, harassing, or that incites violence or hatred.
4. Material that infringes another person's copyright, trade mark, or other rights.
5. Deceptive synthetic media intended to make people believe a real person said or did something they did not.

You must also not: circumvent credit limits or rate limits; scrape, resell or redistribute the Service or its outputs as a competing service; probe or attack the infrastructure; or use automated means to create accounts.

You warrant that you hold all rights necessary for the material you upload, including the consent of any identifiable person depicted in it. You agree to indemnify us against third-party claims arising from your breach of this Section.

We may suspend or terminate an account that breaches these rules. Where the breach is not serious, we will normally warn first.

6. Third-party platforms and your own accounts

Adapter packs are provided so you can use your character on platforms we do not operate. Your use of those platforms is governed by their terms, not ours. We do not operate your account on any platform that lacks an official API, and we will never ask for the credentials of such an account.

Platform behaviour changes without notice. The guidance we provide is based on our own testing at a point in time and is offered without warranty that it still holds.

7. Plans, credits and payment

Free allowance. Every account receives a free credit allowance, subject to a service-wide daily cap. Free allowances are a courtesy, not an entitlement, and may be changed at any time.

Paid plans. Paid subscriptions provide character slots and a monthly credit allowance; additional character slots and one-time credit packs may also be purchased. Current prices and inclusions are shown in the Service. Unused credits carry over — a monthly allowance is added to your balance and is not reset at the end of the period.

Credits. Credits represent computation. They are consumed when we call a paid third-party model on your behalf, metered against the usage the provider actually reports — not by an estimate per image. Actions that cost us nothing (editing a specification, producing an adapter pack, consistency scoring) consume no credits.

Credits have no cash value, cannot be transferred between accounts, and cannot be exchanged for money.

Storage and metered checks. Each plan includes a storage allowance for uploaded works and a number of visual-match evidence checks; further checks are available as shown in the Service. Current allowances are shown in the Service.

Payment processing. Purchases are processed by Polar Software Inc. acting as Merchant of Record. This means Polar, not OpenStela, is the seller of record for the transaction: Polar handles payment, invoicing, and any applicable sales tax or VAT. Polar's terms and privacy policy apply to the payment itself.

Prices are stated in US dollars and exclude any tax Polar is required to add at checkout.

8. Cancellation and refunds

You may cancel a subscription at any time. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the paid period; access continues until then and is not pro-rated.

Payments are non-refundable, including partial subscription periods and any credit purchase. This is because credits are spent on third-party computation the moment they are used, and that cost is not recoverable.

If you were charged in error, or the Service failed to deliver what you paid for, contact [email protected] — those cases are handled on their merits, not by this policy.

9. Character ID, registry and blockchain anchoring — what it is and is not

Each character pack may be issued an identifier (AVL-XXXXXX) and a registry record. The record holds cryptographic hashes (SHA-256) of the character's specification (not of its images) in each version, of the binding record of each registered work, of each evidence and channel record, and of each signed contract and transfer event (Section 4B). Hashes are batched daily into a Merkle tree and the tree root is written to a public blockchain (Arbitrum One).

What this proves: that a specific piece of data — a specification, a work binding, an evidence result, a contract text — existed, in exactly this form, at or before the time of that transaction, and that the record has not been altered since.

What this does not prove, and what we do not claim:

• It is not proof of authorship. It does not establish that you created the character or the work.
• It is not proof of ownership, and not proof that the character does not infringe someone else's rights.
• It is not a registration of copyright, trade mark, or any other legal right with any government office. Copyright arises on creation under the law of most jurisdictions; a timestamp is evidence, not title. Registration with the U.S. Copyright Office or elsewhere, where available, is your own responsibility.
• It is not a token, an NFT, a security, or any kind of asset in its own right. There is no wallet, no coin, and nothing on the blockchain that anyone holds. The registry number has no value separate from the character it identifies.

The registry record follows the character; it is not itself for sale. The registry number cannot be sold, given away or moved to another character, and cannot be split from the character's files and works. When a character is assigned through the deal room (Section 4B), the whole character — files, works, evidence and registry record — moves to the new holder's account and the transfer is appended to the record's history; the number stays the same. Under an exclusive licence the record stays with the licensor and the licence event is appended. Any purported transfer of a registry number outside the deal room has no effect as far as the Service is concerned and is not reflected in the record.

We do not hold any digital asset on your behalf. The wallet used for anchoring exists only to pay transaction fees.

Anchored data cannot be deleted. A public blockchain is append-only. The anchored value is a 32-byte hash root and contains no personal data and no readable content, but it will remain on that chain permanently, including after you delete your account. The underlying files, specification text and evidence detail are held by us and are deleted with your account.

10. Copyright status of AI-generated output

In many jurisdictions, including the United States, the European Union and Taiwan, material generated by an AI system without sufficient human creative input may not attract copyright protection at all. The U.S. Copyright Office has stated that it will not register works whose expressive elements were produced by AI without human authorship, and that a character is protectable only to the extent it is delineated by human creative choices. Nothing in the Service changes that. We make no representation that any output you produce, or any character you register, is protectable; the Character ID, evidence records and anchoring do not alter its legal status; and a character's provenance log — which parts are human-authored and which are AI-generated — is your own declaration, not our finding. A buyer or licensee should read that log before contracting.

11. Taking your data with you

For as long as your account is active you may download your character packs — specification, reference images and adapter packs — from the interface, in open formats. This is a deliberate design commitment: the product's premise is that a character is portable, so lock-in through data retention would contradict it. A complete copy of everything held under your account — including generation events and consent records — can be downloaded at any time from Settings → Your data. Requests by email to [email protected] remain available.

12. Availability

The Service is provided on an "as is" and "as available" basis. It runs on shared infrastructure and includes queueing and daily caps; capacity is not guaranteed. We do not commit to any uptime level or service-level agreement.

Generative models are non-deterministic. We do not guarantee that any particular output, consistency score, or degree of likeness will be achieved.

13. Warranties and liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we disclaim all implied warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.

Our total liability to you for all claims arising out of or relating to the Service is limited to the greater of (a) the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim, or (b) US$100.

We are not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss, or for loss of profit, revenue, data or goodwill.

Nothing in these Terms excludes liability for fraud, for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded — including the mandatory rights of consumers under the Taiwan Consumer Protection Act and equivalent laws elsewhere.

14. Suspension and termination

You may stop using the Service at any time, and may request deletion of your account and its contents by writing to [email protected] (see the Privacy Policy for how deletion requests are handled).

We may suspend or terminate access where you materially breach these Terms, where required by law, or where continued operation would expose us or other users to legal risk. On termination we will, absent legal obligation to the contrary, delete your content in accordance with the Privacy Policy — except anything already anchored to a public blockchain, which cannot be deleted.

15. Changes to these Terms

We may amend these Terms. For material changes we will give notice by email or in-product at least 14 days before they take effect, and continued use after that date constitutes acceptance. If you do not accept a change, your remedy is to stop using the Service and cancel any subscription.

16. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of Taiwan (Republic of China), without regard to conflict-of-laws rules. The Taiwan Taipei District Court is agreed as the court of first instance for any dispute between you and us, save that if you are a consumer, this does not deprive you of the protection of mandatory provisions of the law of your country of residence, nor of the right to bring proceedings in the courts of that country where the law so provides.

Talk to us first. Before starting proceedings, please write to [email protected] describing the dispute. We will respond within 30 days and try to resolve it informally. This step is not a condition of your legal rights.

Contracts between users. This Section governs only disputes between you and us. Contracts concluded in the deal room carry their own governing-law and forum clause chosen by the parties; the standard templates default to the law and courts of the State of New York.

17. General

These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy, form the entire agreement between you and us regarding the Service. If any provision is held unenforceable, the remainder stands. Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it. You may not assign your rights under these Terms; we may assign them to a successor entity on notice to you.

Contact: [email protected]