Acceptable Use Policy

This Acceptable Use Policy (the "AUP") sets out the rules for what you may upload to, sell on, request from, or otherwise do through Snowcone (the "Service"). It applies to every user of the Service — consumers, marketplace creators, and developers using our API. The AUP supplements the Terms of Service; a violation of this AUP is a violation of the Terms.

Don't upload, sell, or request anything illegal. Don't put other people's intellectual property on your designs. Don't use the Service to harm, harass, or deceive other people. Don't try to break, scrape, or abuse the Service or any third-party service we route your work through. The full rules are below.

You may not upload, list, sell, or have us print:

• Illegal content — anything that is illegal in the United States or in the country where you live or where the order ships, including content that infringes copyright, trademark, right of publicity, or other intellectual-property rights, content that is defamatory, content that violates privacy rights, or content that constitutes a threat, incitement, or unlawful harassment.
• Child sexual abuse material (CSAM) — strictly prohibited and reported to the relevant authorities (in the US, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children under 18 U.S.C. § 2258A).
• Sexually explicit content — including pornographic content and content depicting nudity in a sexualised context. We do not operate the record-keeping system 18 U.S.C. § 2257 would require for that content.
• Hate speech and content that incites violence — content that attacks people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, disability, age, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, or other protected characteristic under applicable law.
• Content involving identifiable people without their consent — including non-consensual intimate imagery and content that misappropriates a person's name, image, voice, or likeness.
• Content that promotes or instructs in serious harm — including how-to content for explosives, weapons, illegal drug manufacture, or self-harm.
• Misleading or deceptive content — including fraudulent imitations of currency or government documents, fake official seals, and content designed to deceive consumers about origin, authenticity, or source under FTC §5 or equivalent rules.
• Content controlled by export-control or sanctions regimes — including content that would require an export licence under US, EU, UK, or relevant sanctions law.
• "Made in" claims you cannot substantiate — including unfounded "Made in USA" claims (a current FTC enforcement priority under Executive Order 14392 of March 13, 2026).
• Other people's brands, logos, characters, and trademarks — without a written licence from the rights-holder. Fan-art and parody can be highly fact-specific and are evaluated case-by-case under our IP-takedown procedure (sections 9–11). Don't assume you have a fair-use defence; if you cannot show a licence, prepare for the design to be removed when notified.

You may not:

• Use the Service to send unsolicited bulk messages, spam, or phishing communications.
• Attempt to gain unauthorised access to any part of the Service, to another user's account, or to any system or network connected to the Service.
• Probe or scan the Service for vulnerabilities outside of an authorised programme, attempt to bypass authentication or rate limits, or interfere with or disrupt the Service or any server, network, or sub-processor we route through.
• Scrape, crawl, harvest, or otherwise systematically download content from the Service, except as expressly permitted by our robots.txt, our public API, or a written agreement with us. Permission granted by robots.txt or the public API does not extend to the AI and machine-learning uses prohibited below.
• Use any content from the Service — including product mockups, rendered previews, product photography, generated imagery, designs, and text — as training data for any artificial-intelligence or machine-learning model, or as input, reference, conditioning, or grounding material for AI-assisted generation, in each case without a written agreement with us. We assert this reservation in machine-readable form too (X-Robots-Tag: noai, noimageai and tdm-reservation: 1 on asset responses, and per-crawler robots.txt rules on asset hosts), including as an express reservation of rights under Article 4 of EU Directive 2019/790.
• Submit fake reviews, ratings, or other forms of feedback; submit reviews for products you have not purchased; submit reviews on behalf of someone else for undisclosed compensation; suppress or hide negative reviews of your own listings; or pay for reviews without the disclosure described in the Terms of Service section 11. (These rules track the UK CMA's five fake-review enforcement theories and the FTC 16 CFR Part 465 Consumer Review Rule.)
• Use AI features to generate disallowed content; use AI features to mass-produce content with the intent to deceive users about its origin or authorship; or use AI features to generate content that depicts identifiable real people without their consent.
• Resell, sublicense, or redistribute access to the Service or to any AI feature beyond your own use; rate-limit-evade by rotating accounts.
• Use the Service in violation of US, EU, UK, or other sanctions regimes that apply to you or to us.
• Use the Service to violate any other applicable law or to assist anyone else in doing so.

You keep ownership of the designs and other content you create on the Service. By using the Service you confirm:

• Ownership / licence. You either own the rights to the content you upload, or you have a licence sufficient to upload, print, sell, and authorise others to buy it through the Service. This includes any third-party imagery, fonts, characters, logos, and AI-generated content you incorporate.
• Right of publicity. If your design includes an identifiable person's name, image, voice, or likeness, you have that person's permission to use it for the purpose you are using it for. Public-figure and historical exceptions are highly fact-specific and not a globalised AUP allowance.
• AI outputs. When you use our AI features, the outputs are non-exclusively licensed to you under the Terms §14. You remain responsible for the legality of what you choose to print, sell, or share. Note that under current US Copyright Office guidance purely AI-generated works generally lack copyright protection — that does not exempt them from the IP rules in this AUP.
• Indemnity. The Terms §19 indemnity applies if a third party brings an IP claim against us based on Your Content. Consumers in jurisdictions whose law restricts consumer indemnities are covered by that restriction.

If you list designs on the marketplace for other users to buy, in addition to the rules above:

• Identity and contact information. You must provide accurate identity and contact information so we can comply with applicable trader-traceability obligations, including the US INFORM Consumers Act (15 U.S.C. §45f), EU Digital Services Act Article 30 (where applicable), and any equivalent national rules. For sellers who become "high-volume third-party sellers" under the INFORM Consumers Act — generally, sellers with 200 or more discrete sales totalling US$5,000 or more in any continuous 12-month period during the previous 24 months — we will additionally collect and verify a bank account, government ID or business tax-ID, and contact information, and we will surface seller identity to buyers as that Act requires.
• No infringing designs. You may not list designs that contain third-party IP without a licence; doing so will result in a strike under the repeat-infringer policy (see our Intellectual Property Policy section 6).
• Authentic reviews. You may not pay, incentivise, or coerce buyers to leave positive reviews, suppress negative reviews of your own listings, or open multiple accounts to inflate ratings or feedback. Doing so violates the FTC's Rule on Endorsements and Testimonials (16 CFR Part 465), the UK CMA's fake-review enforcement priorities under the DMCC Act 2024, and the EU Omnibus Directive 2019/2161.
• Accurate listings. You must respond to buyer inquiries in a reasonable time and accurately describe your designs, materials, and production timing. Country-of-origin claims must be substantiated to the standard required by applicable law (in the US, the FTC Made in USA Standard, 16 CFR Part 323).
• Enforcement. We may remove a listing, suspend payouts, or terminate the seller relationship for repeated or material violations of this AUP.

The right form depends on what you are reporting:

Detailed mechanics for reporting copyright infringement (DMCA), trademark infringement, illegal content under EU law (DSA Article 16), and submitting counter-notifications live in the dedicated Intellectual Property Policy. Our repeat-infringer policy (three valid strikes in 12 months → suspension; five lifetime → termination) and the bad-faith-notice consequences (17 U.S.C. § 512(f)) are codified there.

Quick links:

• /dmca — copyright + trademark takedown form
• /dmca/counter — counter-notification form
• /dsa-notice — DSA illegal-content notice form (EU)

Whenever we restrict, suspend, or terminate, we send a statement of reasons explaining what we did, why, and how to appeal. You can:

• Reply to the statement of reasons — appeals are reviewed by a different person than the one who made the original decision (DSA Art 20). We aim to respond within 14 days.
• File through /privacy-requests — the unified portal also receives content-decision appeals.
• Out-of-court dispute settlement — where Snowcone is an "online platform" under the DSA, you may also use a dispute-settlement body certified by the European Commission under Art 21.
• Court action — nothing in this AUP prevents you from going to court.

• We do not monitor every piece of content general-monitoring- style. We respond to notices and to signals from our composition-time content filter (ADR-0056 Phase 2) and our visual-reference review queue (ADR-0056 Phase 2.5).
• We do not act on a takedown notice that does not meet the required elements set out above.
• We do not decide fair-use or parody defences as a global policy — they are highly fact-specific and resolved through the appeal and counter-notification paths.
• We do not use the AUP as a pretext to remove content for a competitor or for a person who simply does not like the content. Notices submitted in bad faith may themselves violate this AUP and applicable law (including 17 U.S.C. § 512(f) for bad-faith DMCA notices).

Snowcone is not directed to children. The minimum age to use the Service is set out in the Privacy Policy section 14. We do not permit content that targets children for the sale of regulated products, nor content that depicts identifiable minors in a sexualised or commercialised way without verifiable consent of their parent or guardian.

We may update this AUP from time to time. The version and effective date appear at the top of this page. Material changes — those that prohibit a category of content or conduct that was previously allowed, or that change the appeal route — are published at least 30 days before they take effect, with notice to your account email. Historical versions are reachable at /legal/aup/v<version>.