Operated by K2MStudios

Code of Conduct

Last updated 10 September 2026 · Applies to everyone with an Indiewright account

Indiewright exists so independent creators can publish audio without a studio behind them. That only works if the place is safe to publish in and safe to buy from. This document is the behaviour half of the deal — the Terms of Service is the legal half, and the Creator Agreement is the money half.

The one consequence to read before anything else. If your account is banned for breaking this Code, purchases already made are not refunded. A ban removes access to Indiewright, and with it the editions bought here. Every ban may be appealed — see Appeals.

1. Who this covers

Everyone. Section 2 applies to every account. Section 3 adds rules for listeners. Section 4 adds rules for creators. If you are both — most creators are — all three apply to you.

2. Rules for everyone

No harassment. Do not target a person with abuse, threats, sexual harassment, stalking, or repeated unwanted contact. This includes reviews, comments, reports, creator pages and messages to support.
No hate. Do not attack or dehumanise people on the basis of who they are.
No threats or incitement. Do not threaten violence, or encourage anyone else to commit it.
Nothing involving minors sexually. Ever, in any form, including fiction and audio. This is reported to the authorities, not just removed.
No doxxing. Do not publish anyone's private information — home address, phone number, workplace, identity documents.
No impersonation. Do not pretend to be another person, creator, or Indiewright itself.
No fraud or manipulation of the platform. This includes inflating plays, buying your own work to manufacture earnings, mass fake reviews, coordinated false reports, chargeback abuse, and using stolen payment details.
No attacking the service. Do not probe, overload, or attempt to bypass payment, entitlement checks or signed media links.
Be honest with us. Do not lie to support to obtain a refund, a payout, or another person's account.

3. Rules for listeners

What you buy is a licence to listen, not a copy to keep. Do not record, rip, re-upload, resell, or redistribute a work. Do not share your account so that others can listen on your purchase.
Reviews must be honest and about the work. Do not review a work you have not listened to, do not review to settle a personal grudge, and do not accept payment to write a review.
Reports must be made in good faith. The report button exists so a person can look at something genuinely wrong. Using it as a weapon against a creator you dislike is itself a violation.
Do not dispute a charge you recognise. If something is wrong with a purchase, write to support@indiewright.com first. We refund honest mistakes without argument. Filing a bank dispute for a purchase you made and consumed is chargeback fraud, and it costs a creator money as well as us.
One person, one account. Do not create additional accounts to evade a ban, to farm promotions, or to manipulate a creator's numbers.

4. Rules for creators

You are the publisher of your work

Every file on Indiewright is uploaded by a creator. Indiewright does not write, record, commission, review in advance, or endorse creator content, and is not responsible for it. The creator who uploads a work is responsible for it — for holding the rights to it, for what it says, and for how it is labelled. If a work causes harm or breaks the law, that is the creator's liability, not Indiewright's. We remove content when we learn of a problem; we do not vet it before it goes up.

Plagiarism and rights — this one ends accounts

You must hold the rights to everything in what you upload: the writing, the narration, the music, the sound design, and the cover art. If you narrate someone else's writing, you must have their permission.

Plagiarism results in a ban. Passing off another person's writing, narration, audio, artwork, or characters as your own is not a warning-and-a-second-chance offence. Confirmed plagiarism removes the work and terminates the account, and any earnings that came from the plagiarised work are reversed and returned to the people who bought it.
Uploading public-domain or licensed material is fine — say so on the work, and keep to the licence terms.
Machine-generated narration or writing is allowed, but it must not be presented as a named human performer's work, and it does not exempt you from holding the rights to the source text.
Copyright complaints are handled as described in the Terms. Repeat infringement ends an account, whether or not any single complaint is contested.

Mature content must be labelled

Mature content is allowed on Indiewright. Unlabelled mature content is a violation. A listener is entitled to know what they are about to hear before they pay for it and before it plays.

You must apply the mature label, and name what it is for, if the work contains:

explicit sexual content;
graphic violence, gore, or torture;
self-harm, suicide, or eating-disorder content;
sustained strong language;
detailed depictions of substance abuse;
content likely to distress a listener who was not expecting it.

Label the work and, where a single episode is different from the rest, label the episode. When in doubt, label it — over-labelling costs you nothing and mislabelling is a violation. Mature works are not shown to accounts that have excluded them.

Some content cannot be labelled into acceptability and is prohibited outright: anything sexualising minors, real recorded sexual violence, real recorded death or serious injury presented as entertainment, and content produced to instruct someone in committing violence.

No misleading content

We are strict about this, because a listener spends real money on the strength of what a page says. Do not:

describe a work as something it is not — wrong genre, wrong length, wrong subject, a summary that describes a different story;
use a title, cover, or description built to be mistaken for a well-known work, author, or narrator;
advertise a full audiobook and deliver a sample, an outline, a summary, or silence;
claim a human narrator when the audio is synthetic, or claim an award, endorsement, bestseller status, or credential you do not have;
state or imply that Indiewright produced, selected, or endorses your work;
present fiction as fact — particularly medical, financial, or legal claims;
pad a work with dead air, filler, or repeated audio to inflate its length or its play time;
split one work into more paid episodes than its content supports.

Pricing and earnings

Set prices you can stand behind. Do not price a work as a full-length production and deliver minutes of audio.
Do not buy your own work, arrange for others to, or trade purchases with other creators. Earnings must come from real listeners.
Do not create additional creator accounts to multiply free allowances.
Payout details must be your own. Do not receive payouts on behalf of a banned account.

Your listeners

Answer legitimate complaints about your own work.
Do not retaliate against a listener for an honest review or report.
Do not collect listener contact details through your work to market to them off-platform without their consent.

5. How we enforce this

Reports are reviewed by a person, not actioned automatically. We weigh what happened, whether it was deliberate, and whether it has happened before. Depending on that, we may:

Action	What it means
Warning	We tell you what to change and give you the chance to change it.
Relabel or edit required	Typically for missing mature labels or a misleading description. The work is hidden until it is corrected.
Work removed	The work comes down. Listeners who bought it are refunded, and the related earnings are reversed.
Payout withheld	Used where there is credible evidence of fraud, while we look at it. You are told, and it is released if the evidence does not hold up.
Suspension	The account is frozen. Nothing can be bought, published, or withdrawn while it lasts.
Ban	The account is terminated and may not be replaced.

Some things skip straight to a ban: content sexualising minors, confirmed plagiarism, payment fraud, and evading a previous ban.

Every moderation action is written to an append-only log. If we act against your account we will tell you what rule was broken and what evidence we acted on, except where telling you would compromise an active fraud investigation or where the law prevents it.

6. What happens to money on a ban

Banned for breaking this Code: no refund. The editions you bought stay bought and stay paid for — the money went to their creators — but a banned account can no longer open them, because it can no longer use Indiewright.
Creator earnings held at a ban. Earnings that came from violating conduct — plagiarised work, manufactured sales, fraudulent purchases — are reversed and returned to the people they came from. Earnings from work that was genuinely sold to real buyers and broke no rule are still paid to you.
If you close your account yourself, or we close it for any reason other than a Code violation, any purchase still inside its refund window can be refunded and your earnings are paid out in full. See Refunds & Delivery.
If an appeal succeeds, everything is restored — the purchases, the works, and the account.

7. Appeals

Every ban and every suspension can be appealed. No exceptions, including the ones that skip straight to a ban.

Write to appeals@indiewright.com from the email address on the account, within 90 days of the action. Tell us what you think happened and include anything that supports it — proof of rights, recording sessions, correspondence, whatever is relevant.

You get a decision, in writing, with a reason. We aim for 14 days.
An appeal is reviewed by someone other than the person who made the original call, wherever that is possible in an operation this size.
Money, works and purchases are held rather than destroyed while an appeal is open, and are restored if it succeeds.
You may appeal an action once. A second appeal is only considered if you have new evidence.

Coming soon. Appeals are handled by email today. A built-in appeals screen — where you can see the exact rule cited, the evidence, and the status of your appeal without writing to anyone — is planned for a future update. Until it ships, the email address above is the appeal, and it is read by a person.

8. Reporting something

Every published work has a report button inside the app. For anything else — conduct, an account, a message — write to support@indiewright.com. For copyright specifically, use copyright@indiewright.com, which is the address in the Terms.

Tell us what you saw and where. You will get a reply. We do not tell the person you reported who reported them.

9. Changes

We will update this Code as the platform grows and as we learn what we missed. For any change that makes a rule stricter, we email registered users at least 30 days before it takes effect. Clarifications and typo fixes go up immediately.