Terms of Use - Briarmont, CA

Briarmont is a Second Life® roleplay community, and these terms cover how you may use this website, what permission you give us to publish what you contribute, and where you stand if you pay us for something.

Effective date: August 11, 2026

Who this agreement is with

This agreement is between you and Briarmont, the Second Life roleplay community that runs briarmont-sl.com and the community wiki. Briarmont is run by a small team. The website carries no advertising.

By using this website or taking part in the community, you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, please do not use the site.

What Briarmont is

Briarmont is a roleplay community set in an invented town in an invented county in California. Reading this website costs nothing and there is no membership fee for it. Briarmont is run for profit, on a small scale and in Linden Dollars: it charges for renting land and homes, and other paid services may follow. Where you pay for something, the terms for that thing apply on top of these.

The town, its history, and its institutions are fiction. Some of that fiction is written to look like real public records. The Disclaimers and Site Notices page says which pages those are and what they are not.

Who can take part

You have to be 18 or over to take part in Briarmont. Taking part also requires a Second Life account. Several different age rules sit on top of each other here and people mix them up constantly, so here they are separately, ours first.

Briarmont is 18+. That is our rule, and it is the one that decides whether you may take part.
Linden Lab’s minimum age for a Second Life account is 16. That is the rule for having an account at all, and it is lower than ours. Having an account does not mean you may join Briarmont.
The Briarmont regions are Moderate rated. Linden Lab does not admit accounts under 18 to a Moderate region; a 16 or 17 year old account reaches only General rated regions. That check sits on Linden Lab’s side of the door, before ours, and Linden Lab decides how it is done and can change it. Our own 18+ rule does not depend on it.
The community charter requires characters to be 18 or older. This is a rule about the fiction, not about the player. The person you play is written as an adult. It says nothing about how old you are.

The community also uses Discord. Discord sets its own minimum age of 13, or higher where local law requires it.

The community rules apply

The rules for how members treat each other and how roleplay works live in the community’s own documents. They apply alongside these terms, and we do not repeat them here.

The Covenant and Stream Governance also set out how to report a problem and how to appeal a decision. Use those routes first. The Covenant says moderation actions are not required to follow a fixed sequence, so do not read anything here as a promise of warnings before action is taken.

Using this website

The community documents cover behavior between members. These rules cover the website itself. Please do not:

Scrape or bulk download the citizen directory, or any other part of the site, by hand or with software. Ordinary search engines that respect our robots.txt file are welcome. This rule is about harvesting pages in bulk.
Run automated tools that hunt for pages you were not given, guess addresses, or hammer the site with requests.
Try to get past the access-phrase gates on restricted handbooks, share an access phrase with people who were not given it, or work around the checks that protect that content.
Run security testing, vulnerability scans, or penetration tests against the site without written permission from us first. If you find a security problem by accident, please tell us at legal@briarmont-sl.com rather than digging further.
Pretend to be another member, a moderator, or an account holder on this site.

What the site stores in your browser, what our host records, and where your browser is sent for images and fonts are all covered in the Privacy Policy.

What you write and draw, and the license you give us

Read this part carefully. It is the part of these terms with the most in it for you.

You keep the copyright in what you make. Writing a lore page, drawing a piece of art, or posting a bulletin does not transfer ownership to Briarmont. It stays yours. There is one exception, for work written on Briarmont’s behalf, and it has its own section further down.

What you give us is a license. A license is permission to use something you still own. When you contribute writing, art, photographs, or other material to Briarmont, you give Briarmont permission to use, copy, adapt, translate, publish, publicly display, archive, and make new works based on it. That permission is perpetual, which means it does not expire. It is irrevocable, which means it cannot be taken back later. It is royalty-free, so we owe you no payment. It is non-exclusive, so you stay free to use your own work anywhere else you like. It is also worldwide. It is sublicensable and transferable only in the limited way explained below.

The license covers your contribution wherever the community shows it, including:

the wiki and this website
RSS feeds and the on-site search index
cached copies held by the site or by our web host
PDF versions of a document
the preview card that appears when a page is shared on social media
use in Second Life itself

Why “sublicensable” and “transferable” are in there. Sublicensable means we can pass the necessary permission to the services that actually store and show your work, such as our web host, the wiki software, and Second Life. Transferable means that if someone else takes over running Briarmont one day, the license goes with the community rather than dying with the current volunteers.

Credit runs through the wiki’s history. The wiki records who wrote each revision of each page, and that record is how contributors are credited. We do not promise a byline on every page, or in every place a page appears.

Other people will edit your work. Briarmont is a shared setting. Pages get corrected, expanded, reorganized, and rewritten by other members and by the people maintaining the wiki. If that is not acceptable to you for a particular piece of work, do not contribute that piece.

Moral rights. Some countries give authors rights that sit alongside copyright, such as the right to be named as the author and the right to object to changes to the work. These are called moral rights. They exist in much of Europe and elsewhere, and barely apply in the United States. Because your work will be edited and republished by other members, you waive those rights as far as the law where you live allows. If your law does not allow a waiver, you agree not to use those rights to stop the community publishing your contribution as described above.

You promise the work is yours to give. By contributing, you confirm two things. First, that you made the contribution yourself, or that you have permission to use it and to license it to us on these terms. Second, that it does not infringe anyone else’s copyright, trademark, privacy, or other rights. This is what protects the community from pasted-in artwork of unclear origin. If you are not sure where an image came from, do not upload it. Complaints about material on the site are handled through the Copyright and DMCA page.

Members may build on each other’s published lore. Contributing also gives every other Briarmont member permission to reference your published lore, extend it, and write around it. That permission costs them nothing and it comes with three limits. It is for use inside Briarmont only. It is not for commercial use. And it does not disturb the wiki’s record of who wrote what, which is how credit works here. It does not let anyone take another member’s work off to use elsewhere. You get the same permission over everyone else’s published lore on the same terms.

If you leave. The license continues for work you already published, so the shared timeline does not develop holes when someone moves on. Your name stays on your revisions in the wiki history. You can stop contributing at any time. To be plain about the part people ask about: writing and art you already published stay up, and leaving is not a way to withdraw them. You can always ask us about a particular page, and we will listen, but the answer is not automatic. Pictures of your avatar or your build work differently, and the next section explains how to ask for those to come down.

Characters and pictures

Characters are handled separately from the license above.

You own your character. The name, the appearance, and the personal backstory of the character you play are yours. You can take them with you to another community.

The setting belongs to the community. The town and the county belong to Briarmont, and so do the invented institutions: the Sheriff’s Department, the hospital, the college, the radio station. So does the shared canon built around them, meaning the settled facts everyone plays from. No single member owns any of that. This does not change who holds the copyright in a particular page or picture, which is covered in the section above.

Official lore written for Briarmont is different. Some people write on Briarmont’s behalf rather than for their own character: lore crafters, group leads writing an institution’s history, and anyone asked to produce canon, a handbook, an official record or setting material. If you are writing in that role, that work is made for Briarmont and Briarmont owns it. You assign the copyright in it to Briarmont, worldwide and for the full term.

Assignments of copyright normally need a signed document, and this page is not one. So that this does not fail on a technicality, the following also applies: if for any reason the assignment above does not take effect, you instead grant Briarmont an exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable and transferable license to that work, to the fullest extent the law allows, and you agree not to make any claim against Briarmont for continuing to use, edit, publish or build on it. You waive moral rights in it so far as your local law permits.

If you are asked to write something substantial for Briarmont, expect to be asked to sign a short separate agreement covering it. That document, not this page, is what settles ownership properly.

This does not reach the writing you do for your own character, your own pages or your own art. That stays under the license terms above, and you keep the copyright in it.

What we keep when you go. Where your character is already part of published canon, in a bulletin, a historical page, an event write-up, or an institution’s records, Briarmont keeps its license to leave that material in place. We are not going to rewrite years of shared history around a departure.

Pictures of your avatar and your build. Portraits and other member images on this site come from the Munibase community platform, which Briarmont also runs. Your entry is created and edited there rather than on this website. If you want an image of yours taken down, write to privacy@briarmont-sl.com and say which image it is and where it appears. We will remove it from the pages we control. An image that comes from Munibase has to be removed there, and it leaves this website at the next sync. The Privacy Policy explains that delay and what we cannot reach.

Photographs and machinima

Public Briarmont events and public Briarmont regions get photographed and filmed. By attending one, you agree that Briarmont may publish photographs and video in which your avatar appears, on this website, on the wiki, and in material promoting the community.

That agreement is also how you can stop it. Tell whoever is filming that you would rather not be featured, or write to privacy@briarmont-sl.com. From then on we will keep you out of what we publish, and we will take existing pictures and video down from the pages we control.

Linden Lab has separate rules for machinima, which means video recorded in Second Life. Under Linden Lab’s Snapshot and Machinima Policy, you need consent from any Resident whose avatar or Second Life name is featured or recognizable in the video. People in a background crowd are excepted. Filming on land you do not own needs the land owner’s permission. Those rules apply to us as much as to you. At a public Briarmont event, attending is that consent, and anyone who has asked not to be featured is off limits. Anywhere else, ask first.

People often assume Linden Lab’s policy requires you to credit whoever you filmed. As things stand it does not. It is Linden Lab’s policy and Linden Lab can change it, so read the current version before you rely on this.

What this website may carry

The domain name briarmont-sl.com relies on Linden Lab’s naming license for SL and inSL. That license holds this public website to a General content standard, whatever rating the in-world regions carry.

So the public website does not carry:

Sexually explicit content.
Gratuitous gore.
Real-world hate content.
Promotion of gambling.

The site also has to comply with Second Life’s Community Standards.

This limits the fiction as well as the site copy. The in-fiction criminal code and the hospital’s clinical material name offenses and injuries, because a real code and a real manual would. Anything a real document would show in graphic detail is kept to a summary here.

Second Life, SL, and inSL are trademarks of Linden Research, Inc. Briarmont SL is not affiliated with or sponsored by Linden Research.

Removing content and ending access

We can remove or edit anything on the website or the wiki, and we can suspend or end anyone’s access to the site, the wiki, and the community. We do not have to give a reason first. That wording is wide on purpose, because a volunteer team cannot bind itself to a procedure it may not be able to follow in every case. It is not how we intend to act.

The Covenant sets out how decisions are made and how to raise a concern about one. That is the route to use.

No warranty

The website and the wiki are provided as they are. We do not promise that they will be available, that they will work correctly, that content will be accurate or complete, or that anything will be preserved.

Pages break. Servers go down. Content gets edited or removed. Sync between the community platform and this website can lag or fail. None of that is a breach of anything, and there is no service level to fall back on.

Anything in Second Life itself, including land, objects, and items handed over or reclaimed, is covered by the Community Covenant and the Rental Covenant, and those documents govern. They already set out that Briarmont does not take responsibility for items lost when something is returned or reclaimed in-world, including no-copy objects.

Limits on what we owe you

Reading this website costs you nothing. To the extent the law allows, Briarmont and the people who run it are not liable to you for:

lost time or lost content
lost Linden Dollars or lost in-world items
lost opportunities
upset or distress
any other loss that comes from using the site or taking part in the community

Some countries do not allow certain liabilities to be excluded. Where that is the case, this section applies only as far as the law where you live permits, and the rest of it still stands.

There is no arbitration clause here, and no waiver of your right to join a class action. We are not asking you to give those up.

Money

This website does not take payments. There is no shop, no subscription and no donation button on it, and it never asks you for a card or bank detail.

Money does change hands in Briarmont, inside Second Life. Land and homes are rented in Linden Dollars, DJ tip jars at events route a share to Briarmont, and other paid services may follow.

Refunds

Briarmont does not give refunds. The Rental Covenant sets this out for renting, and it is the position generally: once a rental has started, Briarmont does not refund it, does not move the remaining time to a different property, and does not swap one property for another. Read the Rental Covenant before you rent, because it is the document that governs your rental.

Two things follow from that, and they are worth knowing before you pay rather than after:

Canceling early does not produce a refund or a credit. That includes a rental that ends because you moved to a different one, and a rental that ends because your access to the community ended.
Linden Dollars are Linden Lab’s, not ours. A payment made in Second Life is a Second Life transaction. Briarmont cannot reverse one, and what a Linden Dollar is worth and what may be done with it are matters for Linden Lab’s own terms.

If a paid service is offered in future, what you get and whether anything is refundable will be stated before you pay for it.

We can always choose to put something right, and sometimes we will. None of the above stops us doing that, and none of it takes away a right you have under consumer law where you live that cannot be signed away.

Which law applies

These terms are governed by the law of the State of California, and by the federal law of the United States where that applies. Any dispute about them belongs in the state or federal courts of California. Nothing here takes away rights you have under the mandatory law of the country you live in. If a court decides that part of these terms cannot be enforced, the rest still applies.

Changes to these terms

We can change these terms. When we do, the effective date at the top of this page changes. Using the site after a change means you accept the new version, so it is worth checking that date.

Contact

Questions about these terms, trademark questions, and permission requests for security testing go to legal@briarmont-sl.com.

Privacy questions, data removal, corrections, and takedown requests for pictures of your avatar or your build go to privacy@briarmont-sl.com, and are covered in the Privacy Policy. Copyright complaints go to copyright@briarmont-sl.com through the procedure on the Copyright and DMCA page.