Bureau/Legal/Terms of Service

LEGAL · EFFECTIVE MAY 2026

Terms of Service

This is a v1 draft published to enable early-access launch. For production-grade compliance — especially in regulated jurisdictions — review with qualified counsel before scaling. Material updates will be announced via email to all account holders.

1. The agreement

These Terms of Service ("Terms") govern your access to and use of Bureau ("Bureau", "we", "us"), an AI documentary production platform operated by Deep Narrative Media US LLC. By creating an account, purchasing credits, or otherwise using the service, you agree to be bound by these Terms.

If you do not agree, do not use Bureau. If you are using Bureau on behalf of a company or organisation, you represent that you have authority to bind that entity to these Terms.

2. The service

Bureau is a software platform that orchestrates an end-to-end pipeline for documentary-style video production. It accepts a topic from you and produces a project folder containing some or all of the following: a research brief, a script, AI-generated video clips, sourced stock footage, voiceover audio, subtitles, thumbnail concepts, YouTube metadata, and timeline files for non-linear video editors.

Bureau is a tool. It does not produce a finished broadcast-ready video; you remain responsible for review, final editing, fact-checking, compliance with applicable laws, and the publication decisions for any content you produce using Bureau.

3. Your account

To use Bureau you must:

  • Be at least 18 years old, or the age of majority in your jurisdiction.
  • Provide accurate registration information and keep it current.
  • Keep your account credentials confidential and not share them.
  • Be responsible for all activity that occurs under your account.

We may suspend or terminate accounts that violate these Terms, that appear compromised, or that engage in conduct we reasonably believe is harmful to other users, our infrastructure, or third parties.

4. Acceptable use

You agree not to use Bureau to:

  • Create content that is unlawful, defamatory, fraudulent, or that infringes the intellectual-property or privacy rights of others.
  • Generate sexually explicit content involving minors, non-consensual intimate imagery, or content that depicts real people in misleading or harmful ways.
  • Produce political deepfakes, fabricated quotations attributed to real public figures, or election-disinformation material.
  • Reverse-engineer, scrape, or systematically extract data from the platform beyond what is exposed by documented APIs.
  • Interfere with the integrity, performance, or security of the service, including by submitting automated requests at a rate that disrupts service for other users.
  • Resell access to Bureau or wrap it in a competing product without a written commercial agreement.

We may review content submitted to or produced by the service to enforce this section, respond to legal process, and investigate suspected abuse. We do not pre-screen or actively monitor user content but reserve the right to remove content that violates these Terms.

5. Credits and billing

Bureau uses a prepaid credit system. One credit is approximately equal to one US dollar of underlying vendor cost. You purchase credit packs through our payment processor; credits are deducted from your workspace balance as you use paid pipeline operations (AI scene generation, voiceover, thumbnail rendering, etc.).

Credits do not expire. Failed generations refund the proportional credit cost automatically. We may adjust credit costs for new operations or underlying vendor pricing changes; existing balances are not retroactively repriced.

Refunds. Credit purchases are generally non-refundable once credits are used. Unused credits may be refunded within 14 days of purchase at our discretion. Disputes about specific generations should be raised through our support channel before a chargeback; chargebacks without prior contact may result in account suspension.

Taxes. Listed prices do not include taxes. You are responsible for any sales, use, VAT, or similar taxes applicable in your jurisdiction.

6. Third-party services

Bureau orchestrates several third-party services to produce its output. By using Bureau you acknowledge that your inputs may be transmitted to and processed by these vendors:

  • Anthropic — script and metadata generation, research agent (Claude).
  • kie.ai / Google DeepMind / ByteDance — AI video generation (Veo3, Seedance).
  • ElevenLabs — voiceover synthesis.
  • Google AI (Gemini) — thumbnail image generation.
  • Pexels — stock footage matching.
  • SerpAPI — research-agent web search.
  • Supabase — authentication, database, file storage.
  • Stripe — payment processing.
  • Resend — transactional email.
  • Vercel — application hosting.

Each vendor has its own terms and privacy policy. Bureau does not control how these services process data beyond the integration we configure. We select vendors with reasonable security and privacy practices, but we are not liable for vendor outages, vendor data breaches, or vendor policy changes. Material vendor changes that affect Bureau's functionality will be communicated via email.

7. Content ownership

See our Content Ownership page for the full statement. In summary: you retain all rights to the topic and any inputs you provide; you own the outputs Bureau produces for you, subject to the inherent limitations of AI-generated content under applicable copyright law; you grant Bureau a limited license to process your inputs and outputs only to the extent necessary to operate the service.

8. Availability

Bureau is provided on an "as-is" basis during early access. We do not currently offer a uptime SLA. We aim for high availability but the service depends on third-party infrastructure that is occasionally unavailable; outages, degraded performance, and queue backpressure during peak demand are expected. Operational status, where known, is published at our public status page.

9. Termination

You may close your account at any time from your account settings. We may suspend or terminate accounts for violation of these Terms, non-payment, prolonged inactivity, or for any reason on 30 days' notice. Upon termination: your access is revoked, generated content remains downloadable for 30 days from your last login, after which we may delete it; unused credits are forfeited unless we determine otherwise at our discretion.

10. Liability limits

To the maximum extent permitted by law, Bureau and its operators are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for any loss of profits, revenue, data, or goodwill, even if advised of the possibility of such damages. Our total cumulative liability for any claim arising out of or related to the service is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve (12) months preceding the event giving rise to the claim, or one hundred US dollars, whichever is greater.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion or limitation of certain damages. In those jurisdictions our liability is limited to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law.

11. Changes to terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. Material changes will be announced via email to account holders at least 14 days before they take effect, except where shorter notice is required for security, legal, or compliance reasons. Continued use of the service after the effective date constitutes acceptance of the updated Terms.

12. Governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of New York, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. The exclusive forum for disputes arising out of these Terms is the state and federal courts located in New York County, New York, and you consent to the personal jurisdiction of those courts.

Bureau and Deep Narrative Media US LLC are operated from the United States. Use of the service from jurisdictions where it is illegal is prohibited.