Boom Learning Support

EFFECTIVE July 1, 2024 (see archived version)

This is a Binding Addendum to the Boom Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. By clicking Publish to the Store you accept these supplemental Terms of Service. If you do not accept all the terms, do not Publish to the Store. If you participate in optional programs available to Public Authors, those will be covered by separate terms and conditions.

1. Our Relationship

In our relationship covered by this agreement, you are a wholesaler of teaching and/or therapy resources and we are a retailer of those resources. We pay you a portion of the proceeds and we keep part. You are responsible for marketing your resources. To be successful, you will need to market to potential customers through a variety of communication modes. Under some of our programs, we do the marketing and sales work for you, but we keep more of the proceeds. Alternative program participation is optional and subject to additional terms.

You are engaged in a business-to-business relationship with us. We are not creating a joint venture, partnership, or the relationship of principal and agent between us. We are not obligated to take on the losses, debts, or other obligations incurred by you except as set forth in these terms. Boom Learning is not your employer or your agent.

2. Commercial Use of Public Author Resources

This paragraph does not apply to resources created and published by you from your Publisher account.

You may not engage in the public commercial use of another Public Author's without the consent of the Public Author. Use of Boom Cards with therapy clients, students in your school, or 1:1 or small groups of tutees is considered an educational use and not a commercial use. Examples of commercial uses that require Public Author approval include: posting Fast Pins on advertising-supported pages, selling access to them through any method or channel, and including Boom Cards as part of a massive open online course. The size of the audience is a key factor in determining whether such use goes beyond the expectations of the author and requires additional permission.  Accounts violating this Section 2 will be forfeit and the account holder banned permanently. 

3. Who Is a Public Author?

The Public Author is the business entity who publishes to the Store. It might be an individual, LLC, corporation, or other business entity. You are accepting these terms for yourself and your business entity.  Public Authors engage in commerce and commercial use. You set your prices for each item. All items published to the Store must follow the rules for a commercial sale, even if the price is set as 0 (free). 

4. Additional Privacy Notices

The following additional privacy disclosure are specific to Public Authors. Public Authors have more limited deletion rights than other users for customer service, tax, and fraud compliance reasons:

• We maintain records of your address.
• We maintain records of your financial transactions, including tax documentation.
• We maintain records of your sales.
• We maintain copies of all decks you sold or shared.

Author store names, avatars, descriptions, grade levels, keywords, product titles, prices, descriptions, and product contents are public information. We may share this public information on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Google, or any other appropriate public marketing service, location, or event. You must contact us with explicit instructions if you have a safety reason to be omitted from marketing efforts or to otherwise have use limit how we identify you in marketing efforts. By becoming a Public Author, you opt in to use of your data for advertising and marketing purposes. You must affirmatively opt out to be removed.

Other Public Author data, such as payouts owed, address information, taxpayer identification information, and payout information is held in confidence.

5. Changes to the Public Author Terms of Service

We provide notice of material changes to the Public Author Terms of Service via our newsletter service. It is not a material change to merely reorganize components between cross-referenced documents or to add detail previously stated in our FAQs. 

6. You May Not Publish in Someone Else's Account

Public Authors shall not attempt to upgrade or sell from an account purchased by another person or by their employer without their employer's consent. The account owner (purchaser) owns all proceeds from a Public Author account. Where the account owner is a business, the businesses authorized employees may access the Publisher account.

7. Acceptable Use Policies

We serve the K-12 education market. Resources must be appropriate to that market. They should respect the rights of others. You may not serve advertisements to students. Failure to comply can result in locked payouts, forfeited payouts, forced refunds, forfeited memberships, locked accounts, suspension, and banning. In short, you are not permitted to profit from inappropriate or unlawful behavior and the entire cost of doing so shall be borne by you to the full extent permitted by our platform and by law. You will be responsible for refunds issued for resources that cannot be repaired. Our Acceptable Use Policies for Public Authors are incorporated into this Addendum and are binding terms. These are in addition to the Acceptable Use requirements in our Terms of Service. 

8. Unfair Trade Practices Will Get Your Store Closed - and You Banned

You shall NOT engage in unfair trade practices. It is an unfair trade practice to publish, sell, or market your resources in a manner that is deceptive, fraudulent, or that causes injury to buyers. We can ban you for life if you engage in unfair trade practices and refer you for civil or criminal enforcement. We will suspend you and your stores and require corrective action on your part. Such behavior has no place in an industry training the citizens of the future. The following are examples and are not an exhaustive list of unfair trade practices:

• It is fraudulent to copy the trade dress of another author.
• It is deceptive to have more than one store where the content is essentially the same but the presentation would suggest to a buyer that they are dealing with two separate entities. Sellers may only open more than one store if the stores serve distinct categories - such as one for general education, a second one with appropriately modified content specifically for special education. 
• It is deceptive to offer resources in a specialized category, such as special education, speech language pathology, music, etc. when you lack the specialized training and/or experience appropriate to the category. We can require proof of appropriate training and/or experience.
• It is deceptive to use unethical methods used to gain an advantage or turn a profit, including keyword stuffing, using terms in descriptions or keywords that are unrelated to the product to gain a higher result in search, etc. 

Any sales you run or promote must comport with state and federal (including FTC) rules and regulations. We reserve the right to remove content for failure to comply. You are liable to us for any errors, omissions, or fraud in your advertisements and messaging around sales. We are not liable to you for your advertisements and messages, including mistakes in your pricing communications.

9. Videos may not contain ads

You may not embed any video in a Boom Cards resource published to the store that contains an advertisement of any kind. You are responsible for watching videos in full before embedding and ensuring that no videos are displayed during or at the end of the video. You are responsible for updating your videos if your hosting service changes its rules to add advertisements to your video. You may not collect personally identifiable information from any user via a video link. You must turn off all marketing settings that collect information before including a video link in a deck. We may at any time and without warning remove a video that is delivering ads or setting and collecting tracking cookies or serving ads. You are responsible for all refunds requested as a result of such change.

10. Do not track or advertise to students

No elements may be included in a deck that are essentially advertisements unless the purpose of the deck is to educate about how advertising works. Examples of advertising that violates this rule are any link, QR code, video, or another embedded element that takes a student to a site, video, or location that presents advertising to a student. This is not an exhaustive example list. If we learn of a deck that is serving advertisements to students or attempting to collect personal information from students, we will depublish it, require you to offer refunds to purchasers, and if appropriate, ban your account. You may also be subject to civil liability if you attempt to collect personally identifiable information from the user without their consent. 

11. Bad choices have consequences

We do not have an obligation to monitor our sites and apps, but we do have a right to do so. We proactively edit and depublish Boom Cards that violate our Acceptable Use Policies.  Bad behavior that may lead to a suspension and/or banning includes, but is not limited to: unfair trade practices, serving advertisements to students, misrepresenting your credentials, repeated infringement strikes, and any pattern of violating the terms. We reserve the right to remove content, suspend you, ban you, or pursue other remedies against you at our sole discretion, any time, for any breach of the terms of our Acceptable Use Policies or of this agreement, without notice. We reserve the right to provide information to third parties such as our authors, schools, law enforcement, supervisory authorities, and attorneys general, to enable them to pursue legal remedies against you. 

You agree that we will not be liable to you or any third party for any suspension or termination of your account. If we terminate or ban your account, you will forfeit your current membership and any points in your account. If you were banned for unfair, false, misleading, or deceptive practices you also forfeit any payouts owed to you. You will not establish a new account without our permission. You will be required to pay anew to reopen an account that we have terminated. We can ban you permanently, which means that any new account you create is immediately forfeit, including all points, memberships, and credits in the account, regardless of when we discover the account. If we ban your account, all outstanding proceeds are forfeited and we reserve the right to reclaim funds you owe us for refunds issued to your customers that are in excess of any outstanding credit on your account at the time it was banned. If we have banned you, you may not open a new account without express permission from legal.  

12. Rights clearances and licenses you grant Boom Learning customers

12.1 Rights must be cleared

You may include the works of others in your materials so long as you have all rights necessary to commercially use those elements. Rights may be obtained by being your original and non-derivative work, by obtaining rights by license, or by using works that have entered the public domain. AI generated content must comply with our Acceptable Use Policies for AI generated content.

12.2 Asset licenses

If you sell assets, you grant all necessary rights for users to incorporate assets into Boom Cards for creation, student playback, printing and print use, display and performance to students, and marketing of Boom Cards created with the assets. If you sell printables this includes rights to download and reproduce the work.

12.3 Boom Cards licenses

For Boom Cards you create, you grant all necessary rights for users to print, assign, play, display, and perform Boom Cards with their students and in their educational context, including displays to administrators, parents, and others as required by the educational setting. The rights you grant are perpetual, irrevocable, and worldwide. You may provide your customers with more generous terms by including those terms in the product description and in any other location we make available for you to do so. If you provide a bundle, and your terms for items in the bundle are not identical, the most generous terms will apply. You promise you have read the Terms of Service and agree to license to accounts as described therein. We may modify the number of students an account or tier is allowed, at any time and in our sole discretion. 

12.4 Licenses you grant to Boom Learning 

You grant us a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive right and license to distribute your resources to customers. 

12.4.1 Right of modification

Your grant gives us the right to make modifications necessary to conform to Boom Learning’s acceptable use policies and system requirements, including conversions, corrections, resizing, and reformatting. You agree that in the course of correcting errors, maintaining site integrity, or providing customer assistance we may modify your resources. You acknowledge that errors or reductions in quality may occur when we do so. Your sole remedy is to correct it yourself or to withdraw the resource, and, if appropriate, resubmit an acceptable version. We are not required to give you any notice that we took corrective action.  

12.4.2 License revocation is limited to new licensees

For resources, you may revoke our license to distribute the resource to new customers by withdrawing the resource from the store. Once a resource has been purchased, you may not revoke your customers’ rights to continue to use it nor may you revoke our right to continue to store and serve it to your customers who purchased it. You grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, irrevocable, perpetual right to maintain and distribute copies of your resources to support customers who have purchased them.

13. Ownership 

Subject to the licenses you grant us and your customers and their students, you retain all ownership rights in and to your products. We own all proprietary rights in and to the Boom Learning platform, excluding you and our suppliers’ resources and assets. You are solely responsible for accounting to and paying any of your co-owners or licensors amounts due to them. If you generate .pdfs of your Boom Cards using our system, you own the rights to use the resulting .pdf as you see fit. 

14. Clearances, repairs, refunds, and removal from the store

14.1 Rights clearances and licenses

You will obtain all licenses and clearances needed to grant the rights you grant at your own expense. If any asset you purchase contains the intellectual property of a third party, you must also have permission from the third party. We respect intellectual property and privacy rights and will remove infringing items. 

14.2 Right to withhold funds and to issue refunds

We may withhold monies owed to you while investigating claims made against you. If we determine you are in breach, we may choose to refund customers for products you sold in violation of these terms. If we issue refunds, we will recoup the refunds from any and all monies we owe to you and, if you have insufficient funds with us, bill you and suspend your account until you have paid us such amounts. You will remain responsible for all amounts due until paid in full. 

14.3 Obligation of repair

If any Boom Cards deck created by you is purchased by a customer and it contains an asset you cannot lawfully include, you must repair the deck. Once a Boom Cards deck has been sold, you may only modify it to correct errors and omissions.

14.4 Right of removal

You may remove a resource from further sale or close your account, removing all items from further sale. Removal is usually effective within 48 hours and is subject to system latencies. We may fulfill customer orders placed prior to the removal becoming effective. Resources purchased by buyers remain accessible to the buyers who have previously purchased them.

15. Marketing 

15.1 Use of the Boom Cards and Boom marks and logos

Please talk about Boom Cards. Be sure to give credit where credit is due. Don’t claim as your own things that are not. If you post an image relating to Boom Learning or Boom Cards to any social media site available to the public, you grant Boom Learning permission to repost that image with appropriate credit to you. You grant us a right to excerpt blogs or other long-form posts you make as part of our efforts to promote your Boom resources.

Boom names and logos are the trademarks, trade names, and/or service marks of Boom Learning. Your names and logos are the trademarks, trade names, and/or service marks of you. You may use our names descriptively in reviews. Use of our names and logos must comply with our rules. For all other uses, ask for written permission from us first. We are required by law to police the use of our marks. Using our marks in a manner that violates our rules may result in suspension, banning, or other actions taken against your account to preserve our rights in our marks.

15.2 Use of your name and marks

You agree to allow users to use your name and product names in reviews. You agree that your name, avatar, photographic image, products, and product images may be used by Boom to market Boom Cards and the Boom platform. You agree that Boom Learning may repost any blog, social media post, or another post you make as part of our efforts to promote your resources and/or our platform, including making video recordings of your works, cropping, resizing, or similar modifications to create marketing materials, in any media now known or existing hereafter. You also grant us the right to use your store name and image to market the Boom platform and your resources. You may revoke all or some of your grant to us contained in this paragraph by providing us a communication to help@boomlearning.com describing how you wish to limit this paragraph. Your revocation will only apply to new campaigns and materials arising after the date we receive the notice. Be aware that if you revoke this grant, we will not be able to include your materials in marketing campaigns, and your sales may suffer. We have no obligation to market or promote your products or to continue doing so after we have started to do so. We will not owe you any fees for marketing or promoting your products.

15.3 Public Authors consent to receive email news from us

You consent to us sending you emails relating to selling Boom resources from time to time. This takes precedence over any directions you may have given us elsewhere. To revoke this permission, you must close your store.

16. External listings

You may list products on marketplaces other than Boom Learning (“external marketplaces“) provided that you (a) use only the special URL provided to you for listing on a specific site (if you list on more than one site each site will have its own unique product URL), (b) pay a service fee for sales on other sites to cover technical and customer support expenses for serving your customers (see our payment schedule for a current list of service fees, (c) ensure that your listings contain the current required language explaining what Boom Cards are, why accounts are required, and any promotional offer language (see MANDATORY READING - Selling on External Sites), and (d) you or your external marketplace will handle all payment processing, including refunds and providing proof of purchase. You may not make any warranties concerning Boom to your customers. 

If you list on external sites and pay us a service fee for the redemption, we will (a) provide technical and customer support to you and your customers, (b) at our option make special promotional accounts available to customers new to Boom Learning, and (c) credit your account and remove materials from an external buyer’s account upon proof from you that an item was refunded. When reconciling redemptions and sales be aware that the dates of each event for a customer may be days or months apart. 

You may not resale memberships without the explicit consent of Boom Learning. Reseller programs have different revenue shares than our standard terms. 

ALL EXTERNAL USES NOT EXPLICITLY ALLOWED BY THIS SECTION ARE PROHIBITED. You may not embed Fast Pins, Previews, Hyperplay links, etc, on any public facing platform or service without our express consent and a written agreement.

17. Proceeds and Taxes

17.1 Taxes 

We collect sales tax for sales made directly by Boom Learning. You are responsible for all other taxes that may be due and payable as a result of your sales, including taxes for sales on external marketplaces. We consider you a wholesaler for sales on Boom Learning. Where required by law, we may deduct or withhold any and all applicable taxes from your proceeds. The amount you receive, as reduced, will constitute payment in full. Upon certain reporting conditions being triggered, we may require that you provide accurate taxpayer identification information before receiving further payments. You must provide us with your full address.

17.2 Payouts 

All payouts are made in U.S. dollars. You must have a PayPal account to receive a payout. There are no alternative forms of payout available. The PayPal account must be an Eligible Account as defined by PayPal. If a payout is returned to us because you did not have an Eligible Account, any repayments will be less fees incurred when we issued the unclaimed payment. 

We reserve the right to change the methods of payout, with notice, at our discretion. If we elect to issue a check, you bear the entire risk for the loss or theft of a check in the mail and fees associated with issuing a stop payment. Payouts are only made if you are not in breach of your obligations to us or under investigation for breach. We are not responsible for payout delays or other complications arising from Paypal or check delivery. We issue payouts as set forth in our Payouts and Service Fees, which may change from time to time. If your account is closed, we may withhold payouts for three months after the date they would otherwise be payable to ensure our ability to offset any refunds or other charges.

17.3 Your proceeds are net after fees, taxes, and other charges. 

Your payout will be amounts earned from sales on the Boom marketplace (wow.boomlearning.com/Store) minus amounts due to us. You may owe amounts to us for advertising supports, service fees for Boom Cards sold on other sites, renewals, points purchases, and more. We may spend your points or enter a negative points balance to obtain satisfaction of a debt you owe us, including debts for refunds you owe us and fees for sales on external sites ("external service fees"). 

17.3.1 Complete My Bundle price adjustments

If you sold a bundle of Boom Cards and the buyer already had purchased, either from Boom Learning or from another site, portions of the bundle, the buyer will pay, and you will be owed, the “complete my bundle” payout, not the full bundle price, which may, in some cases, be ($0) zero. 

17.3.2 Effective time of price changes

The start or stop time of free offers and point value changes you set are subject to system latencies and may not be effective immediately. You agree to accept payment at the points value the buyer was presented. You agree that services fees for external marketplaces will be assessed against the price of the resource listed on the Boom marketplace on the date and time of redemption, which may vary from the date of purchase by days or months.

17.3.3 Reductions in your payout

Your payouts will be reduced by (1) any refunds issued on your products, (2) the fee PayPal charges us to make the payment to you, (3) amounts you owe us, and (4) your annual membership fee, if due for renewal. If you receive a payout in error, we may reverse or require the return of the payout. You agree to cooperate with us in our efforts to do so. We may reduce payouts owed to you to adjust for previous overpayments and may do so without notice. If you owe us money at the end of a payment cycle you will be invoiced, net 60 days. Unpaid invoices may result in the suspension of author accounts.

18. Delegation and Virtual Assistants

You are fully and completely responsible for the actions of your Author Delegee. You are responsible for all actions of your Author Delegees. You will indemnify Boom Learning for any actions taken by your Author Delegees as if they were you. Delegees must have a paid Boom membership to act as a delegee. Author Delegees have access to your Boom Cards Asset Manager tools.