TBOT Subscriber Terms and Conditions

Last updated September 18, 2026

These Subscriber Terms and Conditions (the "Terms"), together with the separately published Use Disclaimer (incorporated herein by this reference), govern your use of TBOT, the AI-powered research assistant offered to eligible subscribers of The Business of Television Max(+). TBOT is operated by TBOT LLC ("we," "us," or "our"). By accessing or using TBOT, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, please do not use TBOT.

Your access to TBOT is subject to (and authenticated based on) your having an active premium-tier (i.e., Max+) subscription to The Business of Television Max(+). All aspects of that subscription, including billing, renewal, and cancellation, are administered through Substack and also subject to Substack's terms of service and privacy policy.

---

1. What TBOT Is

TBOT answers questions about the business of television using a curated archive of approved materials. That archive includes The Business of Television by Ken Basin, articles published in The Business of Television Max(+), the full text of certain collective bargaining agreements, and other books and materials that have been selected for their relevance and reliability and that are either used with the permission of their rights holders, used under a Creative Commons license, or in the public domain (together, the "Approved Materials").

TBOT is designed to ground its factual statements in the Approved Materials, and to ground its analysis in the views and reasoning expressed in those materials, rather than drawing on the general knowledge of the underlying AI model. Where the Approved Materials include published corrections, TBOT is designed to treat those corrections as superseding the text they correct. When the Approved Materials do not address a question, TBOT is designed to say so rather than guess.

TBOT is built on AI models provided by third parties, currently including OpenAI. Those providers are not affiliated with us and do not sponsor or endorse TBOT.

2. Eligibility and Access

TBOT is available only to active subscribers at the Max+ tier (including those with complimentary or trial subscriptions) who are at least 18 years old. Your access to TBOT begins and ends with your eligible subscription. If your subscription lapses, is downgraded, or is cancelled, your access to TBOT will end at the same time.

Your access is personal to you. You may not share your login credentials or otherwise make TBOT available to anyone else, including colleagues within your own organization. If your organization would like to provide access to multiple people, please contact us about group arrangements.

You are responsible for activity that occurs through your account. Please notify us promptly at the address in Section 15 if you believe your account has been used without your authorization.

3. Educational Information, Not Advice

TBOT provides general educational information about the television industry. It does not provide legal, financial, tax, accounting, or other professional advice, and nothing TBOT tells you should be relied upon as such.

Using TBOT does not create an attorney-client relationship, or any other professional or fiduciary relationship, between you and us, Ken Basin, or anyone else. Although Ken Basin is an attorney, he is not your attorney by reason of your subscription or your use of TBOT.

Decisions about a specific production, agreement, negotiation, or employment matter should be made on the basis of the current governing documents and the advice of qualified counsel or other appropriate representatives. If you are yourself an agent, manager, attorney, or business affairs professional, TBOT is intended to support your professional judgment, not to replace it, and you remain solely responsible for the advice you give and the positions you take.

The views expressed in the Approved Materials, and reflected in TBOT's responses, belong to their respective authors. They do not represent the positions of any current or former employer, client, or colleague of Ken Basin, or of any guild, studio, network, publisher, or other organization.

4. Accuracy and the Limits of AI

TBOT is designed to be more reliable than a general-purpose chatbot, but no AI system is error-free. TBOT may misread a question, misstate or mischaracterize what a source says, combine information incorrectly, omit relevant qualifications, or describe a practice that has since changed. The Approved Materials themselves reflect the time at which they were written, and industry practice, guild agreements, and scale minimums change regularly.

You should independently verify any information that matters to a decision you are making, and in particular should confirm current guild minimums and contract terms against the official schedules and agreements published by the applicable guilds. Where TBOT displays links to source materials alongside a response, those links are provided to help you verify the response, not as a representation that the response accurately reflects them.

If you believe TBOT has given an inaccurate answer, we would appreciate hearing about it at the address in Section 15. Identifying and correcting errors is an ongoing part of how TBOT is maintained and improved.

5. Compensation and Deal Terms

TBOT will explain how deal structures work and will report specific figures and ranges where the Approved Materials document them, together with the context in which those figures appear. TBOT is designed not to generate or estimate fees, percentages, or other compensation terms that the Approved Materials do not support, including when asked for an approximation.

A documented range describes the circumstances in which it was reported. It is not a prediction of, or a recommendation for, the terms available in any particular deal, which depend on leverage, relationships, and facts that TBOT cannot see and is not designed to evaluate. You should not rely on TBOT to value a deal, to set a negotiating position, or to evaluate an offer.

6. Your Conversations and Your Information

What we collect. When you use TBOT, we collect the questions you submit, TBOT's responses, the account information needed to confirm your subscription (such as your email address), and basic technical and usage information (such as the time and frequency of your sessions).

How we use it. We use this information to operate TBOT, to confirm your eligibility, to maintain security and prevent misuse, and to improve the quality and accuracy of TBOT's responses. We may use questions submitted to TBOT, in a form that does not identify you, to inform the topics covered in The Business of Television Max(+).

How we share it. Your questions and TBOT's responses are processed by the third-party AI providers and hosting services that make TBOT work. We share information with those providers only as needed to operate TBOT. We do not sell your information, and we do not share it with advertisers. We have configured TBOT so that your conversations are not used by us, or by our AI providers, to train AI models. We may disclose information where required by law or to protect the rights and safety of our users or others.

Retention. We retain conversation records for as long as we deem to be necessary (in our sole, good faith discretion), unless we determine (again, in our sole, good faith discretion) that a longer period is required to address a security concern or legal obligation.

Confidential information. Please do not submit information that you are not free to share, including confidential deal terms, information subject to a nondisclosure agreement, client or talent identities, or privileged communications. TBOT is most useful, and your information is best protected, when questions are framed in general or hypothetical terms. Information you submit is not treated as confidential in the sense of any professional duty of confidentiality, and submitting it does not create any such duty.

7. Acceptable Use

You agree to use TBOT only for your own personal learning and professional development, and not to:

• reproduce, distribute, or publish substantial portions of the Approved Materials obtained through TBOT, or use TBOT as a means of reconstructing or systematically extracting the content of any book, agreement, or article;
• use TBOT, its responses, or the Approved Materials to train, fine-tune, benchmark, or otherwise develop any AI model or competing product;
• access TBOT through automated means, including scripts, bots, or scrapers, or attempt to circumvent usage limits or access controls;
• attempt to obtain TBOT's underlying instructions or configuration, or to cause TBOT to behave contrary to its design;
• submit content that is unlawful, infringing, harassing, or that you do not have the right to submit;
• present TBOT's responses as the statements, opinions, or advice of Ken Basin or of any author of the Approved Materials; or
• use TBOT in any way that violates applicable law or the usage policies of our AI providers.

We may set reasonable limits on the volume or frequency of use to keep TBOT available and responsive for all subscribers.

8. Intellectual Property

Approved Materials. The Approved Materials are owned by their respective authors, publishers, and rights holders, and are made available through TBOT under permissions granted to us or under applicable licenses. Your subscription does not transfer any ownership of, or license to, the Approved Materials beyond the limited right to view the excerpts and information TBOT provides to you in the course of your use.

TBOT. TBOT, including its design, configuration, and interface, and the names The Business of Television, The Business of Television Max(+), and TBOT, belong to us or to Ken Basin. Nothing in these Terms grants you any right to use them other than as a subscriber.

Responses. Subject to these Terms and to the rights of others in any quoted material, you may use TBOT's responses for your own personal and internal professional purposes, including in your own notes, work product, and internal communications. Brief quotations from the Approved Materials that appear in a response remain the property of their owners, and any further use of them should be attributed to their original source and is subject to applicable law. If you publish or publicly share a response, please do not attribute it to Ken Basin or to any other author as their statement.

Feedback. If you send us suggestions, corrections, or other feedback about TBOT, we may use it without restriction or obligation to you.

9. Rights Holders and Affiliations

Inclusion of a work in the Approved Materials reflects our judgment that the work is relevant and reliable. It does not mean that we confirm, validate, or endorse every factual claim, opinion, or interpretation that appears in the Approved Materials. It also does not mean that the author or publisher of any Approved Materials has reviewed, approved, or endorsed TBOT or any response TBOT generates, and those authors and publishers are not responsible for TBOT's responses.

The inclusion of collective bargaining agreements and other guild materials does not indicate any affiliation with, or endorsement by, the Writers Guild of America, the Directors Guild of America, SAG-AFTRA, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, or any other guild or employer organization. Similarly, TBOT is not affiliated with or endorsed by Routledge or Taylor & Francis, Substack, OpenAI, or any studio, network, or streaming service referenced in the Approved Materials or in TBOT's responses.

10. Changes to TBOT and to These Terms

TBOT is under active development. We may add, change, or remove features, change the Approved Materials, change the AI providers on which TBOT is built, or suspend or discontinue TBOT, in whole or in part. TBOT should at all times be understood as a "public beta" product (and used accordingly).

We may update these Terms from time to time. If we make changes that we consider (in our sole, good faith discretion) to be material, then we will use reasonable efforts to notify subscribers of such changes by email, by a notice in the TBOT interface, or by a post in The Business of Television Max(+) before the changes take effect. We may, in our reasonable discretion, make non-material changes without public announcement; the "Last updated" date above will reflect the most recent change. Your continued use of TBOT after updated Terms take effect constitutes acceptance of them, whether or not you have actually reviewed or received notice of them.

11. Suspension and Termination

We may suspend or terminate your access to TBOT if you violate these Terms, if your use creates a security or legal risk, or if we are required to do so by law or by our providers. Where practical, we will notify you and give you an opportunity to address the issue before doing so. Suspension or termination of your access to TBOT for a violation of these Terms does not by itself entitle you to a refund of subscription fees. Sections 3, 4, 7 through 10, and 13 through 16 will continue to apply after your access ends.

12. Disclaimer of Warranties

TBOT is provided "as is" and "as available." To the fullest extent permitted by law, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. We do not warrant that TBOT will be uninterrupted, error-free, or current, or that any response will be suitable for your purposes.

13. Limitation of Liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, neither we, Ken Basin, nor the authors or rights holders of the Approved Materials will be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for any loss of profits, business, or opportunity, arising out of or relating to TBOT or these Terms, including any decision you make or action you take in reliance on a TBOT response.

Our total liability for any claim arising out of or relating to TBOT or these Terms will not exceed the amount you paid for your The Business of Television Max(+) subscription during the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim.

Some jurisdictions do not allow certain of these limitations, in which case they apply only to the extent permitted.

14. Questions, Corrections, and Notices

Questions about these Terms, reports of inaccurate responses, and requests concerning your information may be sent to tbot.max@gmail.com. Corrections to The Business of Television are published on the Corrections page.

15. General

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. Before bringing any formal claim, you agree to contact us and to attempt in good faith to resolve the matter informally for at least thirty days. Any dispute that is not resolved informally will be brought exclusively in the state or federal courts located in Los Angeles County, California, and you and we consent to their jurisdiction, except that either party may bring an individual claim in small claims court where eligible.

You agree to indemnify us against third-party claims arising from your breach of these Terms or your misuse of TBOT.

These Terms, together with the documents referenced in them, are the entire agreement between you and us regarding TBOT. If any provision is found unenforceable, the remaining provisions will remain in effect. Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it. You may not assign these Terms without our consent; we may assign them in connection with a transfer of the publication or of TBOT.