Terms of Service

Last Updated: September 4, 2026

1. WELCOME

1.1 Agreement to Terms

Welcome to the website of War on the Rocks Media, Inc. and its subsidiaries and affiliates (collectively, “WOTR,” “we,” “us,” or “our”). These Terms of Service (“Terms”) form a legally binding agreement between you (“you” or “your”) and WOTR and govern your access to and use of our websites, mobile sites, mobile applications, social media pages, membership subscriptions, newsletters, podcasts, and related services (collectively, the “Services”). By accessing or using the Services, you acknowledge that you have read, understood, and agree to be bound by these Terms. If you do not agree, please do not use the Services.

1.2 Modifications to the Terms

We may change or update these Terms at any time in our sole discretion. We will post the updated version on our site and indicate the most recent update date at the top of the Terms. Except as required by law, updates will become effective no sooner than fourteen (14) days after posting. Your continued use of the Services after the effective date constitutes your acceptance of the revised Terms.

1.3 Eligibility and Authority

To use the Services, you represent and warrant that you are at least 18 years old. Our Services are not intended for use by children under 13, and individuals under the age of 13 may not use the Services without verifiable parental consent. If you use the Services on behalf of a company, organization, government entity, think tank, or other entity, you represent that you have authority to bind that entity, and references to “you” include both you and the entity.

1.4 Privacy Policy

Your privacy is important to us. Our Privacy Policy describes how we collect, use, disclose, and process personal information. By using the Services, you consent to our collection and use of personal information as described in the Privacy Policy.

2. Access and Use of Services

WOTR grants you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, and revocable license to access and use the Services for your personal, non-commercial use (or internal organizational use). We may suspend or terminate your access at any time, including if you violate these Terms.

2.1 Registration and Account Obligations

Some features, such as purchasing or managing a membership subscription, accessing member-only content, participating in community forums, or receiving member newsletters, require you to create an account. You agree to provide accurate, current, and complete information, to maintain the confidentiality of your login credentials, and to accept responsibility for all activities that occur under your account. Notify us immediately of any unauthorized use of your account.

2.2 Modifications to the Services

We reserve the right to modify, suspend, or discontinue the Services (or any part of them) at any time. We are not liable to you or any third party for any modification, suspension, or discontinuation. We may establish general practices and limits concerning use of the Services, including retention periods and storage limits.

2.3 Membership Subscriptions

If you purchase a membership subscription, additional terms disclosed at the time of purchase (“Membership Terms”) may apply. Membership Terms supplement these Terms and govern the specific benefits, access, and features associated with your membership tier. In the event of a conflict, the Membership Terms control for the applicable membership offering.

2.4 Communications and Notifications

By providing your contact information and subscribing to our Services or purchasing a membership, you consent to receive transactional communications from us, including subscription updates, newsletter deliveries, billing notices, and other administrative messages. You may opt out of marketing communications by following the instructions provided in those communications. By accessing or using the Services, you consent to receive all communications, notices, disclosures, and agreements from WOTR electronically (collectively, “Notices”), including via email, website postings, account notifications, or other electronic means. You agree that such electronic Notices satisfy any legal requirement that communications be in writing. You are responsible for maintaining a valid email address and ensuring that Notices are not filtered or blocked.

2.5 Editorial Submissions

If you submit a pitch, article, or other editorial material to WOTR (“Submission”), you represent that you are the original author of the Submission, that it does not infringe the intellectual property or other rights of any third party, and that you have the full right and authority to submit it. WOTR is under no obligation to publish, respond to, or return any Submission. By submitting content for potential publication, you grant WOTR a perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, and transferable/assignable right to the submitted content (the “Submitted Work”), which license includes the right to reproduce in electronic or physical copies, the right to edit or to prepare other derivative works, to distribute copies or to sell such copies, including by publication, and to archive the Submitted Work.

3. Purchases and Transactions

If you purchase a membership subscription or any other product or service through the Services, your purchase is governed by these Terms and any additional terms disclosed at the time of purchase.

3.1 Order Acceptance and Pricing

All orders are subject to WOTR’s acceptance. We may refuse or cancel any order for any reason, including inaccuracies in pricing information, suspected fraud, or other issues. Prices and availability are subject to change without notice. If we discover a pricing error after you place an order, we will contact you to confirm or cancel your order.

3.2 Payment and Taxes

You agree to pay all fees and charges specified at the time you make a transaction, including applicable taxes. Payments are processed by third-party processors, including subscription platforms; we do not receive or store your full payment card information. You represent that you have the legal right to use any payment method you provide. Taxes will be applied based on your billing address and applicable law.

3.3 Subscription Renewals and Cancellations

Membership subscriptions may be offered on a recurring basis. Unless you cancel prior to the renewal date, your subscription will automatically renew at the then-current rate. You may cancel your subscription at any time through your account settings or by contacting us at the address below. Cancellations will take effect at the end of your then-current billing period, and you will retain access to member benefits through that date.

3.4 Gift Subscriptions

WOTR may offer gift subscriptions through third-party checkout platforms, including Supporting Cast. Gift subscriptions are subject to these Terms and any additional terms presented at the time of purchase. Gift subscriptions are non-refundable once redeemed.

4. User Conduct and Content

You are solely responsible for any content that you upload, post, publish, share, transmit, or otherwise make available via the Services (“User Content”), including content posted in any community forum (such as the War Hall). You agree not to post or transmit User Content that violates any rights of another, or that is illegal, abusive, harassing, defamatory, obscene, or otherwise objectionable. WOTR reserves the right (but is not obligated) to monitor, edit, or remove User Content. WOTR does not control, endorse, or assume responsibility for any User Content or third-party content made available through the Services. You acknowledge and agree that WOTR acts solely as a passive conduit for the transmission and hosting of such content. WOTR has no obligation to monitor, review, screen, edit, or remove User Content and assumes no liability arising from any failure to do so.

4.1 Prohibited Conduct

While using the Services, you agree that you will not, and will not assist or permit any other person to:

  • Violate any applicable law or regulation.
  • Submit User Content that infringes intellectual property or privacy rights.
  • Post content that is harassing, threatening, abusive, illegal, sexually explicit, or otherwise objectionable.
  • Introduce viruses, malware, or other harmful code.
  • Use any robot, spider, scraper, or automated means to access the Services.
  • Harvest or collect personal information of others without consent.
  • Advertise or offer to sell or buy goods or services not authorized by us.
  • Interfere with or disrupt the Services or the networks connected to the Services.
  • Impersonate any person or entity or misrepresent your affiliation.
  • Send spam or unsolicited communications.
  • Access or use the Services through any means other than the interfaces expressly provided by WOTR, including through automated tools, scraping technologies, bots, or unauthorized third-party integrations.
  • Use any robot, spider, scraper, crawler, automated agent, artificial intelligence system, large language model, machine-learning system, or other automated means to access, retrieve, copy, monitor, extract, index, or otherwise interact with the Services or Service Content, except as expressly permitted by WOTR under these Terms.
  • Scrape, harvest, download, extract, copy, or collect Service Content or data from the Services, whether manually or through automated means, for purposes of developing, training, fine-tuning, testing, benchmarking, grounding, augmenting, or otherwise improving any artificial intelligence, machine-learning, or automated content-generation or information-retrieval system.
  • Use Service Content, whether obtained directly from the Services or through any third party, as input to, or in connection with, any dataset, model, retrieval-augmented generation system, vector database, embedding, knowledge base, or similar system intended to enable an artificial intelligence or automated system to reproduce, summarize, generate, substitute for, or commercially exploit Service Content.
  • Circumvent, disable, evade, or interfere with any technological measure, access control, robot exclusion protocol, rate limit, authentication requirement, paywall, membership restriction, or other mechanism used by WOTR to regulate access to or use of the Services or Service Content.
  • Access or use the Services through any means other than the interfaces and methods expressly authorized by WOTR, including through unauthorized automated tools, scraping technologies, bots, APIs, or third-party integrations.

By uploading or posting User Content, you grant WOTR an irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free license to use, reproduce, modify, publish, translate, distribute, and display such content in any media, and you waive any moral rights you may have in it. All submissions, suggestions, ideas, or feedback are provided on a non-confidential and non-proprietary basis, and WOTR shall have no obligation to maintain their confidentiality or provide compensation for their use.

4.2 Data Retention and Backup Responsibility

WOTR does not guarantee the preservation or retention of any User Content or account data. You acknowledge and agree that you are solely responsible for maintaining independent backup copies of any information you provide through the Services. WOTR shall have no liability for the deletion of, or failure to store, any content or data.

5. Intellectual Property Rights

The Services, including the design, logos, images, text, graphics, audio, video, podcasts, software, and the compilation of these elements (collectively, “Service Content”), are owned by WOTR or its licensors and are protected by copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property laws. You may not copy, modify, reproduce, distribute, transmit, display, or create derivative works from any Service Content without our prior written permission. The War on the Rocks name, logo, and related names are trademarks of WOTR and may not be used without our permission. No rights or licenses are granted by implication, estoppel, course of dealing, or otherwise, including any right to use Service Content for artificial-intelligence, machine-learning, data-mining, text-and-data-mining, or automated content-generation purposes, except as expressly provided in these Terms.

5.1 Artificial Intelligence, Automated Systems, and Search Indexing

Except as expressly permitted by WOTR in writing, no Service Content may be used to develop, train, fine-tune, test, benchmark, validate, ground, augment, or otherwise support any artificial intelligence, machine-learning, large language model, generative artificial intelligence, automated content-generation, or similar system. This restriction includes the use of Service Content in training datasets, prompts or prompt libraries, embeddings, vector databases, retrieval-augmented generation systems, model outputs, synthetic datasets, or other collections used to enable or improve such systems. For the avoidance of doubt, WOTR does not grant any license or other right to reproduce, extract, ingest, cache, store, transform, distribute, display, transmit, create derivative works from, or otherwise use Service Content for artificial-intelligence or machine-learning purposes merely because such content is publicly accessible, technically accessible, or accessible through an automated process.

Notwithstanding the foregoing, WOTR permits generally recognized public search engines and similar discovery services to crawl, cache, index, and display limited excerpts of publicly available Service Content solely for the purpose of directing users to the original content on the Services, including for conventional search-engine optimization, answer-engine optimization, and content-discovery purposes, in each case subject to WOTR’s applicable technical directives and access controls. This permission does not authorize the use of Service Content for model training, model development, generative responses, creation of substitute or competing content, or any other purpose beyond directing users to the Services.

Member-only, subscription-only, paywalled, account-restricted, or otherwise non-public Service Content (“Restricted Content”) may not be accessed, crawled, indexed, scraped, extracted, copied, cached, summarized, reproduced, or otherwise used by any automated system except as expressly authorized by WOTR in writing. Credentials, authentication tokens, membership access, or other access rights may not be shared with or used by an automated system to obtain Restricted Content.

Any permission granted under this Section is limited, revocable, non-exclusive, and non-transferable and does not waive any copyright, database, contractual, technological-protection, or other rights or remedies available to WOTR or its licensors.

5.2 DMCA Notice and Procedure

WOTR respects the intellectual property rights of others and expects users to do the same. In accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”), we will respond to properly submitted notices of alleged copyright infringement. To submit a notice, you must provide: (a) identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed; (b) identification of the allegedly infringing material and its location on the Services; (c) your name, address, telephone number, and email address; (d) a statement that you have a good faith belief that the use is not authorized; (e) a statement, under penalty of perjury, that the information is accurate and that you are authorized to act on behalf of the copyright owner; and (f) your physical or electronic signature. WOTR reserves the right to remove or disable access to allegedly infringing material and to terminate repeat infringers.

Send notices to: JACO Digital
10990 Wilshire Blvd.
 Suite 1025
 Los Angeles, CA 90024
 Phone: (310) 469-9800
 Email: DMCANotice@jacodigital.com

Upon receipt of a valid notice, we will remove or disable access to the allegedly infringing material and may terminate repeat infringers.

6. Third-Party Links and Content

The Services may link to third-party websites or services — including social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and LinkedIn — that are not owned or controlled by WOTR. We do not endorse or assume any responsibility for these third parties. Accessing any third-party site is at your own risk. The Services may also display content provided by third parties. We do not control or endorse third-party content and are not responsible for its accuracy.

7. Indemnification

You agree to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless WOTR and its affiliates, directors, officers, employees, agents, partners, and licensors from any claims, liabilities, damages, losses, costs, or expenses (including reasonable attorneys’ fees) arising out of or in connection with: (a) your use of the Services; (b) your User Content; (c) your violation of these Terms; or (d) your violation of any rights of another.

8. Disclaimer of Warranties

YOUR USE OF THE SERVICES IS AT YOUR SOLE RISK. THE SERVICES ARE PROVIDED “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE” WITHOUT ANY WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, WHETHER EXPRESS, IMPLIED, OR STATUTORY. WOTR EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, INCLUDING IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. WE DO NOT WARRANT THAT THE SERVICES WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, SECURE, OR ERROR-FREE. THE SERVICES MAY CONTAIN INACCURACIES, TYPOGRAPHICAL ERRORS, PRICING ERRORS, OR OTHER ERRORS OR OMISSIONS, INCLUDING WITH RESPECT TO CONTENT DESCRIPTIONS OR AVAILABILITY. WOTR DOES NOT WARRANT THAT ANY INFORMATION IS ACCURATE, COMPLETE, OR ERROR-FREE. YOU ACKNOWLEDGE THAT INTERNET-BASED SYSTEMS ARE SUBJECT TO INTERRUPTIONS, DELAYS, AND DATA CORRUPTION, AND WOTR SHALL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY SUCH ISSUES OR FOR RELIANCE ON INACCURATE INFORMATION.

9. Limitation of Liability

TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, WOTR AND ITS AFFILIATES WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO YOUR USE OF (OR INABILITY TO USE) THE SERVICES. WOTR’S TOTAL LIABILITY FOR ALL CLAIMS WILL NOT EXCEED THE AMOUNT YOU HAVE PAID TO WOTR IN THE PAST SIX (6) MONTHS OR ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS ($100), WHICHEVER IS GREATER. TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, WOTR SHALL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY LOSS OF DATA, LOSS OF GOODWILL, SERVICE INTERRUPTIONS, SYSTEM FAILURES, OR UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS TO OR ALTERATION OF YOUR DATA OR TRANSMISSIONS. SOME JURISDICTIONS DO NOT ALLOW CERTAIN LIMITATIONS, SO SOME OF THESE LIMITS MAY NOT APPLY TO YOU.

10. Dispute Resolution and Arbitration

10.1 Informal Resolution

Before initiating any formal proceedings, you and WOTR agree to attempt to resolve any dispute informally for at least thirty (30) days following written notice from either party describing the dispute and the requested relief.

10.2 Mandatory Mediation

If the dispute is not resolved through informal discussions, either party may require the dispute to be submitted to confidential, non-binding mediation before a mutually agreed mediator located in Maryland (or conducted remotely by mutual agreement). The mediation shall occur within thirty (30) days after a written demand for mediation, unless the parties agree otherwise.

10.3 Litigation Following Mediation

If the dispute is not resolved through mediation, either party may initiate litigation exclusively in the state or federal courts located in Maryland, and each party irrevocably consents to the personal jurisdiction and venue of such courts.

10.4 Class Action Waiver

YOU AND WOTR AGREE THAT ANY DISPUTES WILL BE CONDUCTED ONLY ON AN INDIVIDUAL BASIS AND NOT IN A CLASS, CONSOLIDATED, OR REPRESENTATIVE ACTION. YOU AND WOTR WAIVE ANY RIGHT TO PARTICIPATE IN A CLASS ACTION, PRIVATE ATTORNEY GENERAL ACTION, OR ANY OTHER PROCEEDING IN WHICH ANY PARTY ACTS IN A REPRESENTATIVE CAPACITY.

11. Governing Law and Venue

These Terms shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the State of Maryland, without regard to conflict-of-law principles. Any claim or cause of action arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Services must be brought within one (1) year after the claim arose. Subject to the dispute resolution provisions set forth in Section 10, you agree that the state and federal courts located in Maryland shall have exclusive jurisdiction over any such dispute, and you waive any objection based on venue or forum non conveniens. EACH PARTY WAIVES ANY RIGHT TO A JURY TRIAL TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW.

12. Force Majeure

WOTR shall not be liable for any delay or failure in performance resulting from causes beyond its reasonable control, including acts of God, natural disasters, labor disputes, governmental actions, or failures of utilities or telecommunications networks.

13. Termination

WOTR may suspend or terminate your account or access to the Services at any time for any reason, including if we believe you have violated these Terms. Upon termination, your right to use the Services will immediately cease. Sections related to User Content, Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence and Automated Systems, Indemnification, Disclaimers, Limitation of Liability, Dispute Resolution, Governing Law, and any other provisions that by their nature should survive termination will remain in effect.

14. No Third-Party Beneficiaries

These Terms do not confer any rights or remedies upon any person or entity other than the parties.

15. Attorneys’ Fees

Should any suit be commenced to enforce WOTR’s rights, and in the event WOTR prevails in any such suit, you agree to pay WOTR’s expenses and attorneys’ fees incurred.

16. Miscellaneous

These Terms constitute the entire agreement between you and WOTR regarding the Services and supersede all prior agreements. If any provision is found to be unenforceable, that provision will be severed, and the remaining provisions will remain in full force. Our failure to enforce any right will not be deemed a waiver. You may not assign these Terms without our consent; we may assign them without restriction. Section titles are for convenience only.

17. Contact Us

If you have any questions or concerns regarding these Terms, please contact us:

Email: legal@warontherocks.com

Mailing Address:
War on the Rocks Media, Inc.
3220 N St., NW, #263
Washington, D.C., 20007