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PROJECT: OPERATOR REQUIRED DOCUMENT: TERMS OF SERVICE UPDATED: 2026-09-01

OR // PUBLIC

TERMS OF SERVICE

These terms cover the Operator Required website and the Operator Required Control Center, the desktop application Mt. Wizard Studios, LLC uses to produce and publish the series.

LAST UPDATED: 1 SEPTEMBER 2026

AT A GLANCE

OPERATED BY
MT. WIZARD STUDIOS, LLC
WHAT IT IS
A WORKFLOW-TRIAL SERIES AND ITS PUBLISHING APPLICATION
PUBLIC SIGN-UP
NONE — THERE ARE NO USER ACCOUNTS
PUBLICATION
REQUIRES EXPLICIT OPERATOR AUTHORIZATION
PLATFORM TERMS
YOUTUBE, INSTAGRAM, TIKTOK, GITHUB GOVERN THEIR OWN SERVICES
CONTACT
OPERATOR-REQUIRED@MTWIZARDSTUDIOS.COM

Contents:

WHAT OPERATOR REQUIRED IS

Operator Required is a project of Mt. Wizard Studios, LLC. It is a series of practical workflow trials: a task is automated, the automation is tested, and what breaks is shown. Every trial answers the same six questions, including where a human has to stay in control and whether AI is necessary, optional, or inappropriate. The work is instructional and evidence-based; failures are treated as material rather than hidden.

The Operator Required Control Center is the desktop application that produces those episodes and delivers them to platforms the operator has connected. It is a local Windows application that runs on the operator's own machine and binds only to that machine's loopback address. It is not a hosted, multi-user, or subscription service. There is no public sign-up, no user account, and nothing on this site is a purchase.

Where these terms say operator, they mean the person running that application on their own machine — in normal operation, Mt. Wizard Studios itself. Where they say you, they mean whoever is reading this site or, if the application is ever run by someone else, whoever is running it.

USING THIS SITE

The Operator Required pages are published for information. Reading them requires no account and no agreement beyond these terms. Everything on them is provided in good faith and describes the project as it stands on the date shown; it is not professional advice, and it is not a promise about what any third-party platform will allow tomorrow.

AUTHORIZED USE OF CONNECTED ACCOUNTS

  • Connections are made only through each platform's own official mechanism — its documented OAuth flow, or a credential the platform itself issues. No platform password is requested or stored.
  • A platform may only be connected using an account the operator owns or is authorized by its owner to publish from, and only with the narrow permissions the application requests.
  • Undocumented, internal, or reverse-engineered endpoints are not used, and browser cookies are not treated as an API. Where a platform offers no legitimate publishing API — currently Substack and Ko-fi — the material is prepared and handed to a person to post in that platform's own editor.
  • Platform-imposed limits are respected rather than worked around, including posting quotas and the visibility levels a platform is currently willing to grant an application.

PUBLISHING AUTHORITY

Nothing is published automatically. Preparing a release is entirely local and creates nothing on any platform. External publication happens only after the operator reviews a specific displayed plan — the exact files, the exact public wording, the intended visibility, and the accounts involved — and explicitly authorizes it by typing an authorization phrase.

That authorization is bound to a hash of the plan it was given for. If any part of the plan changes before the phrase is typed, the authorization is refused rather than applied to something the operator did not read. Where a platform is not ready, the release is withheld instead of being partially sent, and destinations that are blocked or require manual action attempt no remote call at all.

THIRD-PARTY PLATFORMS

Operator Required depends on services it does not control. YouTube and Google, Instagram and Meta, TikTok, GitHub, LinkedIn, Substack, Ko-fi, and the site host Netlify each operate under their own terms of service and privacy policies. Those terms govern their services, and using them through Operator Required does not change them.

  • Each platform decides what an application may do. TikTok, for example, decides whether an app may post publicly and enforces that on its own servers; until it grants that, Operator Required uploads nothing rather than quietly posting something private.
  • A platform may change, restrict, deprecate, or withdraw its API, revoke an authorization, or change its review requirements at any time. Functionality that depends on it may stop working as a result, and that is outside Mt. Wizard Studios' control.
  • Mt. Wizard Studios is not responsible for third-party services, their availability, or their handling of content once it has been published to them.

CONTENT RESPONSIBILITY

The operator is responsible for everything they choose to publish. That means holding the necessary rights to the material — footage, images, audio, narration voices, fonts, code, and anything supplied to or generated by the system — and for the content complying with the rules of each platform it is published to and with applicable law.

The application prepares material and refuses obviously unsafe steps, but it does not clear rights, and a machine-prepared caption or description is still the operator's statement once it is authorized. Where synthetic narration or generated imagery is used, disclosure is decided per episode from what that episode actually used, and it is the operator's responsibility to keep that disclosure accurate.

PROHIBITED USE

You may not use Operator Required, or anything published here, to:

  • access, connect, or publish from an account you are not authorized to use;
  • obtain, share, or misuse another person's credentials, tokens, or authorization codes;
  • publish unlawful material, or material that infringes someone else's rights;
  • circumvent a platform's restrictions, rate limits, review process, or visibility rules;
  • use automation to evade a provider's rules, impersonate a person or organization, or generate spam or artificial engagement;
  • interfere with, probe, or attempt to gain unauthorized access to Mt. Wizard Studios systems or this site;
  • present Operator Required output as an independent audit, a certification, or professional advice.

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

  • Mt. Wizard Studios branding. The Mt. Wizard Studios and Operator Required names, the Operator Required wordmark, the Checkpoint Gate mark, and the visual identity of these pages belong to Mt. Wizard Studios, LLC. Mt. Wizard Studios™ is a trademark of Mt. Wizard Studios, LLC. Nothing here grants a licence to use them.
  • Episode content. Episodes, scripts, narration, diagrams, thumbnails, and the text of this site are © 2026 Mt. Wizard Studios, LLC, unless stated otherwise where they are published. Evidence packages published to a public repository carry whatever licence is stated in that repository.
  • Third-party marks and services. YouTube, Google, Instagram, Meta, TikTok, GitHub, LinkedIn, Substack, Ko-fi, Netlify, and any other names used here belong to their respective owners. They are referred to for identification. Operator Required is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any of them.
  • Open-source and licensed components. The system uses third-party software and typefaces under their own licences, including HTMX (Zero-Clause BSD), the Kokoro speech model and its inference code (Apache-2.0 model weights, MIT code), Remotion (under its own licence, on an evaluation basis), and the Archivo and JetBrains Mono typefaces under their own open-source licences. Those licences govern those components.

AVAILABILITY

This site and the application are provided without any guarantee of uninterrupted or error-free operation. Pages may be changed or taken down, the application may be changed, and features that depend on a third-party API may stop working when that API changes. Mt. Wizard Studios does not undertake to maintain any particular integration, and no publication schedule is promised.

DISCLAIMERS AND LIABILITY

Operator Required is a small independent studio project. This site and the application are provided as is and as available, without warranties of any kind, to the fullest extent permitted by law. Episodes describe what happened on a particular machine with particular fixtures on a particular day; results elsewhere may differ, and nothing published here is a security, legal, financial, or compliance assessment.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Mt. Wizard Studios, LLC is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, or consequential damages, or for lost profits, lost data, or content published in error, arising from use of this site or the application. Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited.

CHANGES AND CONTACT

These terms may be updated as the project and its integrations change. The date at the top of the page is the date of the current version, and it is the version in force. Continuing to use this site after a change means accepting the updated terms.

The Privacy Policy explains what information is processed and how, and forms part of these terms.

operator-required@mtwizardstudios.com

Mt. Wizard Studios, LLC — Operator Required. This page describes the project's current operating practices. It was written by Mt. Wizard Studios, not by a lawyer, and it claims no certification, audit, or accreditation under any standard.