Plain-Language Glossary

Every term that might read as jargon, in one place. For Michael.

OPEN PANEL — The brand and the movement. The free side, the public face. Slogan energy: “comics belong to everyone.”

OPEN PANEL, Inc. / “the PBC” — The actual company that owns everything and employs us.

PBC (Public Benefit Corporation) — A normal for-profit company with one extra feature: a public mission written into its legal charter. We keep ownership, control, and profit; the charter just protects us legally when we put mission (free comics) ahead of short-term money. A Delaware thing. Not a nonprofit.

VARIANT — The commercial side of the company — the part that makes money (merch licenses, partnerships, film/TV, collectibles). In comics, a “variant” is the special collectible cover; here it’s the paid layer on top of the free comic.

Standard issue — A free comic. The normal copy anyone can read at no cost, forever.

Variant edition — A premium, collectible, or licensed product made from the same IP — what people pay for.

LONGBOX ($LONGBOX) — A collectible / membership / community token. A fan layer (“archive the run”), deliberately not a financial investment. A longbox is the cardboard box collectors store their comics in.

Token — A digital collectible/membership item recorded on a blockchain. Ours is for community and collecting, not investing.

DAO — “Decentralized Autonomous Organization.” A community that can vote on some decisions collectively. For us it’s a light community/governance layer around LONGBOX, nothing more.

IP (intellectual property) — The characters, worlds, stories, and brands we create and own. This is “the universe” — our real asset.

Steward-trust — An optional future structure that would make the company permanently un-sellable and lock the mission forever, while we keep running it and keep economic upside. The model Patagonia used in 2022. A one-way door — only if we ever choose permanence.

501(c)(3) / nonprofit — A charity. The structure we considered and set aside because founders legally can’t share in a charity’s profits. Kept only as a fallback.

Private inurement — The tax-law rule that bars insiders from profiting off a charity’s earnings. The core reason the nonprofit version didn’t fit us. (Doesn’t apply to our PBC.)

UBIT — “Unrelated Business Income Tax.” A tax complication that only exists in the nonprofit version. Irrelevant under the PBC plan — mentioned only because older docs discuss it.

Royalty — A cut of sales paid to whoever owns the rights. Licensees pay us royalties; we pay creators their royalty share.

Licensing — Letting someone else use our IP (to make merch, a show, etc.) in exchange for money, under set terms.

Sublicensing — Passing along rights we hold to a third party and keeping the margin.

Rights & Royalty Ledger (“the Ledger”) — Our internal system of record: who owns what, what’s licensed to whom, and who gets paid. It makes creator payments automatic and transparent.

Creator co-ownership — Creators keep a stake in the characters they make (rather than us owning everything outright). The trust-building heart of our creator deal. Image Comics is the industry benchmark for this.

CPF (Comic Package Format) — The open file format our reader uses for a comic — pages, panels, reading order, accessibility text, credits. A technical detail; just know it’s the “one format, every device” piece.

Residuals / reinvestment — Profit we put back into making more and better free comics and paying creators, rather than taking out.

The flywheel — The self-reinforcing loop: free comics → big audience → a hit IP → licensing revenue → reinvest into more free comics → bigger audience. The product stays free while the asset compounds.

Howey (Howey test) — The legal test for whether something counts as an investment “security.” We keep $LONGBOX non-financial specifically to stay on the safe side of it.

Workstream — A track of build work (e.g. “the web reader,” “the rights platform”). The delivery plan is organized into these.

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