Terms of use

These are the terms for using Our Living Memory, operated by Digirelevance Limited(“we”, “us”). By creating an account or accepting an invitation to an archive, you agree to them. If you don’t agree, please don’t use the service.

This document covers using the service - what you can upload, what happens if something goes wrong, and where you stand legally. How we handle your personal data is a separate document: the privacy policy.

There’s no password - you sign in with a one-time link sent to your email, and you’re responsible for keeping access to that email address secure. An archive is created by one owner, who invites the rest of the family in.

Our Living Memory is built for a wide age range, and there’s no separate under-18 sign-up flow. If you’re under the age where you can normally agree to terms like these on your own in your country, a parent or guardian should either set the account up for you or confirm they’re happy for you to use it - the same judgement a family already exercises over what a child adds to a shared photo album.

Paying is different.Before you can start a subscription, manage billing or contribute, we ask you to confirm that you’re 18 or over and that the card is yours or the person it belongs to is happy for you to use it. We don’t ask for your date of birth and we don’t check any documents - we take your word for it, once. If your own record in the family tree gives a birth year that would make you under 18, we won’t offer you a payment page at all.

Whatever you write, photograph, record, or upload stays yours. Nothing in these terms transfers ownership of it to us. What we need, purely to run the service, is your permission to store it, process it (for example, generating a transcript or a resized copy for the timeline), and show it to the people you’ve invited into that archive - nothing more, and never to anyone outside it.

You’re responsible for having the right to share what you upload - a family photo or recording you’re entitled to add, not someone else’s copyrighted work or private material you don’t have permission to pass on.

This is a private space for a family’s own history. Don’t use it to store or share anything:

• that’s illegal to possess or distribute - this includes, without exception, any content sexualising a child, which we treat as a zero-tolerance matter: an account responsible for it is suspended immediately and reported to the relevant authority (in the UK, the Internet Watch Foundation; internationally, NCMEC or the equivalent body), without prior warning.
• that harasses, threatens, or is intended to humiliate a real person, inside or outside the family using the archive.
• that infringes someone else’s copyright or other legal rights.
• unrelated to the archive’s purpose - this is a family history service, not general-purpose file storage.
• intended to probe, disrupt, or gain unauthorised access to the service itself.

Ordinary family photographs and recordings - including children growing up, in the way any family album always has - are exactly what this service is for, and none of the above is aimed at that. It’s aimed at genuine misuse.

If we reasonably believe an account has violated the acceptable- use rules above, we can remove the content in question, suspend the account, or - for the serious matters above - close it outright and report it, without needing a court to tell us to. For anything short of that, we’ll try to talk to the archive’s owner first rather than acting unilaterally.

We do not routinely look at, screen, or automatically scan what families upload - an archive is opened by us only in response to a report or a genuine legal request, never as a matter of course. A Report control sits on every story, photo and video, precisely so a problem can be flagged without anyone here needing to go looking for it.

Every story, photograph and video has a Reportlink right where you’re viewing it - use that where you can, since it tells us exactly what you’re flagging. For anything else, or if you’d rather not use the in-app control, email [privacy contact email]with enough detail to find it. We’ll treat a report involving a child’s safety as the highest priority, ahead of everything else in the queue.

A new archive can be used free for a trial period; after that, keeping it able to add new stories, photos and recordings costs a small monthly subscription, billed through Stripe - we never see or store your card details ourselves. If a subscription lapses, nothing is deleted: the archive becomes read-only and pauses new invitations, and subscribing again switches everything back on. Reading and exporting the whole archive are never paywalled, for any archive, ever. Current pricing is in the FAQ.

The first founding families accept a separate, additional agreement covering their specific free-for-life terms, a lifetime video allowance, and a non-compete condition - shown to a founder archive’s owner the first time they sign in. These general terms apply to a founder archive too; the founder terms sit on top of them, not instead of them.

This is a small, part-time service - one person, not a large company with an on-call team - and we’d rather say that plainly than promise something we can’t back up. We provide the service “as is,” without a guarantee that it’ll be available every minute of every day or entirely free of bugs. What we do guarantee is the thing that actually matters for a family archive: you can export everything, at any time, for free, in a form that opens without us - so the archive outlives any outage, and outlives the service itself if it ever had to.

To the extent the law allows, we aren’t liable for indirect or consequential losses arising from your use of the service. Nothing here limits liability that can’t legally be limited - for example, for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud. [This section in particular needs a proper legal review - liability caps and carve-outs are exactly the kind of clause that must be drafted by a lawyer, not assumed from a template.]

You can stop using the service at any time; an archive owner can ask us to close an archive entirely. We can suspend or close an account for a genuine breach of the acceptable-use rules above, or (with reasonable notice, except in the serious cases described under Enforcement) for any other reason. Either way, the export and erasure rights in the privacy policy still apply.

If these terms change in a way that matters, we’ll say so here and, for a significant change, tell members directly by email rather than leaving it to be noticed - the same commitment made in the privacy policy.

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales. Digirelevance Limited is a company based in the United Kingdom. [Confirm during legal review that this matches the company’s place of registration, and what it means for members in Scotland, Northern Ireland and outside the UK.]

Questions about these terms: [privacy contact email].