Terms of Service

Draft. This page is pending legal review and may change.

These terms cover your use of First Claim: the website, the workspace, the Protection Network and everything reachable from them. Using the service means you accept them. If you are agreeing on behalf of a company, you are confirming you can bind it.

1. What we provide

First Claim records invention disclosures, computes cryptographic hashes over them, issues timestamp proofs, monitors public sources for potentially overlapping material, and connects you with independent IP professionals and investors.

We are not a law firm and nothing here is legal advice. Attorneys listed in the Protection Network are independent practitioners. Any engagement is between you and them, on their terms, and we are not a party to it.

2. What a timestamp is and is not

A timestamp proof evidences that specific content existed in a specific form at a specific time. It is not a patent, a trademark, a copyright registration, or any other granted right, and it does not confer exclusivity. Whether it carries weight in a given dispute is for the relevant tribunal to decide under the relevant law.

We do not review disclosures for novelty or patentability, and a timestamp is not our opinion that your idea is protectable.

3. Your account

Keep your credentials secure and tell us promptly if you think they have been compromised. You are responsible for activity under your account. One human per account. Sharing logins undermines the evidence value of everything sealed under them, which is a problem for you more than for us.

You must be 18 or older.

4. Your content

You own what you put in. Nothing here transfers any intellectual property to us.

You grant us a limited licence to store, hash, display and process your content strictly to operate the service and, where you explicitly share a record, to show it to the recipient you chose. That licence ends when you delete the content, except that hashes and proofs already issued remain, since revoking them would destroy the evidence chain others may rely on.

We do not use your disclosures to train machine learning models, and we do not sell them or derived signals about them.

5. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• submit content you have no right to submit, or use the service to launder someone else's work into a dated record;
• misrepresent what a proof shows, for example by presenting a timestamp as a granted patent, for instance;
• probe, scrape or disrupt the service, or work around its access controls;
• use the Protection Network to send unsolicited bulk messages to attorneys or investors.

We may suspend accounts that do these things. Where circumstances allow, we will tell you why first.

6. Subscriptions and billing

Paid plans renew automatically until cancelled. Cancel any time from Settings → Billing; access continues to the end of the period you have paid for. We do not pro-rate partial periods except where the law requires it.

Price changes take effect at your next renewal, and we will give you at least 30 days' notice by email.

If you cancel, your existing timestamp proofs remain valid. They do not expire with your subscription. You keep read-only Vault access and full export; you lose monitoring, Network access and new seals.

7. Availability

We aim for continuous availability and will not pretend to guarantee it. The service is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties beyond those that cannot lawfully be excluded. Planned maintenance is announced in advance where we can.

8. Limitation of liability

To the extent the law permits, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential damages, or for lost profits, revenue, data or business opportunity, including any loss arising from a dispute over intellectual property, whether or not a timestamp was involved.

Our total liability for any claim is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before it arose.

Nothing here excludes liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.

9. Ending the agreement

You may close your account at any time. We may terminate for material breach, or with 30 days' notice if we discontinue the service. On termination you have 90 days to export your data, after which we delete it per our Privacy Policy. Issued proofs survive.

10. Changes

We will post material changes here and email account holders at least 30 days before they take effect. Continuing to use the service after that means you accept the revised terms; if you do not, cancel before the effective date and we will refund the unused portion of your term.

11. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction. If you are a consumer, this does not deprive you of protections under the mandatory law of where you live.

12. Contact

Questions about these terms, or anything else: Contact.