Terms of Use

Last updated 24 August 2026

These are the terms on which Once Spoken is offered. They are written to be read, not to be endured — and they are deliberately modest about what we ask of you.

1. What Once Spoken is

Once Spoken is a place of remembrance. Each memorial is a photograph, a name, the years of a life and a short piece of something the person actually said. Memorials are shown one at a time and chosen at random, so that people who never knew someone might still come across them.

It is a small independent project operated from the United Kingdom by one person. Administrator to confirm: the legal or trading name of the operator, whether it is a registered company (and if so the company number and registered office), and a postal address.

By using this site or submitting a memorial, you agree to these terms. If you do not agree with them, please do not submit anything.

2. Who may submit a memorial

You may submit a memorial if you are 18 or over, and if you have a genuine connection to the person being remembered or the permission of someone who does — a family member, a partner, a close friend, or someone acting with the family’s agreement.

Please do not submit a memorial for someone you did not know, and please do not submit one where you have reason to think the family would object.

3. Accuracy of what you submit

You confirm that the information you give us is accurate to the best of your knowledge: that the person is real, that the dates are correct as far as you know, and that the words you have submitted are genuinely something they said rather than something written about them or attributed to them afterwards.

If you later realise something is wrong, tell us and we will correct it.

4. Your content, and your responsibility for it

You are responsible for what you submit. Once Spoken reviews memorials before publishing them, but a review is not a verification: we cannot confirm that a photograph is of the person named, that a quotation is accurate, or that you had the family’s blessing.

Photographs

You confirm that you own the photograph you upload, or otherwise have the right to give us permission to publish it. Please do not upload a photograph taken by a professional photographer, a newspaper, a school or a studio unless you have their permission — copyright in a photograph usually belongs to the person who took it, not to the family of the person in it.

If other living people appear in the photograph, please consider whether they would be comfortable with it being published, and crop them out if you are unsure.

Quoted words

You confirm that the words you submit were genuinely spoken by the person being remembered, that you are entitled to share them, and that publishing them will not breach anyone’s confidence or reveal something private about a living person.

5. Respectful submissions

Once Spoken is a memorial site, and its tone matters more than almost anything else about it. Please submit only material that you would be content for the person’s family to see.

We will not publish anything that:

• is untrue, invented, a hoax, or a memorial for someone who is not dead;
• mocks, insults or settles a score with the person remembered, or with anyone else;
• is abusive, hateful, discriminatory, threatening or obscene;
• identifies or exposes a living person in a way that would harm or distress them;
• reveals private information such as addresses, medical details or contact details;
• infringes someone else’s copyright or other rights;
• advertises anything, links anywhere, or is used to promote a business or campaign;
• is unlawful, or would put us in breach of the law by publishing it.

6. Moderation

Every memorial is read by a person before it appears. Nothing is published automatically.

We may decline a submission, and we may remove a memorial that has already been published. We are a small project and we will not always be able to explain a decision in detail, but we will not make one carelessly. We may also decline a submission that we simply cannot verify enough to be comfortable with.

We are not obliged to publish anything, and rejecting a memorial is not a judgement about the person it remembers.

7. Corrections, removal and disputes

You can ask us at any time to correct a memorial, change or remove a photograph, or remove a memorial entirely. Use the contact form, tell us the name shown on the memorial, and tell us your relationship to them if you can.

Where a family disagrees about a memorial — for instance where one relative submitted it and another wants it taken down — we will usually take the memorial out of public view while we work out what is right, rather than leave it up and argue about it. We will try to be fair, but we are not a court and we cannot adjudicate family disputes. Our decision on whether a memorial stays published is final.

If you believe your copyright has been infringed, or that a photograph of you or your relative has been published without permission, contact us and we will act promptly.

8. Who owns what

You keep all copyright and other rights in the photograph and the words you submit. What you give us is a licence: permission to do the specific things that are necessary to run this site and show the memorial.

That permission is limited to:

• storing the photograph and text on our systems and our providers’ systems;
• reviewing them as part of moderation;
• resizing, re-encoding or cropping the photograph only as needed to display it properly on different screens;
• publicly displaying the memorial on Once Spoken, and allowing visitors to see and share a link to it;
• keeping backups as part of ordinary operation.

This licence is worldwide and royalty-free, because the site is available anywhere and we do not charge you for showing the memorial. It lasts for as long as the memorial is published, and it ends if the memorial is removed, except for backup copies that expire in the normal course.

We will not sell your photograph, license it to anybody else, use it to advertise a third party, or use it to train artificial intelligence models.

Use in our own promotional material — for example on Once Spoken’s social media — happens only if you gave the separate optional permission on the submission form. It is genuinely optional, it makes no difference to whether the memorial is published, and you can withdraw it at any time by contacting us.

The Once Spoken name, design, wording and code belong to us, and are not covered by any of the above.

9. Using the site

Please use Once Spoken as it is meant to be used. Do not attempt to break it, scrape it in bulk, gain access to the administration area, copy the memorials for another service, or use anything here for marketing.

Memorials are published so that people may come across them and remember someone. That is the only purpose for which they are made available.

10. Availability

Once Spoken is provided as it is, and we cannot promise that it will always be available or free of faults. It is a small project, and it may be taken offline for maintenance or changed without notice.

We intend memorials to remain published indefinitely, and we will do our best to make that true. But we cannot guarantee that this site will exist forever, and it would be dishonest to say otherwise. If Once Spoken ever has to close, we will try to give reasonable notice so that people can retrieve what they submitted.

11. Payment

Administrator to confirm before payments are switched on: the payment provider, the refund and cancellation policy in final form, whether the operator is trading as a sole trader or a company, and whether any consumer-contract information duties are met at the point of purchase.

12. Changes to the service and to these terms

We may change Once Spoken, add features or remove them. We may also update these terms — if we do, we will change the date at the top of this page, and where a change materially affects people who have already submitted memorials, we will make that clear rather than quietly editing the text.

13. Liability

Nothing in these terms limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited. Nothing in them affects your statutory rights as a consumer.

Subject to that, and to the extent the law allows: we are not liable for loss of profit, loss of business, or any indirect or consequential loss; we are not liable for material that other people submit; and we are not liable for the site being unavailable.

Once Spoken is not a record office, a registry or an archive of legal standing. Please do not rely on anything published here as evidence of a person, a date or an event.

Administrator to have reviewed by a solicitor: this clause, the disputed-memorial clause and the payment clause are the three that most warrant professional review before Once Spoken has significant traffic or takes payment.

14. Governing law

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction. If you live elsewhere in the United Kingdom, you keep the benefit of any mandatory protections of your local law and may bring proceedings in your own courts.

Administrator to confirm: that England and Wales is the correct governing law — if Once Spoken is operated from Scotland or Northern Ireland, this should say so instead.

15. Contact

You can reach us through the contact form on Once Spoken. Every message is read by a person.

See also our Privacy Policy, which explains how information is handled.