ONCE SPOKEN ← Back to the memorials

Terms of Use

Last updated 23 September 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.

Once Spoken is operated from England by Robert Hawes, a sole trader trading as Once Spoken. There is no support department behind it: the person who runs the site is the person who reads what you send. Messages reach us through the contact form. Our geographical and service address is 201 Linley Drive, Hastings, East Sussex, TN34 2BX, United Kingdom.

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.

The form asks for your own name and an email address you can receive at, and a memorial cannot be submitted without them. They are how we know who sent a memorial in, how we can write to you about it, and how we can tell you what has happened to it. You can also tell us your relationship to the person, but that part is optional. None of it is shown on the memorial, and giving us the address for those service messages is not marketing consent. The form also carries Email choices — optional, with three separate unticked choices: one reminder about sharing this memorial; occasional first-party email about Once Spoken’s memorial features, own products and services, offers and ways to support it; and permission for us to ask about featuring this memorial’s story. They are independent, make no difference to submission, publication or price, and can each be withdrawn. The exact scope and confirmation process are in our Privacy Policy.

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.

Voice clips

A memorial may carry a short recording of the person’s own voice. It is optional, can be added while submitting or later through a private, expiring link sent to the submitter’s recorded email address, and a memorial without one is treated in exactly the same way as one with it.

If you add one, you confirm four things, on four separate ticks, none of which is filled in for you and all of which are required before a recording can be accepted:

Two things follow from the first of those, and they are worth stating plainly, because they catch people out. There is normally copyright in a recording, and it usually belongs to whoever made it rather than to the family of the person on it — so please do not send a recording taken from a broadcast, a film, a professional interview, a funeral service recorded by a company, or anything else made by somebody else, unless you have their permission. And a performer has rights in their own recorded performance, which can outlive them and pass to whoever inherited them. A voicemail left for you, or a family video you took yourself, is usually straightforward. Anything made by a business or a broadcaster usually is not.

The file you choose is kept privately and is never the file anybody hears. We make a short clip from all or the part you selected, and that clip is the only thing that could ever be published. Approving the memorial does not approve its recording: the two are reviewed separately, we may decline a recording while publishing the memorial, and we may remove a recording that has already been published.

A published clip carries a written transcript so that somebody who cannot hear it can still read what was said. You may write one, and we may correct it. No recording is sent to any transcription, speech-recognition or artificial-intelligence service — not for a transcript and not for anything else.

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:

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.

A recording is reviewed separately from the memorial it belongs to. Approving one is not approving the other, and a memorial can be published with its recording declined or still unreviewed. A recording is only ever publicly reachable when every one of the conditions on it is satisfied at the moment somebody asks for it — the memorial published, the recording approved, the permission recorded and not withdrawn or disputed, the transcript reviewed, and nothing taken down. If any of those stops being true, it stops being reachable, immediately and without a schedule.

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.

Recordings. You can ask us to take a voice clip down at any time — as the person who submitted it, as somebody who can be heard on it, or as whoever holds the rights in it. Use the contact form; if you submitted the memorial, you can also ask us to email a single-use link to the address already recorded against it. Public access ends when we act on the request, not on a schedule. Withdrawing permission does not erase the record of what was permitted and when: we keep that, because it is how we can show what was allowed rather than assert it. Where a family disagrees about a recording, we will normally take it out of public view while we work out what is right.

If you believe your copyright has been infringed, that a photograph of you or your relative has been published without permission, or that a recording has been published which you did not agree to, contact us and we will act promptly.

What removal can and cannot reach. When we take a memorial out of public view, its page stops being served, it leaves our sitemap, and both happen within five minutes. What we cannot do is reach into a search engine’s own index or cache, or into a copy somebody has already saved or posted elsewhere. Those normally clear by themselves once the page is gone, and we will ask for removal where a search engine offers a way to, but we cannot promise a date for something that is not ours. We would rather say that plainly than imply a removal is instant everywhere.

8. Who owns what

You keep everything you own.

Submitting a memorial does not transfer ownership of your photograph or your words to Once Spoken. It never has and it never will. You give us permission to publish them — nothing more.

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:

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 or your recording, license either to anybody else, use either to advertise a third party, or use either to train artificial intelligence models.

A recording is narrower still, and deliberately so. The permission you give covers this recording on this memorial. It does not permit advertising, use by anybody else, voice cloning, AI training, synthetic speech, impersonation, sale or licensing to another company — not now and not later under the same tick. If we ever wanted to do something materially different with a recording, we would have to come back and ask for a new permission, name what it was for, and get it. Silence, an old tick, or a change to this page would not be enough.

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.

You do not need an account to visit, share, light a candle, contribute or create a memorial. A verified passwordless account is required to manage one through My Once Spoken. We may link an existing memorial to an account only where its verified email matches the private submitter email we already hold, where the owner invites that account, or after a separate manual check by us.

A memorial may have an owner and trusted co-managers. They can see one another’s account email address, view memorial activity, request changes and work with its voice clip. Public changes remain subject to moderation. Only the owner can invite a co-manager or transfer ownership, and a transfer must be deliberate. Keep private sign-in and invitation links private, and invite only somebody you trust with the memorial.

There is also a public page that lets any visitor pass Once Spoken on informally. That ordinary sharing is not the partner programme described below: it requires no sign-up, carries no organisation-specific link, provides no reporting and earns nothing.

10. Partner programme

An organisation that supports bereaved families may apply online to become a Once Spoken referral partner. There is no application or approval fee. Every application is reviewed by a person, and we may approve or decline it at our discretion. Approval creates a stable referral link automatically and gives the applicant’s private status page ready-written material and anonymous impact totals. It does not create an agency, employment, franchise, joint venture, exclusivity or endorsement of either party by the other.

A partner may share Once Spoken as a community-supported and optional service. It must describe the service accurately, must not present Once Spoken as its own service, must not charge a family for using or being referred to Once Spoken, and must not promise publication or favourable treatment. A partner must not send us a family’s name, contact details, memorial material or other personal information unless that person has chosen and permitted it through the ordinary Once Spoken process. The referral link is the safe way to introduce the service: families then deal directly with us.

The link measures anonymous totals as described in the Privacy Policy. A partner receives no lead list, family record or individual memorial information, and no right to contact anyone through Once Spoken. There is no commission, referral fee or financial reward. The benefit is a useful aftercare option, supplied wording and aggregate evidence of impact. A partner may make a voluntary contribution towards running costs, but payment is never required for approval, does not keep a partnership active, and cannot affect a memorial’s moderation, publication or visibility.

We may suspend or archive a partner or a referral link if it is misleadingly promoted, misused, creates a privacy or safeguarding concern, is associated with unlawful or harmful conduct, or no longer fits the purpose of the programme. We will act proportionately and a partner can contact us about a decision. A partner can ask to leave at any time. Referral links and materials remain part of Once Spoken and may not be sold, transferred, repurposed for tracking, or used to imply an entitlement that these terms do not give.

11. 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.

12. Payment

Voice clips carry no extra charge. There is no upgrade or paid tier for adding one, and whether you contributed makes no difference to whether a recording is accepted, reviewed or published. If that ever changed we would say so here first, and it would not alter a permission already given.

13. 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.

Accepting these terms is not consent to marketing. A change to these terms or the Privacy Policy cannot create, broaden or renew an email-marketing permission. If we want to email about a materially different purpose, we must present a separate optional choice in its own words and obtain any confirmation required for that choice.

14. 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.

15. 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.

16. 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.

Once Spoken is a small independent project, run by one person, in the United Kingdom.