GivePeace Copyright & DMCA Policy

Version 1.0 — Effective July 30, 2026

This policy explains how Give Peace Inc., a Delaware corporation ("Give Peace," "we," "us," or "our"), handles copyright on GivePeace. It is part of our Terms of Service: by using the Service you agree to it, and words defined in the Terms of Service — member, trustee, recipient, armed message, release — mean the same thing here.

Two kinds of people need this document, so we wrote it for both. If you own a copyright and believe something on GivePeace infringes it, Sections 2 through 6 tell you how to reach us and what happens next. If you are a member whose video or post was removed, Sections 7 through 9 tell you how to respond. And if you are about to put music in a memorial video, please read Section 12 first. Music is the most common way people run into copyright trouble here, and we would much rather you avoid a takedown than face one on a tribute to someone you love.

1. What This Policy Covers

1.1 This policy covers material that members share through the Service — most often the public memorial surfaces: tombstone videos, the memorial feed, comments, prayers, and photos. We respect the rights of the people who create music, film, photographs, and words, and we expect members to do the same. When a copyright owner tells us, in the form the law prescribes, that material on the Service infringes their rights, we respond through the notice-and-takedown process of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. § 512), as this policy describes.

1.2 Sealed private messages are different. Sealed private messages are not reviewed or accessed; we access them only where the law requires. Section 6.5 explains what we do if a copyright notice points at a message that has not yet been delivered.

2. Our DMCA Agent

2.1 Send copyright infringement notices to:

DMCA Agent, Give Peace Inc. Email: support@givepeace.co Subject line: "DMCA Notice"

2.2 You do not need a GivePeace account to send a notice, and we do not require any particular form, portal, or notarization. A notice that includes the elements in Section 3, sent by email to the address above, is a notice we will act on. We will not add hurdles the law does not require.

3. What a Complete Notice Must Include

3.1 The law sets out six elements (17 U.S.C. § 512(c)(3)). A complete notice includes all of them:

(a) Your signature. A physical or electronic signature of a person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed. A typed full name at the end of your email counts as an electronic signature.

(b) The work. Identification of the copyrighted work you believe has been infringed — or, if a single notice covers multiple works on the Service, a representative list of those works.

(c) The material. Identification of the material you believe is infringing (or is the subject of infringing activity) and that you want removed or disabled, with information reasonably sufficient for us to locate it. A link to the memorial page, post, or video is best.

(d) How to reach you. Information reasonably sufficient for us to contact you, such as your name, address, telephone number, and, if available, an email address.

(e) Good-faith statement. A statement that you have a good-faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.

(f) Accuracy statement. A statement that the information in the notice is accurate, and — under penalty of perjury — that you are authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

4. If Your Notice Is Incomplete

4.1 If your notice identifies the work, tells us where the material is, and gives us a way to reach you, but is missing something else, we will reply promptly and tell you exactly what is missing so you can complete it. We will not silently discard a notice that comes that close.

4.2 A notice missing most of the elements in Section 3 may not be actionable at all. If it gives us a way to reach you, we will still try to point you back to this policy so you can send a complete one.

5. Before You Send: Fair Use and False Claims

5.1 Consider fair use first. U.S. law expects a copyright owner to consider, before sending a takedown notice, whether the use complained of is authorized by law — including whether it is a fair use. Please take that duty seriously here. Many notices on GivePeace will land on memorial and tribute videos, and a takedown reaches a grieving family.

5.2 Misrepresentation has consequences. Under 17 U.S.C. § 512(f), anyone who knowingly and materially misrepresents that material is infringing — or, in a counter-notice, that material was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification — is liable for the damages the misrepresentation causes, including costs and attorneys' fees, to the person injured by it. That protection runs in every direction: to the member whose material was wrongly targeted, to the copyright owner, and to Give Peace itself.

5.3 We do not decide fair use for either side, and nothing in this policy — including any removal or restoration we carry out — is a determination that a particular use is or is not infringing.

6. What We Do When We Receive a Valid Notice

6.1 We act quickly. When we receive a notice containing the Section 3 elements, we remove or disable access to the identified material expeditiously.

6.2 Removal means quarantine, not destruction. When we take material down under this policy, we disable access to it — using the same quarantine mechanism our moderation process uses — so that it is hidden from view. We do not delete it. We preserve the removed material, with access disabled, until the notice and any counter-notice are fully resolved, so it can be restored intact if the process ends that way. The Privacy Policy's retention rules describe this preservation hold, including how it interacts with account deletion. On a service that holds people's last recorded words, we treat "never destroy material over an unresolved accusation" as a hard rule.

6.3 We notify the member. We promptly notify the member who posted the material that we have removed or disabled access to it, provide a copy of the notice, and explain how to submit a counter-notice under Section 7.

6.4 We keep records. We keep a record of every notice we receive, every action we take, every counter-notice, and the reasons for each decision.

6.5 Notices that touch an undelivered message. If a compliant notice identifies material in a message that has not yet been delivered, we do not open or review the sealed message. Instead, we place a hold on that message's release: it will not be delivered while the notice is unresolved. A hold defers delivery; it never, by itself, cancels a delivery, and it never accelerates one. The release process itself, including its waiting periods, is described in the Death Verification & Posthumous Release Policy.

6.6 We may also remove material for reasons that have nothing to do with copyright, under the Terms of Service and the Community Guidelines. This policy governs copyright notices only, and nothing in it limits those separate rights.

7. Counter-Notices

7.1 If your material was removed under this policy and you believe that was a mistake or a misidentification, you may send a counter-notice to:

DMCA Agent, Give Peace Inc. Email: support@givepeace.co Subject line: "DMCA Counter-Notice"

7.2 A complete counter-notice includes (17 U.S.C. § 512(g)(3)):

(a) Your physical or electronic signature;

(b) Identification of the material that was removed or disabled, and the location where it appeared before it was removed;

(c) A statement, under penalty of perjury, that you have a good-faith belief the material was removed or disabled as a result of mistake or misidentification of the material; and

(d) Your name, address, and telephone number, and a statement that you consent to the jurisdiction of the Federal District Court for the judicial district in which your address is located (or, if your address is outside the United States, any judicial district in which Give Peace Inc. may be found), and that you will accept service of process from the person who sent the original notice or that person's agent.

7.3 Read 7.2(d) again before you send. Filing a counter-notice means agreeing that the person who sent the original notice can sue you in federal court over this material, and that you will accept the court papers if they do. We say this plainly because it is a real consequence, not a formality. The misrepresentation rule in Section 5.2 applies to counter-notices too.

8. What Happens After a Counter-Notice

8.1 When we receive a complete counter-notice, we promptly send a copy to the person who sent the original notice and tell them we will restore the material in 10 business days.

8.2 We then restore the material — and lift the quarantine — not less than 10 and not more than 14 business days after we receive the counter-notice, unless our DMCA Agent first receives notice that the original sender has filed a court action seeking to restrain the member from the infringing activity. If we receive that notice, the material stays down until the court matter is resolved.

8.3 If no complete counter-notice arrives, the material stays down.

9. When the Member Who Posted Has Passed Away

9.1 GivePeace is built around messages that outlive the people who record them, so a copyright notice will sometimes point at material posted by a member who has passed away. When that happens, we act on the material exactly as Section 6 describes: we disable access to it, we preserve it, and we send the Section 6.3 notification to the account's contact channels.

9.2 A counter-notice on behalf of a member who has passed away may be submitted by the member's personal representative — the executor or administrator of the member's estate, appointed by a court — signing in a representative capacity. The counter-notice must include the elements in Section 7.2, together with documentation of the representative's appointment (such as letters testamentary or letters of administration) and a certified copy of the member's death certificate.

9.3 If no one with documented authority submits a counter-notice, the material stays down, and we will not restore it. We know that can be painful when the material is part of how someone is remembered. It is also the only position we can honestly take: restoring material over an unresolved infringement notice, with no one lawfully able to stand behind it, is not something we can do.

10. Trustees Have No Role in Copyright Disputes

10.1 A trustee's only role is to tell us a person has passed away, and to confirm or contest what others have reported. A trustee is not a fiduciary, does not hold or inherit anything, and can never see who a person's recipients are, which messages exist, or what any message says.

10.2 Because of that boundary, being a trustee gives a person no authority in a copyright dispute. A trustee cannot file a copyright notice on a member's behalf, cannot submit a counter-notice on a member's behalf — whether the member is alive or has passed away — and is not notified of copyright notices involving the member's account. If a trustee also happens to be the court-appointed personal representative of a member's estate, they may act under Section 9.2 in that capacity; the authority comes from the court appointment, never from being a trustee.

10.3 Nothing in this section stops anyone — trustee or not — from sending a notice about their own copyrighted work under Section 3. The boundary is about acting for someone else.

11. Repeat Infringers

11.1 The policy. We terminate, in appropriate circumstances, the accounts of members who are repeat infringers. Repeated valid takedown notices against a member's account can make that member a repeat infringer; we do not wait for a court to rule. Material restored after a successful counter-notice does not count against the member.

11.2 How we apply it. We apply this policy through a graduated internal process, consistently, based on the records described in Section 6.4. We do not publish a fixed number of strikes; what we promise is that repeated valid notices bring escalating consequences that end in termination, applied the same way for everyone. Whether an account has spent money with us plays no part in these decisions.

11.3 What termination means on GivePeace. Termination follows the Terms of Service: the account is deactivated, and the member's sealed, armed messages will not be delivered. On most platforms, losing an account means losing a login. On GivePeace, it means the messages you recorded for the people you love will never reach them. We say this plainly so no one learns it after the fact: repeatedly posting infringing material puts your armed messages at stake.

11.4 Members who have passed away. If valid notices accrue against material posted by a member who has passed away, we act on the material: we remove or disable access to the infringing material, and where a pattern continues, we may restrict what the account's public memorial surfaces display. We do not treat a member's passing as a shield for infringing material — and we do not treat it as a reason to erase a memorial.

12. Music in Your Videos — Please Read This Before You Post

12.1 The most common copyright problem we expect on GivePeace is commercially recorded music playing in a memorial or tribute video. Using a recorded song in a video generally requires permission from both the music publisher (for the song) and the record label (for the recording), and no everyday purchase — owning the album, having a streaming subscription — grants that permission. GivePeace does not provide music, and no music license comes with the Service.

12.2 You are responsible for having the rights to any music — and any other material, such as photographs, video clips, or written words — in what you post. Music rightsholders send takedown notices in high volume, often through automated systems, and a valid notice will bring down a tribute video no matter how much love went into it. The safest choices are your own words, your own recordings, and music you have explicit permission to use.

12.3 We cannot tell you whether a particular use of music is lawful, and this policy is not a determination either way. What we can tell you plainly is where the risk lives — and it lives here.

13. What We Do Not Do

13.1 We do not monitor for copyright. We do not monitor the Service or pre-screen what members post for copyright infringement, and the law does not require us to. We rely on the notice process in this policy. We do moderate the public memorial surfaces for safety and respect — the Community Guidelines describe how — but that is a different job from copyright review, and it is not a promise to detect infringement.

13.2 We do not take sides. We follow the process this policy describes: notice, takedown, counter-notice, restoration or court. The process — not our sympathy for either side — decides the outcome.

13.3 We accommodate standard technical measures. We accommodate, and do not interfere with, standard technical measures used by copyright owners to identify or protect copyrighted works, as U.S. copyright law defines them.

14. Preservation, Deletion, and Related Policies

14.1 Material removed under this policy is preserved, with access disabled, until the notice and any counter-notice process fully resolves — including where the posting member's account enters deletion during that time. The Privacy Policy's retention rules are the single source of truth for what we keep and for how long, including this preservation hold; nothing in this policy shortens or extends them.

14.2 Legal process connected to copyright — for example, a subpoena seeking to identify the person who posted material — is handled under our Legal Process & Estate Requests Policy.

14.3 This policy works alongside the Terms of Service, the Privacy Policy, the Community Guidelines, and the Trustee & Recipient Terms. Where this policy and the Terms of Service both speak to copyright process, this policy governs the copyright process.

15. Changes to This Policy

15.1 We may update this policy as the law and the Service evolve. The version and effective date appear at the top. For material changes, we will give notice as the Terms of Service describe. Prior versions are available on request to support@givepeace.co.

16. Contact

Give Peace Inc. support@givepeace.co givepeace.co

• Copyright infringement notices: subject "DMCA Notice"
• Counter-notices: subject "DMCA Counter-Notice"
• Anything else about this policy: subject "Attn: Legal"

If a takedown has landed on a memorial you care about and you do not understand why, write to us. We cannot referee a copyright dispute, but we can always explain what is happening and what your options are.

Copyright & DMCA Policy v1.0 — Effective July 30, 2026