Terms of Service

Pudding is operated by Socialocca LLC ("Socialocca", "we", "us"). These Terms are a binding agreement between you and Socialocca covering your use of pudding.social and everything on it (the "Service").

By creating an account or using the Service you accept these Terms. If you do not accept them, do not use the Service. Our Privacy Policy and Honest Claims page form part of this agreement.

You must be at least 13 years old. If you are under 18, you may only use the Service with the involvement of a parent or guardian who agrees to these Terms. If you are using Pudding on behalf of an organization, you confirm you are authorized to accept these Terms for it.

You may not use the Service if you are barred from doing so under the laws that apply to you, or if we have previously terminated your account.

Pudding does three things:

• Verifies that accounts, websites and email addresses belong to you, using methods such as signing in to the platform, a one-time code in your public bio, a DNS record, a file or meta tag on your site, or a confirmation link sent to your email.
• Creates Proof Records: a SHA-256 fingerprint of a URL or file, together with the time you registered it and the verified channel you registered it from.
• Publishes those records so anyone can check them, and periodically anchors batches of them to the Bitcoin blockchain through OpenTimestamps so the timestamps do not depend on our word.

You are responsible for your account, for keeping your sign-in credentials secure, and for everything done through your account. Tell us promptly at hello@pudding.social if you believe it has been accessed by someone else.

Your username appears in your public profile URL. We may reclaim usernames that impersonate someone, infringe a trademark, or are used in bad faith.

You keep every right you already have in what you register. We claim no ownership of it.

You grant us a limited, non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to store, reproduce and display your content strictly to operate the Service: showing your public profile and Proof Records, computing and publishing fingerprints, and keeping any private file copy you explicitly asked us to keep. This licence exists only to run the Service and ends when you delete the content or your account, except for material already published to the blockchain as described in section 6.

By registering something you confirm you have the right to do so and that doing so does not infringe anyone else's rights.

Anyone can register a fingerprint of anything. What makes a record persuasive is that it is earlier than a competing claim and comes from a channel you verifiably control. That is evidence, and it may be useful in a dispute, but no court, platform or third party is obliged to accept it, and we do not promise that any of them will.

Anchoring is permanent in a way we cannot reverse. Batches of fingerprints are combined into a single value and published to the Bitcoin blockchain. That value cannot be withdrawn by us or by anyone else. It is a hash derived from other hashes and does not identify you or reveal your content, but it is public forever.

A Proof Record is a public record, and it outlives the account that created it. If you delete your account, the record is stripped of your handle, its title, note and source link, and every connection to you; the fingerprint and timestamp remain, so that someone who was pointed at the record can still check it. That is what makes a record worth relying on: it cannot be withdrawn later because it became inconvenient. Section 12 covers deletion, including how to ask for the anonymous remainder to be erased too.

Read Honest Claims for a fuller account of the limits.

You agree not to use the Service to:

• Register or publish content you do not have the right to register, or that infringes someone else's intellectual property, privacy or other rights.
• Impersonate any person or organization, or falsely claim a verified channel belongs to you.
• Harass, threaten, defame or endanger anyone.
• Publish content that is illegal where you are, or that sexually exploits or endangers children.
• Attempt to bypass our verification methods, plan limits, or access controls.
• Probe, scan, overload or disrupt the Service, or access it by automated means beyond ordinary use.
• Attempt to reverse the fingerprinting process, or use the Service to build a competing product from our data.

We may remove content or suspend accounts that break these rules. Where the situation allows it, we will tell you why.

If you believe something on Pudding infringes your copyright, email hello@pudding.social with the subject line "DMCA Notice" and include:

• Your name, address, phone number and email address.
• Identification of the work you say is infringed.
• The URL of the material on Pudding you are complaining about.
• A statement that you believe in good faith the use is not authorized by the owner, its agent, or the law.
• A statement, under penalty of perjury, that the information is accurate and that you are the owner or authorized to act for them.
• Your physical or electronic signature.

We will respond to properly submitted notices, and we will terminate the accounts of repeat infringers. If your material was removed and you believe that was a mistake, you may send a counter notice to the same address with the corresponding statements required by the DMCA, and we will follow the statutory process.

The free plan is free. Paid plans are described on the pricing page and are billed in advance through our payment processor, Stripe. We do not receive or store your card number.

• Subscriptions renew automatically at the end of each billing period until you cancel.
• You can cancel at any time. Cancelling stops the next renewal; it does not refund the period already paid for, and you keep paid features until that period ends.
• Proof Records you already registered stay public and stay anchored after you cancel. Cancelling returns you to the free plan's monthly limit for new records.
• If we materially reduce what a paid plan includes, we will tell you in advance and you may cancel for a pro-rata refund of the unused period.
• We may change prices. Changes apply from your next billing period after we have given you reasonable notice.
• Registered 501(c)(3) organizations and equivalent charities outside the US may apply for a discount. We verify status by hand and may withdraw the discount if it no longer applies.
• Taxes are your responsibility unless we are required to collect them.

Beyond the cases above, payments are non-refundable except where refusing a refund would be unlawful where you live. If you think you have been billed in error, email hello@pudding.social and we will look at it properly.

Verifying a channel may involve signing in to a third-party platform or letting us read a public page. Your use of those platforms is governed by their terms, not ours. We do not control them, and they may change or withdraw access at any time, which can make a verification method stop working.

When you connect an account by signing in, we receive only enough to confirm which account it is. We do not post on your behalf and we do not retain access tokens after the check.

We aim to keep Pudding available and accurate, but we do not promise uninterrupted service. We may add, change or remove features. If we make a change that materially reduces the Service's core function, we will give reasonable notice where we can.

We may update these Terms. If a change is material we will give notice through the Service or by email before it takes effect. Continuing to use Pudding after that means you accept the updated Terms. If you do not, you may close your account.

You can delete your account at any time in settings. Deleting removes your profile, your verified channels, any files we were keeping for you, and every link between you and what you registered. It cancels an active subscription and it cannot be undone.

We may suspend or terminate your account if you materially breach these Terms, if we are required to by law, or if keeping your account would expose us or others to real risk. Where we reasonably can, we will tell you first and give you a chance to fix it.

Sections 5, 6, and 13 through 17 survive termination.

We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, secure or error-free, that fingerprints or anchoring will always be available, or that any third party will accept a Proof Record as evidence of anything. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain disclaimers, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

We are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost revenue, lost data, lost goodwill, or the cost of substitute services, even if we were told such damages were possible.

Nothing in these Terms excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including for fraud, or for death or personal injury caused by negligence. Some jurisdictions do not allow these limits, so they may not fully apply to you.

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless Socialocca LLC and its members, officers and contractors from claims, damages, losses and reasonable legal costs arising from content you register, your breach of these Terms, or your violation of any law or of anyone else's rights. We will tell you promptly about any such claim and you may control the defence, provided any settlement that imposes obligations on us has our written agreement.

These Terms are governed by the laws of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the applicable federal laws of the United States, without regard to conflict-of-law rules.

Before filing anything, please email hello@pudding.social and give us thirty days to resolve it. Most things are a misunderstanding, and we would rather fix it than litigate it.

If you live somewhere whose consumer law gives you the right to bring proceedings locally, this section does not take that away.

• These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy and Honest Claims page, are the entire agreement between us about the Service.
• If any provision is held unenforceable, the rest stays in force and the unenforceable part is narrowed to the minimum extent needed.
• Our not enforcing a provision is not a waiver of it.
• You may not assign these Terms without our consent. We may assign them to a successor in a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets.
• Nothing here creates a partnership, employment or agency relationship.
• We are not liable for failures caused by events beyond our reasonable control.

Socialocca LLC, Pennsylvania, United States. Questions about these Terms go to hello@pudding.social.