Terms of Service

1. Who we are and what these terms cover

SpeechMeme is operated by Jan Hübner, c/o POSTFLEX PFX-334-247, Emsdettener Straße 10, 48268 Greven, Germany ("we", "us"). Full provider details are in the Impressum.

These terms govern your use of https://speechmeme.com and everything offered there: the meme maker, the public gallery, profiles, comments, votes, favorites and the rank system (together, the "Service").

You can use the meme maker without an account. By creating an account, or by publishing anything to the public gallery, you enter into a contract with us on the basis of these terms. If you do not agree, do not create an account and do not publish.

2. Eligibility and your account

You must be at least 16 years old to create an account or publish content. If you are under 18, you confirm that your parent or legal guardian agrees to your use of the Service.

Accounts are created by signing in with Google. You are responsible for activity on your account and for keeping access to it secure. One person may not operate accounts to evade a restriction or ban.

Your username and profile are public. We may reclaim or change usernames that impersonate others, infringe rights or break these terms.

3. The Service

The Service is free of charge. We provide it as it is and may change, limit, pause or discontinue features at any time, for example for maintenance, security or because a feature is no longer viable. There is no entitlement to uninterrupted availability or to specific features.

Images you process in the meme maker without publishing are processed to produce your result and are not added to the gallery. Animated GIFs are processed on our servers for that purpose only.

Ranks, XP, badges and cosmetic effects are a game-like feature. They have no monetary value, cannot be transferred or exchanged, and may be adjusted, recalculated or reset, for example to correct abuse or when content is removed.

4. Your content and the license you give us

You keep all rights you have in the images, titles, descriptions and comments you submit ("your content"). We do not claim ownership.

So that we can run the gallery, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to host, store, reproduce, resize and re-encode, publicly display and make available your content within the Service, including in previews when a link to it is shared, and to let other users view, download and share it as the Service allows. The license ends when you or we delete the content, except for backups and cached copies that expire in the ordinary course, and copies other users already downloaded.

You confirm that, for everything you publish:

• you made it or have all rights and permissions needed to publish it and to grant the license above,
• it does not infringe anyone else's copyright, trademark, privacy, image or other personality rights, including those of people shown in it,
• it complies with these terms and with the law that applies to you.

You can delete your own posts at any time. To delete your account and the personal data tied to it, contact us as described in the Privacy Policy.

5. Content and conduct rules

The gallery is public and should stay a place people of different ages can browse. You must not publish, or use comments, usernames or avatars for:

• anything illegal under German or EU law, or under the law that applies to you,
• any sexual content involving minors, or content that sexualizes minors in any way. We report such content to the authorities,
• pornography, explicit nudity or other sexually explicit material,
• hate speech, or attacks on people based on origin, ethnicity, religion, disability, gender, sexual orientation or similar characteristics,
• harassment, bullying, threats, incitement to violence or glorification of violence, including graphic gore,
• content that promotes self-harm, suicide or eating disorders,
• private or identifying information about other people without their consent (doxxing), or images of private individuals published to humiliate them,
• content that infringes copyrights, trademarks or other rights,
• spam, scams, malware, phishing or misleading links,
• impersonation of other people, of us, or of brands.

You also must not interfere with the Service: no scraping at a scale that burdens it, no circumventing of limits, moderation or bans, no vote or XP manipulation, no attempts to access other accounts or our systems.

6. How we moderate content

This section describes our policies, procedures and tools for content moderation, as required by Article 14 of the Digital Services Act (DSA).

Automated check before publication. Every image you publish, together with its title and description, and every comment, username and avatar, is checked automatically before it goes live. We use an automated classification service operated by OpenAI for this. It assesses content for categories such as sexual content, sexual content involving minors, harassment, hate, violence, self-harm and illegal activity. Content that is flagged is not published and you see a message naming the reason. If the check is temporarily unavailable, publishing is paused rather than skipped. Automated systems make mistakes. If you believe your content was blocked wrongly, contact us and a person will review it.

Human review. We review reports, and may review content on our own initiative. Depending on how serious and how repeated a violation is, we may remove individual posts or comments, remove all posts of an account, reduce or reset ranks and XP, restrict an account from uploading, voting, favoriting, commenting and editing its profile, or terminate the account. Severe violations, in particular any sexual content involving minors, lead to immediate removal and a permanent ban.

Statement of reasons. If we remove your content or restrict your account, we tell you why, unless we cannot reach you or the content is deceptive high-volume commercial content. The information covers what was decided, the facts and the rule or law it is based on, whether automated means were involved, and how you can object.

Objections. You can contest a moderation decision by writing to [email protected] within six months. A person who was not bound by the automated result reviews it, and we reverse the decision if it was wrong. You remain free to go to court or, where available, to a certified out-of-court dispute settlement body.

Reporting content. Anyone can report content they consider illegal or in breach of these rules by email to [email protected]. Please include the exact URL, why you consider it illegal or against the rules, and your name and email address. We confirm receipt, decide without undue delay and inform you of the outcome. Details are in the Impressum.

Misuse. We may, after a prior warning, suspend for a reasonable period accounts that frequently publish manifestly illegal content, and stop processing reports from people who frequently submit manifestly unfounded reports.

7. Our rights and what you may do with your memes

The SpeechMeme name, logo, design, software and speech bubble templates belong to us or our licensors. You may use the Service to create memes and use those memes as you like, including commercially, as long as the underlying image is yours to use. You may not copy or resell the Service itself or remove our notices.

Memes other users published in the gallery remain theirs. Downloading something from the gallery does not give you rights in the underlying image.

8. Third-party services and links

Sign-in is provided by Google. The Service links to third-party sites such as Discord. Those services have their own terms and privacy policies, and we are not responsible for them.

9. Liability

We are liable without limitation for intent and gross negligence, for injury to life, body or health, under the German Product Liability Act, and where we have given a guarantee.

For slight negligence we are liable only for breach of an essential contractual duty, meaning a duty whose fulfilment makes the proper performance of the contract possible in the first place and on which you may regularly rely. In that case our liability is limited to the damage that was foreseeable and typical for this kind of contract. Because the Service is provided free of charge, the statutory privileges for gratuitous services additionally apply where the law provides for them.

Otherwise our liability is excluded. This also applies to the personal liability of people acting on our behalf. We are not liable for content published by users, subject to section 6 and the statutory rules for hosting providers.

You are responsible for keeping your own copies of anything you want to keep. We do not guarantee that content stays available.

10. If your content causes a claim against us

If a third party asserts a claim against us because content you published infringes their rights or breaks the law, and you are at fault, you indemnify us against that claim and bear the reasonable costs of our legal defence. We will inform you of such claims without delay and give you the opportunity to respond. This does not apply where you are not responsible for the infringement.

11. Ending the contract

You can stop using the Service at any time and ask us to delete your account by email to [email protected]. We may end the contract with two weeks' notice, and without notice for good cause, in particular for serious or repeated breaches of sections 4 to 6.

When an account is deleted we delete or anonymize the associated personal data as described in the Privacy Policy, unless we must keep it by law.

12. Changes to these terms

We may change these terms for a valid reason, for example new features, changes in the law or court decisions, security, or to close gaps. We announce changes to registered users at least 30 days before they take effect, by email or by a notice in the Service, together with the new wording.

Changes that are purely to your advantage, or that only describe new optional features, take effect on the announced date. For any other change we ask for your consent, for example the next time you sign in or publish. If you do not agree, the previous terms continue to apply and either side may end the contract as described in section 11.

13. Applicable law and disputes

German law applies, excluding the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods. If you are a consumer residing in another EU country, you keep the protection of the mandatory consumer law of that country.

If you are a merchant, a legal entity under public law or a special fund under public law, the courts at our place of residence have exclusive jurisdiction. Otherwise the statutory rules on jurisdiction apply.

We are neither willing nor obliged to take part in dispute resolution proceedings before a consumer arbitration board.

14. Final provisions

If a provision of these terms is or becomes invalid, the remaining provisions stay in force. These terms are provided in English. Questions about them can be sent to [email protected].